[Riprincattiva]

A Europe of two speeds is direly needed.

(But why do you want the Italians? )

[kathy]

So it's my way or highway again, lead by the French? Figures..

[feroiodpiop]

I have equal apprecation for all cultures. That is, they're all crap, especially mine.

[GypeFeeshyTes]

You can have your little club.

When the time is up, all of you will die anyway.

[mensforyouthis]

Ugh? I didn't mean YOU personally. I meant people in general, that would include myself also.

[vernotixas]

Yeah, France was pleasently quiet for a while, but now it seems they're going at it again. Algeria, Indochina.. just some recent things where the true colours were shown.

[Dreqsqse]

Exactly. It isn't our thing. If it was, we'd be debating. Who says UK isn't more EU with it's direction? We also joined for free trade and that stuff, not federation.

Soon we might hear ok some bloke with frog legs hanging from his mouth has written a new constitution, we got all these founding fathers and our kids better start learning that stuff etc etc.

There's a reason why many people in Africa talk French, and all these other places as well. It's not because they like it, it's because they were born with it, and people before that raped and pillaged and forced it like the brute animal crimnals they were. AKA colonialist ****s.

Now, it's the same thing over again, except with more politness, since they don't have the power anymore and everyone would whoop their butts

[GennadiyRom]

IDIOTS = Frenchie lovers

[Adeniinteme]

It really was stupid, the .. the way it was sold to the people. You see, it was sold to the people with few reasons such as 'the price of food will go down'. Throw in few similar ones and you've got the pro-EU side. Then the anti-EU side had claims like 'We want to keep our currency, flag and independence'. THere was a big battle between the two sides, and the anti-EU people got trashed as being nationalistic idiots. Of course we'd still have our currency, of course it will never be a federation. Look, the food price will go down. Think about it, how nice is that, cheaper food?

Well, we did adopt the currency almost immidiately after joining, we are now talking about constitutions and federations.... SO, the anti-EU side was right after all. And the price of food never came down either

So yeah, our people were stupid. They prolly still are. And we prolly are still so ****ing stupid, that we'd believe to be equal to other states in the federation. That's a big x infinity.

And that's why I won't be sorry if French people die, simply because they represent all that is wrong with the EU, a thing that could be great but isn't and won't be.

[Slonopotam845]

Its good to see DAVOUT and Ned sharing the same opinion that it's always the Brits at fault.

[Hujkmlopes]

This time The Economist, champion of capitalism's crusade against the last bastions of socialism, actually paints in an article a picture of the EU that is not totally bullshit and which may even help resident EU critics to gain a better understanding of the system. Most notably, the author makes some very good points about the responsibility of the nation states for the democracy deficit, corruption in Brussels and the delusion of some countries who choose to stay outside of the EU/certain EU programs without actually being more independent. But read for yourself.

Four Ds for Europe
Mar 15th 2007
From The Economist print edition


Dealing with the dreaded democratic deficit
THE biggest failing of the EU has long been the yawning gulf between the union, as both a project of integration and a set of institutions, and the mass of its citizens. Nobody could pretend that, when French and Dutch voters voted against the constitution in 2005, they were objecting merely to specific provisions in the text; nor that they were just using the opportunity to give their governments a good kicking. It seems much more likely that they were expressing a general feeling of resentment towards the European project and its remoteness. That feeling is more emphatic in some countries than in others, but it seems to be strong everywhere.

An expensive and unloved talking-shop

The traditional response by governments has been to ignore such resentment. Europe was always an elite project, went the argument, and so it should remain. As long as political leaders understood and pursued the case for European integration, that should be enough. French voters would probably have refused to endorse the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community back in 1951, and German ones, if given a voice, might have vetoed the abolition of the D-mark in favour of the euro 50 years later.
But ignoring the people's views is no longer tenable. Margot Wallstrom, a commission vice-president, even deplores the word “club” as connoting an elitist institution. Politicians these days have to be more responsive to voters. Mindful of this, many leaders in Europe spend more time attacking the Brussels institutions for interference (even though almost all EU laws require those leaders' endorsement) than preaching the European dream. The media have also become more critical of the EU. And the spread of referendums means that the people in the member states must now be repeatedly persuaded of the case for Europe. In the past 15 years a dozen national referendums have been held on EU questions (not counting acceding countries)—and half of them have been lost.
Popular support for the EU has, in fact, risen a bit in most countries over the past decade (see chart 6), but it remains dismayingly low. Worries over this lay behind the Laeken declaration, the convention on the future of Europe and the ill-fated constitutional treaty. But whatever the ultimate fate of the constitution, it is not going to be a vehicle for regaining voters' affection. That leaves three other options.

