[dantondwa]

Obviously, this is about creating the infrastructure for a continent-wide surveillance program, using children pornography as a troy horse.

The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing, at least until said European laws get implemented locally.

[rickdeckard]

> The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing

That's largely because citizens of several countries accept the narrative of their local governing parties that the EU is some "external force" that is outside of anyone's control.

Reality is that the EU is largely formed by members of local political parties sent to EU-institutions. They just send people there which they deem not useful for local campaigning or prefer to become "invisible" to local politics.

Citizens should not accept this narrative, and instead demand more transparency on the activities of the local politicians sent to EU, holding the party accountable for their actions (or non-action) within the EU.

[ImHereToVote]

This is similar to the Soviet Union. A lot of factories and utilities got asked to send their best employees to be council representatives. The factory managers naturally sent the most useless workers to become politicians. The rest is history.

[michaelt]

Eh, partly.

But it's also inherent in running an organisation with 24 official languages.

Let's say you had really strong opinions on this, and you wanted to rally voters for a letter-writing campaign. Good luck coordinating the Spanish-speakers, the German-speakers and the Polish-speakers and so on. All of whom also have different TV networks, different newspapers, different radio, presumably different social media and so on.

And politicians have the same problem - maybe you're an amazing public speaker. Maybe you've got the farming subsidy policy equivalent of the Gettysburg Address. Clear, succinct, witty, persuasive, honest, passionate - everyone who hears it will be fired up to support your vision. But if you can only deliver that speech in Portuguese? Good luck with that.

Hell, look at this very discussion: I know first-hand about the complex relationship between the EU with the British parliament, press and electorate. But I have no idea what the equivalent situation is in the Czech Republic.

[rickdeckard]

That's all a symptom of the current state of affairs. If citizens would hold their government accountable for their actions on EU-level, the ruling political parties wouldn't send people to the EU who are ill-equipped to communicate/execute.

But it's also an inherent problem of the EU. In retrospect, they shouldn't have left communication with citizens to the EU-members, expecting that they would communicate based on common interest.

As it turns out, the local governments are much more comfortable to celebrate themselves for everything positive, and blame everything negative on these "EU overlords".

The EU charter should have included the means for the Union to communicate directly with citizens, i.e. the basis to have their own local news-channels.

I can see improvements in communication nowadays, with EU press-releases and announcement carrying over into local (online) news at least. The fact that none of those messages are already carried by the local government speaks volumes...

[michaelt]

> That's all a symptom of the current state of affairs. If citizens would hold their government accountable for their actions on EU-level, the ruling political parties wouldn't send people to the EU who are ill-equipped to communicate/execute.

What I'm saying is that everyone is ill-equipped to communicate, when communications are conducted in 24 languages.

Imagine a Greek newspaper decided to send a team of dedicated EU reporters to Brussels - how are they supposed to talk to the delegates from Sweden and Slovenia and Spain?

(and if you're thinking "they'll just communicate in english" let me remind you that less than 2% of the EU population lives in a country where english is an official language)

> As it turns out, the local governments are much more comfortable to celebrate themselves for everything positive, and blame everything negative on these "EU overlords".

Truth.

But IMO pre-Brexit a big reason the British government had a lot of influence over the British press (and vice-versa) while the EU government didn't was the simple issue of speaking the same language and being in the same city.

[rickdeckard]

I get what you're saying but that's a non-issue. At plenary meeting and conferences every country is in the same situation, they communicate via an Armada of interpreters, just like they do at the UN, at the WTO, the WHO, the NATO, and so on. Outside of those they communicate in English and/or French.

If a Greek newspaper is sending a journalist who can't speak English or French they sent the wrong person. If a local government sends a politician into the EU who can't communicate in English or French they sent the wrong person. Also, it would already be sufficient for the cause if Greek newspapers would put the spotlight on GREEK politicians in Brussels. So far not even THAT is happening in a sufficient manner...

> But IMO pre-Brexit a big reason the British government had a lot of influence over the British press (and vice-versa) while the EU government didn't was the simple issue of speaking the same language and being in the same city.

Every single press-Release of the EU is done in English language. Granted, the EU doesn't invite to press-conferences in London to talk to the local press, that's the job of the local government.

Pre-Brexit it would have been the job of the British government to promote the spirit of "We are European", but as everywhere it is more useful to their narrative to promote "We are Nationalists!"

[michaelt]

> they communicate via an Armada of interpreters [...] Outside of those they communicate in English and/or French.

> If a Greek newspaper is sending a journalist who can't speak English or French they sent the wrong person.

