It’s easy, I think, to critique any management or government undertaking, but devilishly difficult to actually do it: it’s something I experience at work all the time, even when I’m not a manager, but involved in a (for our medium-sized) significant change project. On the national or supra-national scale, with so many possibilities for critical voices to legitimately be raised, it’s another thing altogether. I feel we need to give governments and institutions like the EU credit for what they do, as an organisation.
So, the first point that stems from this is: given that it is genuinely difficult, should we treat and critique all forms of government equally positively, or is it legitimate - begging the question, here! - to be vehemently against certain forms like dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, theocracies and the like? I think it’s fair to say, since we can critique democracies and fascist, authoritarian form of government usually cannot countenance criticism at all, we can treat them differently.
This brings me to an old critique of the EU, voiced without further elaboration in this recent “episode” of the Guardian’s series Dining across the divide, in which an 84-year-old retired journalist and specialist magazine owner states that the EU is clearly anti-democratic and that he voted for Brexit for independence and not for anything to do with economics.
At this point, I think it’s worth reminding myself of the EU’s structure in 2026:
The structure of the EU in 2026
According to the Wikipedia article on The Institutions of the European Union or directly from the EU itself, we have four core institutions that are either directly or indirectly democratic:
- The European Parliament, which is directly elected (representative democracy)
- The European Council, which is indirectly elected, given that it consists of the heads of state of the EU Member States (each themselves democratically elected)
- The Council of the European Union, also indirectly elected, as it consists of designated Ministers from each of the EU Member States (this body is effectively the second chamber working with and buffering against the European Parliament’s perhaps more exuberant law-making)
- The European Commission, which I would say is institutionally neutral, since it’s basically the EU’s civil service.
Is the EU anti-democratic?
Given the above… no. But it is interesting to consider how the EU so often seems to roll out regulations that appear to surpass what any one government or industrial sector (ah, the lobbies…) would ask for - think of environmental regulations (like the packaging and packaging waste example below): is it a democratic following of instructions, or is it democratic leadership acting on a broad mandate? I feel it is the latter - Parliament, the Councils and the Commission have to work together to hammer goals into legislation, and if there is an element of group-think, Parliament and to a certain degree the Councils still have the jeopardy of being voted out if they get things catastrophically wrong. Parliament also has to vote across its constituent parliamentary groupings.
Lobby groups aside, I think most EU inhabitants agree with the general direction of action for the climate, but have to see that their views and challenges are considered and acted upon to retain legitimacy.
Is the EU a bureaucratic behemoth?
Yes. All governments are and if they try not to be, like the current US government, things get very messy quickly. There is a subtler argument here, one that I by now was not surprised to see raised by the Tech-but-mostly-Apple blogger John Gruber on his blog Daring Fireball, who writes, in his post What is the point of the DMA
the point of the DMA is to impose obvious regulatory burdens and bureaucracy upon Apple (and Google, and Microsoft) — and upon the EU citizens who use those companies’ “gatekeeping” platforms and then later, in the same post: I’m sure some of you think I’m all wet in my argument that the point of the DMA was merely to impose ongoing bureaucratic complexity. But my view jibes with the reality of how it’s worked out.
Well, yes. Whilst this comment is specifically targetted at the Digital Markets Act (which, as a set of goals, sounds sensible to me!) I can’t recall any comment from Gruber acknowledging any benefits stemming from the EU or its goals at all, or any sense of there being a right general direction, of it being the right thing for the European continent - and the world - to have. I feel he has put the EU in the same bin (also in the negative sense) as Android or Microsoft: innately incompetent and wrong-headed.
My assertion would be that whilst the EU is heading along the right path, they can and do fail on the implementation, Google and MS are actually going in wrong directions, though their implementations are pretty good (though never as good as Apple’s, of course.)
The EU is bureaucratic, absolutely. But bureaucratic for bureaucracy’s sake? No, I don’t get that impression. I’m sure there are the sorts of people within the EU who think that way, bureaucratic sadists, as it were. I know the general feeling is that the EU is regulating itself to death (see below), but I see the mix of politicians and the commission, plus consultations and feedback working to ensure that things don’t get bureaucratic for the sake of it. Watering down can, alas, happen, but so can streamlining and focussing on the right things.
Having said that… Administration can be a (small business) killer, hopefully not for long
The PPWR, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation along with the EPR, the Extended Producer Responsibility act is causing ructions in EU small businesses.
I recently encountered a post on Mastodon referencing a blog post by Alain Pannetrat of the small electronics retailer Lektronz entitled How Europe is killing makers and micro entrepreneurs. Fundamentally, the PPWR is a great case in point, as Pannetrat puts quite simply and powerfully:
A good idea, a terrible implementation
The fundamental problem that Lektronz raises is that small businesses have to register (and pay for this registration) with each individual EU member state into which they ship. In their example, a small boutique electronics shop in Greece would have to register and report the packaging in which they ship their products in each of France, Belgium, Austria and Germany, for a combined fee (which varies from country to country, of course) of over EUR 1000, potentially more than the value of the goods shipped. It looks ridiculous, and clearly is deserving of ridicule - in the implementation, at least.
If the EU could organise a one-stop registration shop for the whole EU zone (as they managed for taxes paid by small businesses), then that issue should be resolved.
An EU superstate?
Another age-old fear raised by the older chap in the Guardian’s Dining across the Divide post is that of the EU “Superstate”. It’s an old bugbear / straw man set up by any opponent of the EU, because it seems reasonable that the European political elite would want such a thing. But I come back to the democratic aspect of the EU: right now, a federal EU state isn’t on the cards, since there isn’t a clear mandate or majority to achieve it. The phrase “ever closer union” sounds perhaps scary to sovereigntists who hate the idea either of a homogenising authority, or of having to deal with the French on equal terms - but the path to a single Superstate simply hasn’t been described yet, let alone planned. The ever closer union has a lot of incremental steps to achieve on things like packaging or PFAS or immigration before ever being able to consider federalising.
And, in any case: does anybody call the USA a “Superstate”? Or China? It seems to be a pejorative term reserved for the EU itself, a “Buhmann” as the Germans would call it.
A homogenenising hegemony?
Well, of course not! In the European Parliament, members from Member State parties are bundled into larger political groups, and some have more seats than others. But, as in any properly democratic system, it’s a far cry from a hegemony.
But the EU’s key opponents themselves certainly tend in that direction, as seen in the upcoming probably miserable elections in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt:
On average, East Germans remain considerably poorer than their western counterparts. They possess significantly less wealth, inherit much less and often face markedly weaker career prospects. A lingering feeling of being “second-class citizens” has become deeply entrenched, extending even to generations born long after German reunification. I can understand these feelings, and I can understand how the AfD has channelled this pervasive sense of abandonment… … What I can’t understand is that the people I grew up among are failing to see how hollow the AfD’s promises are.
Summing up
I haven’t even touched on the geopolitical aspects of the EU as counterweight to the USA’s uncomfortably near-fascist turn, to China and to whatever Russia (or, at least its President and oligarchical “friends”) thinks it is. That alone is enough to make me a strong proponent of the EU - these “smaller”, internal issues are the ones that I kept encountering in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, and keep on seeing now, too.
Fundamentally, then, I’m pro-European and want to see it succeed and - along with its population(s) - thrive.
