I suppose the following article is also an explanation on how the European Union corrupts national politicians – or better say: allows national politicians to corrupt their own citizens in order that the latter support the rotten system in Brussels. How? By using European taxpayers’ money for the famous EU Structural and Agricultural Funds thus handing over the control of their distributions to the national governments.
Below is an excerpt of ” The EU no longer serves the people – democracy demands a new beginning” by Yanis Varoufakis posted on The Guardian. Varoufakis mainly promotes his new pan-European movement. However, in his thread of arguments, he gives also a nice summary of the EU development in the last decades and the changes that the institution in Brussels desperately needs as it has been drifting more and more away form its goals.
“The European Community was, in its early incarnation, a magnificent undertaking. Its construction allowed for the revitalisation of national cultures in the spirit of European cosmopolitanism, disappearing borders, common institutions and shared prosperity. Despite different languages and diverse cultures, Europe began to pull together, in peace and ostensible harmony. Alas, the serpent’s egg was hatching inside the foundations of the emergent union.
[…]It began life as a cartel of heavy industry (coal and steel, then car manufacturers, later co-opting farmers, hi-tech industries and others). Like all cartels, the idea was to manipulate prices and to redistribute the resulting profits through a purpose-built, Brussels-based bureaucracy.
This European cartel and the bureaucrats who administered it feared the demos and despised the idea of government by the people, just like the administrators of oil producers Opec, or indeed any corporation, does. Patiently and methodically, a process of depoliticising decision-making was put in place, the result a relentless drive towards taking the “demos” out of “democracy”, at least as far as the EU was concerned, and cloaking all policy-making in a pervasive pseudo-technocratic fatalism. National politicians were rewarded handsomely for their acquiescence to turning the commission, the Council, Ecofin (EU finance ministers), the Eurogroup (eurozone finance ministers) and the European Central Bank into politics-free, democracy-free, zones. Anyone opposing the process was labelled “un-European” and treated as a jarring dissonance.
This is, in an important respect, the deeper cause of the aversion that many in Britain instinctively harbour for the EU. And they are right: the price of de-politicising political decisions has been not merely the defeat of democracy at EU level but also poor economic policies throughout Europe.
In the eurozone, to maintain their unenforceable fiscal rules, the Brussels and Frankfurt-based “technocracies” ensured that economies sharing the euro were being sequentially marched off the cliff of competitive austerity, resulting in permanent recession in the weaker countries and low investment in the core countries. The more their policies failed, the more authoritarian they became and the more irrational the policies they imposed.
I also suppose it is up to the European Union to decide to whether it will be more transparent and democratic or it will keep leaning towards the model of totalitarian and undemocratic regimes it has been allegedly criticizing all the time.
Nevertheless, on the occasion of the UK-EU referendum and the deal PM Cameron is trying to reach with the EU, the German President of European Parliament Martin Schulz hit out at David Cameron’s “continuous demands” for EU reform and claimed that many of his colleagues in Brussels had grown so fed up with Britain they believed the UK should be shown the exit door.
During a speech at the London School of Economics, Martin Schulz said:
“This is despite the fact – and I admit this quite frankly – that the British often test our patience and good will with their continuous demands.
They are demanding. They push hard. They insist. They just don’t let go.
Many of my colleagues say behind closed doors: ‘Don’t stop a rolling stone. If the Brits want to leave, let them leave.”
“test our patience” – how many times did we hear this phrase the Eurozone-Greece negotiations, during the EU-Greece Migration Crisis dispute?
I admit, I do not know much about the UK-EU dreal. But: Who are these arrogants in EU, in EZ and the EP who claim they can kick out a member state because their “patience” has been tested?
If Germany, the Netherlands and some other EU countries want a core Europe, they should simply get out of EU and the Eurozone and form the Exclusive Club of their dreams.
PS apparently Schulz, Juncker & co stick to the strict model of Athenian Democracy where women and slaves were deprived of any right to voted directly on legislation and executive bills in the demos.
