Governance misalignment

Introduction

The misalignment between the EU and EU citizens seems to be the underlying reason for the different problems faced by all EU citizens. The main problem for eu/acc supporters is EU overregulation suppressing innovation. In more general terms the problem is overregulation and bureaucracy suppressing individual freedom. To understand this we first need to understand what the EU is. The EU describes itself as (source):

The European Union is a unique partnership between 27 European countries, known as Member States, or EU countries. Together they cover much of the European continent. … Citizens of the EU countries are also EU citizens.

Since the EU is the partnership between countries we have to understand what a country is (source):

An area of land that is controlled by its own government.

In my view this definition is incomplete. A more complete definition would be “a country is an area of land with a group of people with shared goals and values that have a governance structure to support these values and pursue these goals”. Using this definition the EU is simply an implementation of cooperation between countries that have one or multiple shared values and goals.

The prevalent governance structure for the individual countries of the EU is a system of democracy. Therefore at first glance one would argue that the EU uses a system of democracy. However on further inspection this does not seem the case. The EU governance system is complex and individual EU citizens can only directly vote for a fixed number of EU parlement members assigned to their country. These representatives seem to be the only connection to the democratic system of the underlying countries. The other governance elements (called institutions and bodies) are selected by different means. Based on this my view is that the EU is an aristocratic system not a democratic system. An aristocratic system with governance power above the democratic sub systems results in the democratic sub systems collapsing into aristocratic systems. The democratic legitimacy of the EU is a long debated question (source), even by it’s own members (source), and seems to be the reason for the misalignment.

Issue

Throughout history it is shown that the main driver for people in power is to stay in power. To stay in power in a democratic system the current hodler of power needs to align with the values and goals of the voters. In other systems this alignment is missing. The people selected for the positions of power in EU governance are not selected by democratic process. Therefore their values and goals are not aligned with the EU citizens, instead they are aligned with the sources of their power. The main visible resulting issue of this misalignment is overregulation and bureaucracy suppressing individual freedom. Further resulting in a suppression of innovation and stagnation (or worse recession) of the prosperity in the EU. The worst case result of misalignment between positions of power and its citizens is war. Unfortunately the current trajectory seems WAR!

Hot Fix

EU citizens directly vote for the president of the European Commission in a democratic process. To be implemented as soon as possible.

Note that the democratic design is not perfect (source), it however is the best we have. In the words of Winston Churchill “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried”.

Bug Fix

More complete detailed bug fix for the misalignment:

1. Make detailed analyses of current EU governance structure.

2. Direct EU citizen vote on the crucial positions of power.

3. Make selection and decision processes transparant.

4. Add an institution with the power to remove old institutions, bodies and legislation. This institution is selected by EU citizens directly.

5. Remove unnecessary institutions, bodies and legislation.

6. Potential: add a sub governance innovation branch that allows researching innovative changes in governance processes at a small scale. Comparable to a start up financed by a multinational.

In essence make the EU democratic and give POWER TO THE PEOPLE! This is the only way to fix misalignment and create prosperity for all EU citizens.