The transfer of power from legislative to executive in Sweden as a result of the EU membership.

Before (or without) the EU level:
government proposes legislation -> parliament votes it down -> life goes on

(Swedish governments are often minority governments and can loose votes, as long as it is not budget votes or something critical like that)

With the EU level:
government proposes an amendement in the codecision process -> Council governments and Commision colludes to get unpopular decisions passed -> [lots of steps within the EU...] -> directive comes to Swedish parliament -> parliament votes it down -> Sweden gets sued before the EU court -> Swedish parliament eventually accepts or leave EU

OR
government proposes an amendement in the codecision process -> Council governments and Commision colludes to get unpopular decisions passed -> parliament holds vote of no confidence -> government falls -> possibly new elections

In essence:
EU membership has in Sweden passed legislative powers from parliament to the executive government, and this is due to the rules and the power of the Council. It is not that most legislation goes through Brussels, it is that what can not be passed otherwise goes through Brussels. It is small amount in comparision, but very important.

If the Council is to work like a senate it should have seperate senators - not part of the executive - that are either elected by the people or elected by the parliaments. Mixing in the executive governments as a part of an EU-level legislative process shifts power nationally to executive governments, weakening what checks existed on the national level. You could argue that the most efficient way of fixing it is at national level in each country. I would probably not agree, but it is an argument that could be made.

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

The EU is a completely different animal and people keep trying to graft systems appropriate for local nation states onto it.

The problem with the Council, specifically, is that it is made up out of members of the executive nationally, but performs a legislative function on the European level. This was pointed out by Colman and others in the thread. We are used to most discussions in legislative organs to be public, but in the Council, until recently, nothing was public. Now that some steps in the legislative procedure have become public, we get longer pre-meeting lunches, dinners, etcetera. Anything to get the horse trading out of the open.

a swedish kind of death and migeru argue that the Council also provides a way for the national executive to increase its power and circumvent national democratic control, in making unpopular decisions, and then afterwards blaming the EU when it has to implement them back home. This is also known as policy laundering. I have argued the same here before. This is a real problem for democracy in the EU and for democracy at the national level. The same problem also arises with regard to all other international institutions. So solving the problem is crucial if we want more and better global governance.

One solution to this problem would be to have a European Freedom of Information act, which would allow news organisations and the European Parliament to open up any procedure in the Council. This would not necessarily solve the horse trading at the highest level, but it would be effective in bringing issues out in the open earlier. The majority of the decisions in the Council are already taken at the level of the committee of permanent representatives or lower levels, and the concrete effects are often determined only after legislation has been decided, through comitology. Opening these up to scrutiny, and giving the European Parliament some kind of means for intervening in the comitology procedure if it thinks politically controversial decisions are being taken, would solve most of the existing problems.

We also need more alert parliamentarians and a better press corps. And we could do some of the early warning ourselves. But without increased transparancy, this can only go so far.

How many members of the European Commission can you name, compared to your local government ?

What is the relative press that goes into lawmaking in the EU compared to the local government ? Despite the fact that EU lawmaking takes precedence and is more important than local legislation.

The EU will look, and in effect be, technocratic, as long as it works ahead without the public opinion watch made possible by a free press informing the populations.

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères

A swedish kind of death asks something very close to what I was wondering throughout the thread:

I think the interesting question would be: Why do not even educated interested citizens know how the EU works?

My question was, what is the level of understanding of most "educated interested citizens" about how the EU works?  How much understanding do they need to have in order for the EU to work effectively and truly democratically?

The key to culture is religion. Daniel Dennett @ TED (Feb 2006)

If the Council is to work like a senate it should have senators that are either elected by the people or elected by the parliaments.
[ASKOD]

But that's the case!!! Your 'senator' is your Prime Minister (or President), duly elected by the people or the parliament of your country.

If most legislation applicable in our countries is decided in Brussels, then the behavior of your representative in Brussels should be the single most important thing you vote on. If you don't, again, it's your democratic process that's flawed, not the Council.

This has been the case for decades. Why are people always pretending to discover how Europe works?!

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

If the primary income tax in the EU were controlled by the EU Council, I bet there would be a lot more discussion about it...

My irk, which I will not be able to expound on than this touch and go, is this:

European Tribune - Airports and Secret Legislation

In barely five working days a norm directly applicable at all airports in Europe has been approved. The same norm behind the many questions and contradictions that have made its application an example of chaos and arbitrariness at thousands of control points. Rules with no legal rigour, of dubious legitimacy, not known directly, but only through explanatory leaflets. No court will be able to examine them either, as they have a confidential character.

How in blazes is this accountable, or democratic, or, gods forbid, sensible? I will echo's nanne's superb post upthread - comitology in this forms needs scrutiny, either by the EP and/or by a Freedom of Information Act, preferably both. In current form, the plus side of comitology is being outdone by its darker side.