Love me do
The first is to concentrate on showing European citizens that the union works. Mr Barroso, the commission's president, is keen on this idea. In the economic field, it means persisting with the Lisbon Agenda for further reform and liberalisation across Europe. To this can now be added the related issues of energy and the environment, as examples of areas where it is self-evident that EU governments should be co-operating (though what is really needed is global co-operation). Foreign policy is another area where most European citizens believe that a union acting together can do more than nation-states acting alone.
A concentration on delivery does not always mean doing more at European level. Indeed, the arguments on subsidiarity over the past decade suggest that there is merit in giving back to nation-states some of the powers that Brussels has arrogated to itself over time. Mr Barroso's commission has repeatedly promised to review and scrap some of the torrent of regulations and directives that has poured out of Brussels in the past 20 years, and it also claims to subject new regulatory proposals to a more rigorous cost-benefit analysis than before. There has been more talk than action, but at least the amount of new legislation being proposed by the commission has dramatically declined over the past decade.
The second idea for making the EU more popular with its citizens is to deal with what is known as its democratic deficit. Eurosceptics make much of the European institutions' lack of transparency and accountability, their corruption and their remoteness from the citizens. They note that the commission is not merely far away from most national capitals but unelected (although the last thing a Eurosceptic wants is an elected commission), and yet perhaps 80% of the laws passed at national level originate in Brussels.
This is a seductive line of reasoning, but it is flawed. There is indeed a democratic deficit in Europe, but it is hard to maintain that it lies at the European level. In comparison with most national governments the Brussels machinery is highly transparent: information is always easy to find. Corruption certainly exists, as it does everywhere; but the auditors' habitual qualification of the EU's annual budget relates largely to how the money is spent at national level. As for accountability, the commission answers not only to national governments, through the council, but to the parliament as well.
In truth, the deficit is to be found more at national than at European level. The EU is a creature unlike any other: neither a superstate, nor a federal union, nor an inter-governmental organisation. But it is closer to the third, in that nation-states remain the main actors. Against this background the failure of democracy has been not to make clear to citizens that they can find out about and influence what is going on in Brussels through national institutions. Yet this ought to be easy, since the senior law-making body, the Council of Ministers, is made up of national governments.
As it happens, there is an example of how this might work: Denmark. When the country joined the then EEC in 1973, the Danish Folketing (parliament) was anxious not to lose its ability to steer legislation, despite the loss of sovereignty to Brussels. So it set up a powerful European committee to call ministers to account. This committee summons ministers every Friday to discuss the following week's council meetings in Brussels, and agrees to a negotiating mandate. If ministers want to deviate from this mandate, they must telephone from Brussels to secure fresh instructions from the committee, which can reconvene at a moment's notice.
It sounds cumbersome, but it seems to work—and it certainly gives Danes a greater sense of understanding of and involvement in the EU. The EU committee in the Folketing also maintains a large information and library service and a website that all Danish citizens can use. Denmark's famously Eurosceptic voters have become noticeably more relaxed about their country's EU membership over the past decade, even as hostility to Brussels has grown in some other countries.

A distant parliament
What about the European Parliament? It has a reputation as an expensive talking-shop, with a ludicrous monthly commute between Brussels and Strasbourg that adds some €250m a year to its costs. But it is better than its reputation: the average quality of its members has risen, and it has learnt how to work the EU system. In the past year alone the parliament has played a crucial role in forging the necessary compromises to secure an agreement on the EU's services directive and also on REACH, a set of rules governing the use and disposal of chemicals. Its influence over the commission has increased too: in 1999 the parliament even engineered the commission's resignation.
Yet there is one area in which the parliament has failed utterly, and that is to establish its legitimacy as the natural conduit connecting citizens to the European project. Few European voters have the slightest idea who their MEP is, and fewer still know what he or she does all day. Turnout in European elections is mostly low and falling; campaigns are fought on national not European issues, reflecting in part the fact that the media are national not European; there is no sign of a Europe-wide demos. Voters see little connection between how they cast their ballot and what happens in the EU. MEPs form broad political groups—the centre-right European People's Party, the Socialists, the Liberals and so on—but tend to act together, not in opposition to each other. The agenda of the place, it often seems, is largely to advance its own powers.
One answer sometimes put forward to remedy this is to increase the parliament's powers. Give it more say in the choice of commission president, for example, and more voters might take an interest. In 2004 MEPs made clear to EU governments that their choice of commission president should reflect the political make-up in Strasbourg. It would be easy to entrench this practice, perhaps getting political groups to propose their own candidates if they gained a majority. Yet even if this were done, it is hard to see the parliament winning greater legitimacy.
A more robust solution would be to acknowledge that the parliament has failed in this goal and to scrap it altogether. In its place there could be a European Senate, made up of nominated members of the European committees of national parliaments (the American Senate was nominated, not elected, until 1914; the original European Parliament was nominated from national parliaments before direct elections in 1979). Such an innovation might encourage other parliaments to follow the Folketing example and improve their scrutiny of what goes on in the EU. Sadly, the union, like most international organisations, never abolishes anything.
The third idea for re-firing European citizens' enthusiasm for the club is to give them a new dream, what some have called a narrative. The original narrative for the project was about peace and prosperity. But the first is now taken for granted, except perhaps in the Balkans; and many voters feel that the EU is either not helping or is actively hindering the second. So what might a new narrative for the 21st century consist of?

