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.

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.