Right - so from the perspective of a Greek person, EU lawmakers are speaking a completely different language. Seems like a pretty big communication problem to me.

> Also, it would already be sufficient for the cause if Greek newspapers would put the spotlight on GREEK politicians in Brussels.

But the Greek politicians in Brussels already agree with the Greek government.

If the German faction in Brussels wants to do something that'll be unpopular with Greece, they've got no way to make their case to the Greek people directly.

> Pre-Brexit it would have been the job of the British government to promote the spirit of "We are European"

Did the British government ever agree that was their job?

I mean, in the United States I don't see Biden expecting the Texan government to convince Texans of anything. Luckily for Biden, he can speak to Texans himself. Because they share a language.

[raxxorraxor]

You would need a common official language to do that. And even with that, you cannot really build something democratic if a large part of the population has no idea what you are saying.

[rickdeckard]

> You would need a common official language to do that.

Not sure what "that" actually refers to.

The common official language of the European Union is ALL official languages of the member-states. Every major publication of the EU is ALREADY made in all languages of its members.

-

Example: Electricity market reform, an ongoing topic. What's the status there?

Here it is: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20240304STO...

Ah, you only speak Greek?

No problem. Here: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/el/article/20240304STO...

Ah sorry, Polish? Here: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/pl/article/20240304STO...

-

> you cannot really build something democratic if a large part of the population has no idea what you are saying

Why? There is a LOCAL government which is in charge of representing the citizens locally and also representing the country in the European union.

If they can't explain to me what they are doing, they are not qualified to represent me.

[ljlolel]

Interesting, maybe that’s totally changed as of today with the AI voice and language and lip synching tech we have now

[techcode]

This.

It's been same before EU or other similar multiple country things.

Back then some politicians were getting "promoted" into ambassadors of some faraway country, or decided to become university professors, if not flat out sent to "Goli Otok", "Siberia" ...etc.

Since that mentality/way-of-doing politics has been around for a while - it will not be easy to get the political establishment to change.

[harywilke]

It still boggles my mind that it's not obvious how much of my tax bill go to the EU. This aids in the feeling of detachment.

[wongarsu]

Does this chart [1] for contributions and this [2] for net contributions (direct financial contributions minus direct financial benefits) not answer that question?

Then just figure out which portion of your countries budget comes out of your taxes, and how big the total budget of your country is, and you have your answer. It's not like this is top secret information

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/316691/eu-budget-contrib...

2: https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...

[KingOfCoders]

It's more like "I can't be bothered to look, but I can be bothered to complain".

[disgruntledphd2]

Basically nothing.

They get 1% of VAT which is mostly spent on poor regions (cohesion funding) and agricultural subsidies (Common Agricultural Policy).

[unilynx]

With the EU having a total €150B budget in a €19.350B GDP economy it's probably still noise in your total taxes.

[scoot]

I can't help thinking that you must have the decimal point in the wrong place...

[pasc1878]

Or else they are European and use . as the thousands separator.

[scoot]

I wondered if that might be the case, but they're writing in English which use a comma as a thousands separator; in which case, they definitely have the decimal point in the wrong place, even if it's down to a grammatical error.

[pasc1878]

I see many Europeans write in English but still use European number formatting - they are sort of different things.

[fossislife]

Just had a look: 25 of EU countries use ".", and 2 (Malta and Ireland) use ","

[caddy]

In school (UK) we were told to use ' as the thousands separator in mathematics as it avoids confusion i.e.

1'234.56 1'234,56

Either of these can be understood no matter which format you're used to. Although, I don't think it's ever caught on really (or whether it's even advisable/sensible).

[plantain]

That's how it's done in Europe. . not ,

[mrtksn]

>The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing

What is the base of this claim? There are EU elections this year FYI.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I'm not anti-EU, on the contrary, but honestly the claim is true in practice. I'm not going to give you any hard data, but I think it's just obvious in plain sight.

At least in my country, almost all the debate in news outlets is about national or local issues. EU regulations do come up, but they are always depicted as something that comes "from above" and not tied to specific parties or people. If there is controversy about a national law, the media will blame things on the government or on the opposition (depending on their bias). If there is controversy about an European law, the media will blame an abstract "Brussels"... or directly the government or the opposition anyway, as they're the ones who implement it.

In the EU elections, most (euphemism for all) people I know just vote to the party they prefer in terms of national or regional politics. Almost no one votes because they want a given European directive to be implemented.