Dream and reality
Concern for the environment might furnish something. A second idea would be a more active foreign policy, which might even include a renewed push for enlargement. Poles and Lithuanians are not the only people who would be pleased if Ukraine were to join the club one day: the orange revolution of December 2004 resonated all round Europe. But what is needed most is more inspired leadership by European heads of government, including a full acknowledgment to their voters of the practical importance of the EU. And in the end surely what voters really want above all is economic success and greater prosperity—which is why further economic reforms are so pressing.
Yet harder-headed Europeans may not be interested in dreams or narratives at all. As Germany's Helmut Schmidt once put it, “if you have visions, you should see a doctor.” Such folk might prefer a different reassurance: that the EU will be a group of diversity not uniformity, and that not everybody on the European voyage needs to go at the same speed. The Brussels jargon for this idea changes and evolves: recent examples include flexibility, variable geometry and a multi-speed EU. What it means in practice is that some countries opt for projects of closer integration that others prefer to avoid.
In fact this is already happening. All members must participate in the single market, with its four freedoms of movement (of goods, services, labour and capital). Most of them are also members of NATO, but some are not; only 13 of the present 27 are in the euro; a different but overlapping 12 are in the Schengen passport-free travel zone, with the addition of three non-members; and just seven have signed the Prüm treaty governing the exchange of information among police forces (see table 7). The Amsterdam and Nice treaties both provide for “reinforced co-operation”, another piece of EU jargon referring to projects that only some countries choose to join.


Once again Denmark offers an interesting case study. The Danes are almost as famous for their supposed Euroscepticism as the British. When they voted no to the Maastricht treaty in 1992, it was renegotiated to give the country four opt-outs: from the single currency (from which Britain was also excused, but Sweden was not, so although it has chosen to stay out of the euro, technically it has no right to do so); from defence policy; from EU citizenship; and from justice and home affairs.
Living with these opt-outs can be awkward. In defence, for example, Danish forces are able to join NATO operations but must pull out if the EU takes over. And although the country retains the krone, the Danish National Bank is not independent of the European Central Bank in its interest-rate policy because it has chosen to hold the krone in lockstep with the euro. The governor, Nils Bernstein, admits that he moves interest rates two hours after the ECB does so. In the money market Denmark pays an average interest-rate premium over the euro of 0.15-0.25%, according to Mr Bernstein, which could be said to represent the cost of remaining outside the single currency. The other cost is a certain loss of influence, but a Denmark inside the euro would hardly hold huge sway.
Yet despite, or perhaps because of, their opt-outs, the Danes seem increasingly comfortable inside the EU. They no longer fear that a superstate is being built in Brussels. There is little pressure to follow the lead of Greenland, a Danish territory that holds the distinction of being the only place to have withdrawn from the club (in 1985). Nor do Danes cast envious eyes at Norway and Switzerland, the two biggest European countries to have chosen to stand aside from the union. Both must apply almost all EU laws to gain full access to the single market, and even make large payments into the EU's budget—but play no part in its decision-making.
A multi-speed Europe could, in principle, be a way of solving several different problems at once. For example, the argument over the constitutional treaty has shown yet again that some EU members want more integration than others do. As things stand, this can lead to blazing rows, with those that want to hang back eventually being pushed into a corner from which they either veto a project or, reluctantly, sign up to it to avoid being isolated. A far better approach would be for those who have no interest in joining to allow others to go ahead—which is how the British dealt with the European single currency at Maastricht.
Equally, a multi-speed Europe might be a good way of resolving growing tensions within the union over further enlargement. Already new, often poor members are invited on the basis that they do not take part in all EU activities right from the start; they are usually given long transition periods before benefiting in full from the union's four freedoms. A multi-speed Europe might take that idea a stage further. Turkey, say, might join on the basis not just of a long transition period but of an open-ended exclusion from the EU's rules on the free movement of labour.