I've actually frothed against the no-liquid aviation legislation; I feel somehow validated if it was indeed shaped up through this process.

First, the system needs what you might call horizontal separation of powers. There needs to be a clearly defined legislative, executive and judicial system, and their relationships need to be worked out. Ahead of time.

Personally, I am biased in favour of what one might call constitutional parliamentarism - where the executive serves at the pleasure of the parliament but the judicial branch has both independence and teeth to impose judicial review of the constitutionality of challenged policies.**

The second challenge is to ensure what one might call vertical separation of powers.

I do not necessarily vote for the same political parties at the city council elections as I do for the national elections - the party that I prefer for national policy may have some cooky local policy and vice versa. If one were to remove direct elections for either the city council or the national parliament and let the body in question be appointed indirectly, it is virtually certain that I would cast my vote based on national policy, and the city be damned, if you'll excuse my French.

I see no reason to assume that this is not also true for the state-EU relationship, and in large part, I point to this fact to explain why the EU is considered less than perfectly transparent. Much and more in the EU bureaucracy takes place through indirectly appointed bodies. Bodies appointed by people who are put in charge of the appointing by the parliaments and governments of the member countries.

If the perception exists (it does, and this will, I believe, remain the case for the foreseeable future) that the national level is more important than the EU level (the EU level needs not be considered unimportant, just less important), the votes for national government will be cast based on national issues. Which means that the resulting national governments will have virtually zero accountability on EU matters.

The party or parties that have my vote based on domestic matters can be virtually certain of not losing it almost irregardless of what kinds of silly things they do at the Union level (surveillance being the only single policy area that I can think of that might motivate me to shift clear across to the other bloc - except that their policy on that issue is actually worse). And on the other side of the fence, there is very little to gain by the parties not getting my vote today  by behaving properly on Union policy, because there is no way that farming subsidies are more important to my vote than unemployment benefits, free and equal education, or the funding of the agencies that enforce the laws against selling me spoiled food.

In summary, the fact that the EU level is both (a) almost completely disassociated from the national level in the mind of most voters and (b) considered by most voters to be vastly less important than the national level makes me think it necessary to give direct elections a far more prominent role in the appointment of people at the Union level. I would personally prefer doing away completely with the indirect appointments across the state-Union boundary.

The third challenge is to design - from the ground up and from the very beginning - a federal system that will satisfy the following criteria:

a) Initially, the system must give greater weight to small member states. A system in which regions hold powers proportional to their population will, as long as the citizenry thinks in terms of national allegiance, be tantamount to asking smaller members to be annexed outright by larger members. This is largely the state at which the Union is today.

b) Eventually, the political integration will/may progress to an extend where the distinction between individual member states is both politically and psychologically meaningless. In this case it is clearly unreasonable to attribute greater power to regions purely with low population (density) based on the historical accident that the Union started life as a confederation. This is largely the state that the USA is at now, and the reason why the Electoral College - which was an eminently sensible idea when the USA was still for all intents and purposes a confederation - is considered archaic.

c) The speed of the transition between states a) and b) must be ultimately controlled by the citizens in order to be considered legitimate. I do not believe that an arbitrary timetable of fixed dates would be taken kindly by the smaller member states. On the other hand, it is vitally necessary that the process does occur, and since it is not ultimately in the narrow self-interest of the low population (density) regions to help this process on the way, it may be that it will be necessary to provide some temporary incentive to do so.

Lastly, there is the half-challenge I promised: The rules and systems that meet challenges one through three must be written in a sufficiently compact fashion that it is readable to any literate citizen in a reasonable timespan. Publishing a 150 page book doesn't cut it. Especially when upwards nine tenths of the content is redundant diplomat-speak and/or vague statements of intent. While I think I have made clear that copying the content of the US constitution would be A Bad Idea, I do believe that the Founders of a more perfect European Union could take lessons in brevity from Jefferson et al. Then again, by the look of this post, so could I...

- Jake

*Let's not mince words here for the sake of political correctness: The Union as currently set up is a confederacy and its political integration will only become tighter. In an age where one can go from Helsinki to Berlin in less than a quarter of a day (and information can travel the same distance in less than a quarter of a millisecond) the world is simply too small for sovereign states of 5-10 mil. people. But I digress; infrastructure and its relation to the minimum and maximum sizes of viable political units is a topic for another day...

**Actually, as a matter of principle I would prefer to see an independent executive, but I fail to see how such a body could be made "by the people, for the people" - a presidential executive seems to do Bad Things to the political culture by encouraging tactical voting to avoid 'splitting the vote' (see, e.g., Bush vs. Gore or Chirac vs. Le Pen), and I fail to see another system that provides for direct input from the citizenry (you could make the executive a 'second chamber' but that runs the risk of either getting very similar election results by holding elections in close proximity or constant campaigning by holding elections every other year or so). Then again, that may simply be a failure of my imagination.

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.