Sometimes I have actually made some effort to find out what each of my country's parties voted in some EU decision, and most of the times I failed. It's not clear what decisions come from the Commission or from Parliament (many come from the Commission which is not even directly elected but elected by local governments, by the way). And even for those from Parliament, it's not clear how to find detailed results of Parliament votes. Mind you, I'm not saying there is no way - probably there is one, if you are very well informed or have a lot of time, but there is definitely no way that I could find in 20 minutes of Googling, and most people won't make a greater investment than that.

Not sure if it's the same in all countries, and not sure how to fix it... but yes, I do have the perception that EU institutions are detached from citizens.

That said, this has its pros. If citizens had more of a say, we'd probably have no low-emmission zones, no or almost no pollution regulations, etc. Many environmental policies that are, IMO, unquestionably good, are pushed to reluctant citizens using the "hey, don't blame me, it comes from Brussels" wildcard, and we are better for it (again, IMO). Sad, but true.

[AlecSchueler]

> I'm not anti-EU, on the contrary, but honestly the claim is true in practice

I agree that it's under reported but I don't think it's because the EU is far away or detached from the people. The media simply don't tell us what's going on. There's no regular programmes in my country covering it. There are shows like that for local politics and for national politics, and I can even keep up with US politics if I like. But to know what's happening in the EU I have to very actively choose to search for it.

The US is surely more removed but everyone seems to know every detail of what's going on over there.

[aembleton]

In Berlin, the EU has a information shop kind of thing. Its nicely done but is pretty much verbatimin stuff from the EU website. I tried asking a couple of questions to members of staff in there and they didn't seem to have any more knowledge than myself on the inner workings of the EU.

I think its good to have that sort of thing though and I don't think we ever had such a thing in the UK. I would have liked to understood how the EU works better and the interaction between the parliament and the commission.

[carlosjobim]

> The US is surely more removed but everyone seems to know every detail of what's going on over there.

Except for Britain, European nations simply do not have a strong tradition of news publishing and free debate like the United States. In Europe, news mostly came and still comes in the form of dictates from the rulers. That's why it was so important that people had to go to church each Sunday: not to listen to the word of God, but to be told the latest decisions of the king directly from the preacher's pulpit. Later on, non-government affiliated media has mainly been partisan affairs, directly or indirectly controlled by political parties.

With a weak tradition of free speech and press, it is no wonder that European journalists prefer to sit around all day and read reporting on American politics and summarise for their readers, instead of doing some actual investigating, reporting and interviewing.

[toyg]

That's just anglo spin, sorry - and pretty galling coming from a country where Fox News thrives and propaganda is rife (Judith Miller, anyone?). Same for Britain, dominated for decades by agendas set by Rupert Murdoch's properties.

European traditions in terms of journalism are as good as any. The problems of modern media are the same everywhere: nobody wants to pay for quality journalism, so only people with deep pockets end up footing the bill and hence setting the agenda.

[oytis]

I follow news about German, British and US politics, and I can't quite understand what you mean. Clearly there is debate in Germany, both in parliament and in press. The author of the discussed article is a German politician himself.

[mistrial9]

news media in the USA has become dysfunctional due to the economic changes of the last 20 years. Local news is not available or just so bad that it is obvious.. and national stories have been co-opted into camps promoted on corporate owned channels.. truly, the US news media is only a ghost of what it was forty years ago

[ufocia]

Don't blame it on the media, though I agree that they're not doing a good job. If you know they're not doing a good job, don't be complacent. Do the research yourself. It's not like this is a secret law and the Internet doesn't exist.

Yes, people should be more focused on what's going on in their back yard, at least on the social level, than another country "half way" around the world.

[AlecSchueler]

I do do the research myself and consider myself a very engaged citizen, but the power of the media to inform poeple shouldn't be overlooked. It's very difficult for someone starting from zero to even know they're missing something never mind what to look for.

[brookst]

The media is demand-driven. What gets attention will generate more coverage, what gets ignored will wither.

If there is no coverage of something it generally means people don’t care. That can be a vicious circle, of course. But as soon as people start paying attention to the small outlets that do cover these things, the bigger ones will adapt their coverage.

[generic92034]

> There's no regular programmes in my country covering it.

There are several ones in mine. However, the huge majority of people is not interested in watching them. Unless it is making the headlines/major news programs, most people only hear about it when it is too late to change anything.

[tormeh]

> "hey, don't blame me, it comes from Brussels"

This is definitely a feature disguised as a bug.

[aembleton]

It has a proper term for it in political science. I wish I could remember what it is. I think its something like offshoring democracy but I'm really not sure.

[Funes-]

>That said, this has its pros. If citizens had more of a say, we'd probably have no low-emmission zones, no or almost no pollution regulations, etc.

Since we would rightly blame corporations for polluting the Earth and not ourselves, we would absolutely do away with low-emission zones, but we would surely crank up pollution regulations for them.

