What I hate about EU

It’s boring
Is there anything more soporific than the European Union? Short of 10mg of diazepam there is hardly a better strategy for insomnia than listening to a report on the latest activities of the EU. The EU’s very nature virtually guarantees that any issue is met with glazed eyes and apathy on the part of the public. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is because…

It’s bureaucratic
Quick: what’s the European Commission? The council of ministers? What’s the difference between the Council of Europe, the Council of the European Union and the European Council? Are they all parts of the EU? What does Eota do? Never mind Colm McCarty getting to work with a pair of scissors on the South’s public service, maybe he can do something about the bloated blancmange that is the EU. No sane person would willingly choose to understand the totality of these bodies and their relationship with one-another – and that’s just the way the EU likes it because…

It’s undemocratic
Why does the EU even have a parliament if it wants real power to lie with the European Commission? The EU is an exercise in cod-democracy that would make proponents of ‘democratic centralism’ smile. Remember, communist parties were in fact internally democratic. It’s just that once a decision had been implemented dissent was forbidden. Similarly, the EU has all of the institutions of democracy but little of the spirit. The very fact that Ireland is being dragooned into a second referendum (just as it was with the Nice Treaty previously) is proof of this. Of course it’s hard to get agreement across 27 sovereign countries – but that’s just tough. Perhaps the EU should not have expanded with such reckless abandon, instead taking a more cautious approach and having prospective members spend a few years in the European Free Trade Area first.

The question of the military is a real one
Horror stories about conscription into EU armies are fairly absurd but that doesn’t mean the EU has no military or geopolitical ambitions. The wars in Yugoslavia were seriously exacerbated by a recently reunified Germany wishing to display its new-found moral authority on the world stage. Ireland’s neutrality is not really a point of principle. It was adopted as a policy because it would have been inevitable that the country would have been drawn into Britain’s wars as a junior partner – and Britain was very much still an imperial power at the time. Coming so soon after independence this would have been a disaster for Ireland. Now that the state has established itself there is a debate to be had about neutrality, but it should be had in public: in the Dáil, in the press, in the pubs, cafés and living rooms across the country – not in the smokeless rooms of Strasbourg. Northern unionists, meanwhile, would do well to consider where they want the British army’s orders coming from.

It’s unrepresentative
Honestly, does anyone really care about European elections? Is the European Parliament anything other than a massive talking shop for worthies? It’s not quite as pointless as the Seanad [the Republic’s upper house] but it’s not far off. Voter turnout in EU elections is notoriously low, worse even than local government elections. Those that do turn up to vote, therefore, get to foist their candidates on everyone else. In one sense this is fair enough: if you don’t vote then you lose the right to a say in who represents you. However, the EU elections are so distant and pointless seeming – most people have no idea what MEPs actually do – that it’s understandable that so few of us get excited about the process. Worse still, the European parliament itself lacks legitimacy in a broader sense: it doesn’t really do much of anything. The real power within the EU as an institution lies elsewhere.

It’s impossible to have a serious discussion about
Mention Europe in some circles and you’ll be regaled with tales of Brussels sprouts being renamed and the curvature of bananas being measured. Much of the anti-EU argument is clearly baloney – but then, so is a lot of the pro-EU propaganda. How can we have a serious discussion about the make-up of the EU when politicians that support it freely admit to not having read its treaties and its opponents often appear to be a few Brussels sprouts short of a Christmas dinner? The EU has completely failed to get its purpose across to the public – in fact, it seems to spend an awful lot of time trying to disguise its purpose and its real virtues from the public for fear they will be whipped-up into an apoplexy about ‘sinister agendas’ by anti-EU newspapers and pundits.

It promotes poor politics
It is regularly said that Irish politics is inherently corrupt and that only the EU can bring probity to the country’s law-making process. The not so subtle subtext here is that that Irish cannot be trusted to govern themselves, that the electorate are lazy, greedy and stupid and that any technocratic measures which can be introduced in order to get around them are a good thing. Author Colm Tóbín openly made this point writing about the previous Lisbon referendum in the Guardian. Apart from the fact that it is deeply insulting reading of politics it is also ahistorical and untrue. If you want a certain set of policies enacted or repealed then the onus is on you to campaign for it. That’s democracy.

It’s not going to solve our other problem
How many times have you heard that the partition of Ireland will become irrelevant as a result of the EU? Well, it won’t. Certainty, co-operation on an EU level could bring the two states closer together, but the fact is they exist and that has absolutely nothing to do with the EU and everything to do with Ireland and Britain. Surely it’s up to us to solve our own problems and create our own space for politics rather than rely on an external force to do it for us?