eurealist.co.uk

Perhaps is the area of greatest confusion and divergence between those who support the formation of the union, even though many of them also claim that this union requires radical change before it can be acceptable, and those of us who are distinctly anti such a movement. The pro EU change brigade including our own Conservative Party, are under the illusion that the EU is something it is not and would dismiss the claims of dictatorship or autocratic rule out of hand.

Yet after listening to the likes of Joschka Fischer nobody should still be labouring under the illusion that the Union is based on anything like the democratic principal or in fact could be so based. When he says the process of democracy is weakening the West and accuses national government of opportunism, lack of determination, and cowardice in the face of democracy and charges politicians with self interest because they consider their own election prospects above the needs of the union, he is clearly advocating the formation of nothing less than a state based not on democracy but on technocratic authoritarianism. An autocratic despotic state where the people and their representatives must be disconnected from any influence over the operation or the direction of power, where our own representatives are provoked and cajoled into ignoring the wishes of those they are elected to serve.
Thus having completely failed to carry the people with them on their journey of construction the EU proponents now make it clear that they never intended to allow a little thing like democracy stand in their way.

We in Britain have come to understand that the very foundation of a state’s authority rests with the people, thus without the supporting will of the people the structure of the state will collapse into a meaningless jumble of distressed powers. Yet within the sphere of the European Union decision-making is governed by administrative procedure, not by popular will, thus the democratic principal is seen not as the base for its authority but as an inconvenience that has to be administered.

In the world inhabited by the EU autocrats the public will as expressed at the ballot box, is just one of the influences on decision making and only then a very small influence that only must be addressed if the pesky local politicians insist on actually asking the people.

EU officials instead reach agreements on policy after a series of discussions with NGOs lobbyists and other single interest groups in a system designed to be an administrative procedure, where there is no place available for public debate or public involvement. A system moreover that allows the EU official to choose who to ask and who to ignore, where public involvement is relegated to the role of cannon fodder for the pollsters. In such a process it is difficult to imagine the wishes of the people being given a leading role, where the voters are seen not as the basis for authority but as a hurdle to be surmounted or by passed, or if that is not possible to be ignored, a technocratic system designed to be self governing and self supporting where as Fischer says public involvement can only weaken the EU.