2008 April 18 | eurealist.co.uk

The effects of EU Citizenship part 3

The EU is already vying with its member states over the concept of citizenship something which is vital for the EU to progress towards its eventual goal. In order to maintain its advantage in the citizenship

a policy of prohibiting dual citizenship between member states would be seen as unreasonable and opposed to the spirit of European integration.

stakes, the EU has to enhance its claim to be our nation state and that it in fact does speak for its citizens. Rather than allowing the member states to maintain their position as guardian of EU citizenship the EU must eventually become the body which decides who would become an EU citizen.

Thus the central EU leadership begin the next steps in demolishing the nationality of the member states, because the EU feels that as the EU does not have legal authority to grant the status of citizen; which at the moment can only be acquired through nationality of a member state. It must therefore challenge the exclusive competence of the member states to determine who is a national, and therefore an EU citizen. It must open up a second avenue for acquiring Union citizenship and bypassing the gate keepers to union citizenship.
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Filed under : A solution in search of a problem
By Ken
On April 18, 2008
At 5:34 pm
Comments : 0

An Expression of Hard Democracy

The form of democracy offered by the EU is one where we the people do not have a controlling effect. The EU offer of democracy can, in some ways, be equated to the use of EU soft power, with the exception that soft power is only one of the methods the EU uses to get its way it is of course quite prepared to use the hard power of legislation or the threat of hard power to enforce its will if the use of soft power does not move the project forward quickly enough.

Don’t come back from Geneva having sold us out. “Sell us out and we will have our say on the 12th of June,”

Soft democracy therefore is denuded of the hard power of democracy i.e. effective votes at the ballot box, to the benefit of the project. In the main the EU leaders much prefer to ignore the people, but are increasingly finding it difficult to deflect attacks based on the lack of democracy evident in the EU institutions. So they have invented the concept of soft democracy, this is where focus groups, massive polling, deliberative democracy and deliberative polling are used. Instead of the EU leaders actually being accountable to the people for their actions, they pretend to listen to the people wishes, as expressed through the use of these methods. Thus the use of soft democracy has the effect of insulating the EU leaders from any interference in their plans and from being held accountable to the voters at an election.

This is why I was quite cheered this morning to read that over 10,000 farmers protested in front of the Irish Parliament in a rally held to harmonize with a propaganda visit by EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso to persuade the Irish to vote for the Lisbon Treaty.
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