[toyg]

> Do actual EU citizens want the important legislation to happen at the national or EU level?

Well, when an EU directive agrees with you and overrules your national elites, of course you are all for it; and when it's the opposite, it's "them shady eurocrats"...

We are in the middle of a transition. Consider the history of the European nation-state: it took about three centuries for France, Germany, Italy and Spain to solidify into what we now regard as nations. Still today, we have significant problems with regionalist movements almost everywhere. One could even argue the UK, that shaped the structure of relations between nation-states so much in centuries past, never even reached the full ethnically-defined description of nation-statehood...

We are now trying to further aggregate and streamline these already-shaky constructs, something we have to do if we want to have any hope of resisting demands by global superpowers. It will be a long process and it's clearly not finished yet. It might even entail the deconstruction of the ethno-state as commonly conceived, like the move to statehood did away with things like city-states and regional dialects. Instead of 28 countries, maybe we should have 100 regions. We don't really know yet.

But it's a path we just have to walk, unless we want to be a satellite territory where bigger powers come to clash - which is basically what we had become in the '60s and '70s, when the Cold War happened. We had state-sponsored terrorism across all of Europe; half the continent was literally enslaved and the other half was doomed to nuclear holocaust. Nobody who really remembers how it was, can possibly want that again.

[samdoidge]

> Well, when an EU directive agrees with you and overrules your national elites, of course you are all for it; and when it's the opposite, it's "them shady eurocrats"...

Some people just want these important decisions done at the national level, hence Brexit.

[toyg]

Please. Brexit is due to a number of factors, most of them fairly irrational and built over decades of lies from the British press and British politicians. The people shouting to “take back control” don’t know what that “control” even means, and most of them are completely ignorant of how their own government operates, let alone the EU. They were really complaining about the under-representation of English grievances in British politics, about the distance between London and the rest of England & Wales.

Unless, of course, you mean corrupt oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch and Arron Banks, who simply want to cut any political power to size to protect their own interests. They indeed want decisions to be taken at the lowest possible level.

[samdoidge]

> Please. Brexit is due to a number of factors, most of them fairly irrational and built over decades of lies from the British press and British politicians. The people shouting to “take back control” don’t know what that “control” even means, and most of them are completely ignorant of how their own government operates, let alone the EU.

Quite the assertion, and ironic with Project Fear in full swing. There is of course the question of how much understanding is needed of how the EU works to want to take back control. 'Can national laws override an EU law? No? We need control!'

[vsl]

Is it so hard to acknowledge that people you politically disagree with might actually have valid reasons and not be the vegetative idiots you assume them to be?