[c3o]

Nationalism is the problem behind that, not the solution for it:

Legislative processes in the EU are woefully under-covered by the press. That's because newspapers have offices full of reporters to work on national political stories, yet send only one person to Brussels to cover all issues there. (That in turn is one factor leading to EU political jobs being way less glamorous and desired, which in turn has an effect on who even gets sent there in the first place, etc.)

It's no wonder that when everyone's horizons end at their national borders the supra-national body will operate under too little scrutiny. We need to start thinking European – the alternative, going back to trying to regulate things like the internet in 28 different ways on a single continent, is just not a reasonable option.

[CharlesColeman]

> Legislative processes in the EU are woefully under-covered by the press. That's because newspapers have offices full of reporters to work on national political stories, yet send only one person to Brussels to cover all issues there.

Do actual EU citizens want the important legislation to happen at the national or EU level?

I'm not from Europe, but one of the weird things about the EU is that sometimes it seems to be trying to be a state and a not-state at the same time.

[shaki-dora]

If you’re in the US: do you want legislation to happen federally, or at the state level?

It all depends on the scope of the legislation. I have a small business that sells food EU-wide, and that’s only possible because the law is aligned. It’s enough work to get certified as organic once. To do it 18 times over would be prohibitive. Same with packaging and labeling, T&Cs, payment systems, etc.

Other whole areas have stayed national, such as criminal law or most social issues (gay marriage, abortion, unemployment benefits, defense, pensions).

I can’t see a discernible difference in how much of the legislation I like that correlates with where they originate. Or, if anything, it seems like EU stuff tends to be more pro-consumers. C. f. free roaming, passengers’ rights in air travel, car emission standards.

The EU is actually somewhat more responsive if you want to talk them, if only they constantly feel threatened in their very existence.

[xienze]

>I'm not from Europe, but one of the weird things about the EU is that sometimes it seems to be trying to be a state and a not-state at the same time. That’s IMO the fundamental flaw of the EU — they want to be the “United States of Europe” but unlike the USA, there’s far too much history and non-shared heritage between the countries for them all to effectively shed their heritage and reshape into a cohesive whole.

[toyg]

> Do actual EU citizens want the important legislation to happen at the national or EU level?

Well, when an EU directive agrees with you and overrules your national elites, of course you are all for it; and when it's the opposite, it's "them shady eurocrats"...

We are in the middle of a transition. Consider the history of the European nation-state: it took about three centuries for France, Germany, Italy and Spain to solidify into what we now regard as nations. Still today, we have significant problems with regionalist movements almost everywhere. One could even argue the UK, that shaped the structure of relations between nation-states so much in centuries past, never even reached the full ethnically-defined description of nation-statehood...

We are now trying to further aggregate and streamline these already-shaky constructs, something we have to do if we want to have any hope of resisting demands by global superpowers. It will be a long process and it's clearly not finished yet. It might even entail the deconstruction of the ethno-state as commonly conceived, like the move to statehood did away with things like city-states and regional dialects. Instead of 28 countries, maybe we should have 100 regions. We don't really know yet.

But it's a path we just have to walk, unless we want to be a satellite territory where bigger powers come to clash - which is basically what we had become in the '60s and '70s, when the Cold War happened. We had state-sponsored terrorism across all of Europe; half the continent was literally enslaved and the other half was doomed to nuclear holocaust. Nobody who really remembers how it was, can possibly want that again.

[Faark]

As usual, one wants all the benefits without its disadvantages, no matter how impossible that is.

I'd like for the EU to transform more into a state, but that will be hard unless the local powerful are willing to give up their power. The concessions that had to be made to get as far as the EU is today are also part of what is holding it back. Thankfully a significant veto power will remove itself from the EU in the coming months.

A huge reorganization such as setting up a proper new state seems easier with help of some disruptive event like e.g. a war or imminent war, something I hope the EU won't have any opportunity to take advantage of.

[vsl]

I’d say it’s essential for a functioning democracy to have all decisions made under scrutiny. Whether that’s local or not doesn’t matter, scrutiny matters. And for better or worse, we only have somewhat functioning local scrutiny.

These days anyone who criticizes EU is labeled Putinist, “populist” (case in point: comments around here), far-right etc., but there are legitimate concerns with how EU works:

- There’s precious little public oversight, as parent post described.

- Fixing that is hard. This isn’t US, but a mishmash of countries that don’t have all that much in common: not language, not culture, not shared historical experience (e.g. “eastern” countries are bitching about EU’s heavy-left leaning because they lived through socialist experiments that young Westerners are enamored with, and are vary of repeating them; southern states don’t see economy performance the way Germany does; Poles know Russian aggression all too well and value US military presence way more than most of EU, and so on and so on).

- Cyclical course corrections, so typical for functioning democracies, are non-existent, because voting can influence precious little: voters only have direct control over EP, which is mostly a rubber-stamping body. You can observe it with this directive: wasn’t EP initiative (because at the EU level, legislative/law-making and executive branches are merged). EP still voted for, despite massive opposition, but with caveats. Didn’t matter: backdoor discussions ended the way they ended - including EP position being... not entirely compatible with plenary vote. This is typical, the EP representatives in the trialogues aren’t bound by previous EP vote and see making a deal, no matter how bad, as necessary. Next step is EP approving the result. It is extremely rare for a plenary to reject trialogue output. It probably won’t happen even with this mess, but there’s a chance it might, this time. If it does, it will be championed as the process working (people on HN said that last month when the news hit that talks broke down... not so much). For things that are not this important to this many people on the right side of the political spectrum, it just doesn’t happen.

[stale2002]

> the alternative, going back to trying to regulate things like the internet in 28 different ways on a single continent, is just not a reasonable option.

But this was working fine! The way that it was "regulated", was that it basically wasn't.

Ineptitude in regulation seems like a feature, not a bug, when the regulation that people try to pass ends of being horrible.

28 countries acting ineffectively to regulate the internet is something that I support, not oppose.

[ivan_gammel]

In this case the press itself is the special interest group. Publishers are trying to protect their content by dropping A-bomb on a pest.

[cf141q5325]

>Nationalism is the problem behind that, not the solution for it

I dont think nationalism plays into this. If we didnt have a supra national body with that kind of power we wouldnt have article 13. Quite a few of the regulations where proposed on national levels first, like the link tax in Germany, and rejected there. It was similar with providers being forced to collect your browsing history. The constitutional court ruled it illegal in Germany and it was then proposed via the EU and enacted there.

I see absolutely no reason to enforce any regulation that is not aimed at enabling a united market across the member states. The EU is an economic union not a United States of Europe.

[c3o]

The link tax was not rejected in Germany, in fact it's the law of the land there. When it failed to lead to the expected riches, the lobbyists behind it switched their attention to the EU level.

It could well be argued that all Internet regulation has to do with enabling a united market.

[speedplane]

> It's no wonder that when everyone's horizons end at their national borders the supra-national body will operate under too little scrutiny.

This is not necessarily true. The early United States had a relatively weak Federal Government precisely because States had quite a bit of scrutiny. It's only after the past 100 years that the U.S. Federal government's power has increased substantially.

The point I'm trying to make here is that a true union among states is not easy, but it does not necessarily lead to undue power over the long term. We'll all probably not live long enough to see how it plays out in the EU, but there is precedent for this type of coordination throughout history.