My view here is probably "tainted" is that I strongly dislike the parliamentary system anyway.
The difference is that the EU is NOT a country,
So what?
This was in effect part of my thesis. The rest of it what my attempt to explain what.
and that it is a conference of leaderships that vote the leadership of the EU into place; the amount of representation lost in that level is astounding. At least Parliament, which makes national laws in Britain, gets directly voted for.
So does the European Parliament.
It's the commission I find most objectionable, though I find issue with the Parliament that I suppose would in fact Coke from believing a country to be a better unit of government that you suggest later.
But the EU is not voted for my the diverse interests along the UK, and sees no level of that minority expression that Parliament voting does. It's the majority that counts to elect Commissioners in the end,
Not dissimilar to the way the majority gets to elect the government in the UK.
[/quote] Both houses of the government have SIGNIFICANT minority view representation in the UK government. Not so in the Commission.
and for EU laws it's a majority not even comprised of one's own country. The minority opinion is in many cases doomed.
Sounds like democracy to me.
Not to me. Minority views hold a level of sway in the British Parliament, yes? Because it isn't uniform. It's even more the case in the United States Congress, even if you discount the Senate. *toots needless patriotism horn*
At least purely national level ghvernments have the best interests of the country in mind and have that layer of directly elected accountability and representation for minority views. The EU has none of these three traits.
You can just replace country by "Europe" in there and it'll apply equally well to both.
No it won't. Countries are distinct enough that one can vote for something that would nuke the common EU interest but would DIRECTLY advance their own interests. If you do the same in a country, and people sometimes do, it has a way of biting you in the butt. And I don't mean to compare states voting for their interests -- you can vote "SCREW THE EU" and be largely fine, but if you vote with the intent of screwing the country over, you screw yourself. Europe as a whole is simply FAR more clashing with interests and blocs of interest than a single country; it is exponentially less uniform.
I mean, you can take what we could call a nationalist view and consider that the British people form a natural unit of government the way the European people does not. But that's not the same thing as saying the EU institution are undemocratic.
I admit to taking that view to an extent. But I ALSO take the second view. It isn't self-contradictory.