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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.