This comment exposes the elitist Europhile mindset beautifully. Yes, another Roman Empire to allow a small imperial caste to rule the entire continent is exactly what they are aiming for.
Where on earth did you get that reading from? Just because someone wishes for the artificial divisions that divide us to melt away does not they want a return to imperial hegemony. Your comment reflects more on your euro-skepticism than the claims you are making of the grandparent.
The EU is all about setting up a centralised governing power over Europe. Given that Europe contains many different cultures, this will inevitably be an Imperial government, since there is no single demos with broad agreement on policy to be represented by the European state. The EU is really the last thing Europe needs: all the European creativity and energy over the last few centuries has come from competition between small nation states, while huge states everywhere eventually run out of cash and become oppressive and bureaucratic (keep an eye on the US, folks).
The US is experience the type of issues that all empires experience as they transition from plateau to decline (crushing bureaucracy, close ties between business and state, overwhelming federal debt, etc etc). Whats interesting is that the EU is trying its hardest to emulate those issues without actually ascending to an empire itself. They are copying an empire in decline. The EU is a cargo cult.
Do you realize that the current convoluted lack of accountability is largely a result of the lack of deeper integration?
E.g. the EU is limited in how much of the power that is vested in EU organizations that can be transferred to the parliament, because much of the power that is elsewhere is there as a side effect of that power nationally being delegated to the sitting cabinets, and so in most countries it will take constitutional changes to hand that power away from the cabinets, that exercise it as part of the EU Council and EU Commission, to the parliament.
This is a "workaround" to problems similar to what the US endured under the Articles of Confederation (where the central government was pretty much powerless to implement many decisions because the states simply could decide to not follow decisions they didn't agree with), and a lot of the work on deeper integration in the EU has focused on how to change this situation to grant the EU parliament more of these powers.
There are plenty of problems with the approach. But there are also plenty of "Europhile's" for whom reforms are simultaneously about tighter integration and democratizing the decision making, and in fact it's hard to find anyone that are happy with the current power split between the EU Commission, Council and Parliament.
The idea that you could, even in principle, make an organisation like the EU "accountable" at all is fundamentally mistaken.
My critique of the EU is not that it is doing a bad job of ruling people from on high, and that we should reform it to make it better, but rather that the very idea of trying to govern an entire continent is wrongheaded from the get-go.
We are perfectly capable of cooperating and trading and working together without adding another layer of government on top.
Thankfully, it is becoming abundantly clear that the whole project is doomed to failure. I just hope that it falls apart before further forced integration creates a lot of bloodshed, and not after.
Federal systems are meant to be scalable. The US gov't might have its problems, but the land size it governs is not the source of these. If you needed proof of concept, there you go.
The US federal government is a perfect example. Remote - geographically, culturally, and financially - from the people it governs, it has continually eroded the freedoms and protections of the bill of rights, and has usurped the sovereign authority of the state governments.
The federal government has been a great success for those with the money to control it and bend its power to their will, but has been an absolute disaster for the vast number of ordinary Americans.
That's not what I meant to convey at all. The idea is that cultures that have a different history, a history of conflict, blood and war - as one would probably guess just by observing the lines on this map - can come together, work together and overcome their different antagonistic histories, in order to attain peace. If other states were to join, islamic states, such as Turkey, and it were to work, this would be an even more amazing historical event. I'm not saying the EU is without its problems, but I think its going far in moving away from cold-warish pre 21st century nationalistic tendencies that have led to so much disaster in the world.
> If other states were to join, islamic states, such as Turkey, and it were to work, this would be an even more amazing historical event.
Can you define 'Islamic state'? Turkey is a secular democratic republic. Admittedly one run by religious nutjobs with delusions of grandeur at the moment, but it is technically a secular republic, not an islamic state, and does not identify as such.
Also, for Turkey to join the EU, the EU would have to provide an incentive that at the moment does not exist. Turkey has good tariffs and trade agreements with many EU states and having it's own currency.