The EU Is Undemocratic

You don't need a majority to get in here

One common refrain of the people  on Twitter who oppose UK membership of the EU was that it is undemocratic.  It was a frustrating one because in a sense it is true.  The EU is not a state but a federation and so it is not and can never be truly democratic.  To become so it would have to alter quite a bit.  You'd need the European Parliament to become the actual sovereign body for the whole organisation.  That would make it a state.  But I have a feeling that pointing that out wouldn't have made the democratic purists want to stay in the EU and push for greater integration.


And in fact there is no particular reason to push for that final stage.  Federations of states can never be truly democratic but they can last a long time and do pretty well.  The obvious example is the United States of America.  That is not, and when the subject comes up, never claims to be democratic.  The president is elected not by the people but by an arrangement between the states of the federation.  So Donald Trump is perfectly legitimately elected as the president by dint of having the support of the most states even though he was well behind in the popular vote.  That is the sort of thing that can happen in the US, and exactly the same kind of thing can happen in the EU.  This gives Malta a disproportionate influence compared to its size, and limits the power that big countries like Germany and the UK would have if power were based simply on population.

It is ultimately a question of your personal taste, but speaking for myself I find the federal system to be perfectly acceptable and in some ways superior.  Take for example the result of the Brexit vote.  The UK is a single state and the vote was won by a simple majority.  Had the UK been a federation it would have been possible for either Northern Ireland or Scotland to block the leave vote - or at least the referendum would have had to be framed in such a way as to get prior agreement from the federal parties that all would abide by a majority decision.

That at least is how I have felt up until this weekend.  Seeing the way Donald Trump is going about the ban on travellers from certain countries makes me wonder about how effective federations are.  There seems to be a clear strategy to undermine the federal checks and balances in place to prevent the president ruling by fiat.  The ban has been brought in by executive order and is being imposed by central government.   It will be interesting to see how well the checks and balances work.  It could be that the courts will render the ban unworkable.   But I don't really know enough about the US to have any idea how it will all turn out.

But I think this is a story that the EU needs to watch carefully.  If Trump succeeds in turning the presidency into an elected dictatorship that is something that needs to be taken into account in future constitutional developments.  European politicians always look a bit puny compared to people like Putin who doesn't have as many restraints on his freedom of action, or the US president who is more constrained but at least is clearly the leader of a big block.   I find that one of the good things about the EU.  I hope they keep it up.