Europe's 50th Anniversary Clown Show

Foreign Policy Magazine, which has veered much to the farthest left since Richard Holbrooke founded it in the early '70s as a sort of left-version of Foreign Affairs, nevertheless occasionally desists from bashing Bush long enough to have articles on other subjects. Here is a lucid and limpid summary of
the 50th Anniversary of the European Union aptly titled "Europe's 50th Anniversary Clown Show."

The author is an historian who wrote a book on the decline of the Hapsburg Empire.

Today’s EU resembles a sort of undemocratic Habsburg Empire. Its legislation is proposed by a Commission of unelected bureaucrats who have now apparently lost control of their own staffs and who themselves are usually political outcasts from their national political systems. Decisions on whether to adopt their often bizarre initiatives are then taken in total secrecy by the Council of Ministers or the European Council, before being rubber-stamped by the federalist parliament and imposed on the citizens of member states, whose national legislatures can do absolutely nothing to alter their directives or regulations. Indeed, 84 percent of all legislation before national parliaments, according to the German Ministry of Justice, now simply involves implementing Brussels diktats. All this makes European politics undemocratic at all levels, and opinion polls reflect the public’s growing disillusionment. So, given the present lack of democracy, together with corruption scandals and splits over foreign policy—not to mention the prospect of having a constitution rammed down the throats of voters who originally rejected it or never had the chance to vote on the matter in the first place—it can be no surprise that ordinary Europeans saw the celebrations as a sick joke.

The entire article is worth a look.

And we complain in the US that Congress and Big Government don't represent the people. They don't, but compared to Europe, the USA is a pure democracy.