[mrtksn]

I see your point but it appears that countries prefer keeping their sovereignty and as a result EU doesn’t have any direct impact on people lives. Every now and then countries agree on some standardization and it’s only then when people see an EU impact on their daily lives.

[oytis]

> Sad, but true.

That's not only sad - it erodes public trust in democracy, and leads to a rise of populist parties.

[elric]

Those two statements are orthogonal. EU elections have little impact on EU institutions. The elections are only for the European Parliament. The European Commission, which controls the institutions and dictates policy, does not get elected by the populace.

There is a lot of criticism (warranted, IMO) on this state of affairs.

[mrtksn]

Right, but the other EU officials are not Belgians or Germans or aliens from another dimension but people who are appointed by the elected governments in every country. As a result, these elections define part of the EU and the elections in every country defines the rest.

In EU countries keep having strong sovereignty, it’s not like the USA. EU here acts more like an alignment institution among countries, it doesn’t actually have powers by itself and it appears that Europeans are still not ready to switch to a US-like system.

[Detrytus]

You have outdated info about how EU works. Since the Lisbon Treaty it is actually evolving towards single super-country, trying to strip member countries from their sovereignty (and mostly succeeding at that, unfortunately).

EDIT: in a typical HN fashion people downvote simple statement of the fact, because they are in denial about the fact.

[p_l]

This is exactly the argument that was used to defang reform of EU Parliament, which gave more power connected directly with voters, and kept the strong but non-transparent EU Commission as the only one with legislative initiative.

Because it's easy to blame "Brussel bureaucrat" when it's hardly visible that said bureaucrat is minister and/or represantive from the party that is now campaigning against "brussel's edict".

[oytis]

I'd argue it would be more democratic like that. If we had pan-European parties with their own pan-European agendas, people would know what they are voting for, and would be much more involved. Instead EU is still rather an international organization where governments of member states set the agenda, so the result is a very indirect way of decision making where an individual voter can hardly understand what impact their vote makes.

[disgruntledphd2]

> You have outdated info about how EU works. Since the Lisbon Treaty it is actually evolving towards single super-country, trying to strip member countries from their sovereignty (and mostly succeeding at that, unfortunately).

Can you point me to the parts of the Lisbon treaty that facilitate this please?

[Detrytus]

Well, for one, many areas now require "qualified majority vote" instead of unanimous decision.

Few key countries (Germany, France and Italy) got their voting weights in both the Council of Ministers and the European Council increased at the expense of everyone else (witch Germany's voting power doubling).

European Central Bank got official recognition.

European Court of Justice got its jurisdiction expanded.

[mrtksn]

It’s a political process that will or will not happen to a point. Currency it’s not there yet, it’s quite far of it and honestly I don’t believe that it will happen before fixing the Eurozone and that’s a hard one.

[tormeh]

The Parliament has veto rights. Nothing gets enacted without parliamentary approval. Which is very good, considering some of the bullshit that comes out of the Commission.

[anticensor]

Legislative veto without legislative initiative is barely useful.

[disgruntledphd2]

True, but note that the national governments (i.e. the Council) also have a veto.

But I do agree that Parliament should be given law making powers, and the Commission should just be enforcement and implementation of said laws.

[aembleton]

Can they remove or update bad legislation that is currently in place?

[disgruntledphd2]

The EU Commission do not dictate policy.

This is a convenient fiction that the EU Council (i.e. the national governments) are very keen to retain, as it insulates them from the consequences of their decisions.

If you really wanted to be tactical about it, one should vote for a disjoint set of parties in the EU vs the national elections, as this would be more likely to lead to effective supervision and assessment of decisions.

[SiempreViernes]

Sure, but the commission is proposed by nationally elected representatives (namely the heads of state) and then approved by the elected European Parliament, so the overall process is not too undemocratic.

Of course, direct election of the commission would be more democratic formally, but the fact is there's not really a truly European polity in the first place so its not clear the outcome would be much better in regards to the problem of the commission being composed of random politicians you never heard of.

[disgruntledphd2]

If you were gonna elect Commissioners/President etc directly, you'd probably end up with something like the US electoral college system.

In fact, given that Ireland (a very small country) would have to have a referendum on it, then I can almost guarantee that such a system would over-weight small countries.

[mariusor]

The Commission doesn't "dictate" policy. They are the body that has the power to initiate legislature, but the Parliament (the democratically elected part of the EU orgs) has to vote on them.

Also from my interpretation of TFA, the people that expect intelligence agencies to be exempted are national interior ministers (not named though), there's no such thing as a "European Union minister", which have no influence at the EU level.

