| I mean those problems are well understood. There are not that many parties to vote for and people vote for the party they dislike least. Some of those parties wanted to join the EU. In general it was elites that wanted to join the EU, not the party base. People might have voted social domestic because they wanted domestic labor laws but instead their country was integrated in essentially a super-national state. The reality is most people vote primary for domestic polices, and the extent what the EU would do was not understood by voters at the time. There is a difference in initially joining and then having very little choice in the continue growth of that institutions power. And in fact, in many places where aspects of the EU were put to a popular vote it actually fails. There is also the reality that things like the EU/Euro were political projects and that Germany after the Cold War had to agree to some of these things in order for France and Britain to accept its unification. People certainty were not asked if Eastern nations should be allowed to join the EU. Again, shouldn't a popular vote be in order when an institution like the EU considers adding a new member that can massively impact its economy and will receive untold billions in subsidies? I'm Swiss so for me, a decision of such huge importance should actually be based on a popular vote. Not 'well in the 70s leftist parties were broadly more popular'. And once you are in, its incredibly hard to get out, and that is by design. A real European Union based on fundamentally pro European pro Democracy principles would have been established over many steps and many votes. This would give some granularity to the choices. Maybe the population like one aspect of the many EU polices, but not the other. In Switzerland we rejected the EG, but we joined Schengen, both based on popular vote. We join institutions such as ESA and many others. That seems to me to be a much better process of incrementally growing together. > the state of most of europe during the 1950's i wouldn't judge them so harshly for it. Lets not pretend the EU was formed in the 1950s. |
This is democracy at its finest.