The risks of multi-speeding
A multi-speed Europe clearly harbours potential dangers. The EU can work only if all its members sign up to the bulk of its rules, known as the acquis communautaire, especially for the single market. It will not be possible for members to opt out of competition rules, for example. Indeed, most single-market laws are not suitable for the multi-speed treatment, though the single currency clearly is.
If a multi-speed Europe were to become a multi-tier Europe and those in the lower tiers felt frozen out, that would be unsatisfactory too. Most proposals to create a “hard core”, a group of “pioneers” or even a “United States of Europe”, embracing either the original six or, more likely, the 13 euro members, fall into this category. Nor could a multi-speed arrangement work if those who pursue a project can capriciously stop others joining if they want to.
Yet it should be possible to find ways round these problems, using the European Commission and, if need be, the European Court of Justice as arbiters. The goal should be not to create categories of first- and second-class membership, nor to fragment the union. Rather it should be to accommodate diverse views on how far and how fast to go, and to take in a wider range of members—but all within a broad common framework set by the single market and the EU institutions.
In 2005, after the French and Dutch rejections, the commission published a paper by Mrs Wallstrom called plan D, outlining various ways of bringing the EU closer to its citizens. A better name for what Europe really needs might be plan 4D, to stand for democracy, delivery, dreams and diversity.

[itepearce]

Haven't Ireland had a ton of EU money?

[Evdokia]

Originally posted by DAVOUT
Originally the union was an association intended to progressively become a federation. Can you please explain why France wants this so bad and why do you think (I assume here) it is a good thing?

attempts for new improvements

Such as?

a more powerful union.

A more deeply integrated one, YES, but a more powerful one? In what sense? Economic? Centralised dirigist federation would cause economic growth how?

Military?

[Affiltavajefe]

Maybe we should just kick the brits out?

The US can have them.

[Attarderb]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
Haven't Ireland had a ton of EU money? Just like Finland some time ago.

[Thigmaswams]

Originally posted by TheStinger
Lets look at the founding 6 nations

Germany- felt guilty becasue they kept invading the French so did what they were told
Italy-Basket case needed access to French markets so did what they were told
Belgium-Basicaly french
Netherlands-Always liked trading so happy to join
Luxembourg-who cares
France- wnated to set up something they were in charge of and knew those 5 other members would do as they were told. Well, that's nonsense.

[ButKnillinoi]

The enlargement was the major cause of the present EU crisis. The voters realized that a decision with brutal consequences (the EU became from this day almost impossible to manage) had been make without being informed, let alone consulted. They also realized that more was to come. They observed that the EU institutions had to be reformed to be adapted to the new situation.
The UK was for nothing in that mess. But the Prime Minister announced that a referendum will be done in due time. Now it has been cancelled, and I dont know how the constitutional treatise will be ratified, if it is ever.
If the UK had been strongly influencial in the last enlargement and still support further enlargements, and if it does not ratified the treatise which was supposed to adapt the EU institutions to the new situation, it is only bad luck for the EU of course.

[newwebstar]

Clearly the EU is well on its way to establishing itself as a powerful counterbalance to the crazy cowboy Americans. Just a few minor details to sort out first...



-Arrian

[voksveta]

Originally posted by Saras
Intra-EU free trade and enlargement brought and still brings prosperity and a better life to millions of Central & Eastern Europeans. Are you saying French voters would have objected to enlargement had it been put up for referendum? They did that to Norway in 1962 and 1967 . The argument is that the EU institutions should have been adapted BEFORE the enlargement. If it had been done, we would not be now in a situation were the budget contributed by the old members is at the same level than before, for instance, which prevent the new members to receive the same help than previous incoming menbers had receive (but apparently it was not necessary for their prosperity!). And without the changes included in the Constitution, the current decision process will prevent useful changes; which means that the Union will not move..

[9V4i8xw1]

Originally posted by Sprayber
Now that the EU has been successfully crippled, We can move on to other threats.. quod erat demonstrandum