From a one-time passionate supporter of the EU project I now find I'm much more sceptical for several reasons:
- Unelected Commission. Powerful commission head Baroso who has no mandate whatsoever. Likewise his fellow Commissioners.
- Almost powerless and irrelevant parliament.
- An equally irrelevant President Van Rumpouy.
- ECB and Trichet. An institution and a man outside of any political influence (mostly a good thing) but with inflation as it's main objective - often a bad thing.
- Powerful countries like Germany/France virtually in control of all major decisions that affect the lives of 1/2 billion people but are elected by maybe only 150 million.
The more I look at the EU the less I like it as it is essentially anti-democratic. There are many good things about it, but the democratic deficit is undermining it entirely. Is it time for it to reform or just wither away?
I find myself in very much the same boat as you. Up until about 4 years ago I was a very strong supporter of the EU project. When I was still in school in the early 90s I had a great history and social science teacher whom I found myself constantly disagreeing with. Looking back I am amazed at how much foresight the woman had about some of the deep flaws of the EU project and the at the time hotly debated EMU.
I agree with you on the commission, which is probably one of the most dangerous parts of the EU governing apparatus, in that it functions under almost no restrictions and unelected. I also believe that the EU parliament is totally irrelevant, but I do not think it is powerless or has its powers curtailed enough; the same goes for the president.
I have become a lot more skeptical of the Euro than the EU, to the extent that I believe the Euro will fail. The EU idea was founded on the principles of free movement of goods and services, free movement of people and free movement of capital. Somehow though, these principles of freedom have been *******ised into a bureaucratic glob where these freedoms are being increasingly curtailed. I don't think a week goes by without some EU body coming up with some new crazy idea to regulate goods and services for "the good of the EU".
What annoys me most at the moment is the idea being spewed out around the Euro zone, that if the Euro fails the EU will fail. This is total and utter crap. There is absolutely no reason why the EU cannot continue to support free movement of goods, services, people and capital without a single currency.
The EU isn't too bad, or at least no worse than any other large state organisation but the Euro is flawed; it's incomplete. There is no mechanism to deal with what's happening here now just as there was no mechanism to deal with (stop) the massive flows of capital into the country during the boom/bubble.
Well, there was a "mechanism" to deal with what is happening now, and it was called the stability and growth pact. But at the first sign of difficulty it was abandoned. To me the Euro has been totally exposed as a political project, rather than an economic one.
The problem with trying to find a mechanism to deal with the flow of credit is that it simply cannot be done in any other way than by turning off the printing press. The ECB increased the monetary base from €1806bn in January 1999 to €4719.5bn in April of this year, or 260%. This is incredibly inflationary and it is simply impossible to control the flow of such amounts of money through the system. It would also go completely against the free movement of capital.
I highly recommend a book by Philipp Bagus called "The Tragedy of the Euro". It is quite short but incredibly precise and well researched (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tragedy-Euro-Philipp-Bagus/dp/1908089326%3FSubscriptionId%3D1NNRF7QZ418V218YP1R2%26tag%3Dbf-dt-home-21%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D1908089326). It is very eye opening as to how and why the Euro was created and especially why the hard currency Deutsche Bundesbank become part of the highly inflationary ECB.