[freehorse]

European parliament has a democracy-decorative role. All the important institutional decisions are taken by the commission and the european central bank. The parliament at best approves, or works on the less important stuff. EU is a very undemocratic institution, despite all the pro-democracy talking.

[mrtksn]

Are those in the commission all Belgians? Where do they come from? What happens if the parliament doesn’t approve? Do “they” do it anyway?

[RobotToaster]

The two democratic bodies of the EU, the EU Parliament and Council of Ministers, do not have the power to submit new legislation. Only the appointed Commission has the power to submit documents.

[toyg]

The Commission acts almost exclusively on mandates extended by the EU Council (i.e. national states), which also nominates commissioners. EU Council effectively tells the Commission "Something should be done about X; write a directive to achieve Z, K, and J". Then the Commission sits down with MEPs and national ministers to bang something into shape. It very rarely comes up with original policy suggestions, and when it happens it tends to be big news - like with the daylight savings stuff, which eventually wasn't carried through because the EU Council (i.e. governments) wasn't particularly interested.

Political initiative and agenda-setting, in the EU, are firmly in the hands of national governments - they just hide behind "Bruxelles bureaucrats" as a shield.

[mrtksn]

Who appointed the commission and are they Germans or Belgians or something?

[josefx]

When the head of the commission was elected various parties presented their favorites for a direct election as had been done in 2014. When the results came in for 2019 parliament refused to accept them and selected its own favorites from out of nowhere. An election result that can be disregarded at the whim of the current ruling parties does not paint a very democratic picture.

[a0123]

There are elections in most countries in the world. There most likely are in your country. Would you say the people you've elected aren't detached from your way of life and concerns?

[mrtksn]

The thing about elections is that you don’t elect the detached ones. If they are elected despite what you think about them, it simply means more people think otherwise.

[PurpleRamen]

There is usually very little news coverage and public discussion with anything going on at EU-level, unless it's a hot topic or something that concerns a specific number of people in some way, like in this case.

And EU-Elections have usually a pretty low participation, showing how many people it really concerns.

[flir]

50% turnout last time around.

[mrtksn]

Not very different from any election in the developed world.

[Scarjit]

It depends, in Germany we enjoy a quite high turnout of ~70-80% for federal elections (https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/2274/umfrage/...) [The site is in German, but should be fairly easy to read].

While for European elections it is usually 40-50% with huge differences by country (https://results.elections.europa.eu/en/turnout/)

[mrtksn]

Then you should vote more on the EU election I guess.

[flir]

Why do you think they don't?

[sebnun]

It has been historically low in Sweden. Last time 55% voted in the EU election while 82% voted in the Swedish election.

[mrtksn]

The more local the more people care but half of the population voting is not really drastically different than 2/3 of the population voting.

It would be better if more people voted though.

[ApolloFortyNine]

This assumes that the ones who decide to vote in the EU election are a random sample of the ones that vote in the national elections, which is almost definitely not true. One of the parties is likely being over/under represented at the EU election.

[soco]

I'd call this a failure of the elected officials - elected just as the national ones yet feeling quite remote to their voters.

[denton-scratch]

> I'd call this a failure of the elected officials

You mean, the MEPs? There's very little that MEPs can do to hold the executive (the Commission) to account. Commissioners are appointed by national governments; each government gets a quota. The appointees are generally ex-ministers whose careers in national politics are over, due either to failure or disgrace.

Essentially the only power that MEPs have is to vote down legislative proposals from the Commission. They have approximately no power to remedy administrative failures, corruption, and mistakes in implementation.

[soco]

Oh but lobby and communications and meeting the commissioners and and and. I don't hear any that all too often, but maybe it's on me?

[surgical_fire]

> The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states

How exactly is it detached?

The EU parliament is elected.

The EU commission is composed of members appointed by each member state (and every member state is - or should be - a democracy, so the commissioner is s representative of an elected government).

I keep seeing this bullshit being repeated as if it was true, and whenever I ask I never get meaningful answers.

[3836293648]

They're socially detached. Yes, people vote for them; no, people do absolutely not follow anything the EU does until it reaches national parliaments.

[surgical_fire]

This socially qualifier completely changes the original meaning.

One might argue that even national governments that are directly elected are socially detached from the general population.

That is in my opinion a fault of society rather than fault of governments. If you don't care about politics, you are doomed to be ruled by those that do.

[aembleton]

I don't even know what language the Wednesday morning meetings that the commission have are held in. The official minutes are in French; are they conducted in French?

At least this was the case back in 2016 when I was doing as much research as I could before the referendum.