6.6.5.4  Growing Hostility towards the EU

(This is an archived extract from the book Patterns of Power: Edition 2)

People feel that decisions which affect them are taken elsewhere – ‘in Brussels’ – where they don’t understand how their countries’ interests have been represented.  An individual vote clearly has less sway in a large grouping like the EU than it has in local or national elections, but that does not mean that large groupings cannot be democratic.  It means that it is harder to change their direction – but this can be a benefit in preventing politicians from trying to win short-term popularity at the expense of the wider collective interest, for example by advocating economic protectionism (3.5.4.2). 

Much of the EU’s unpopularity can be ascribed to a communication problem:

·      Some national politicians try to increase their power by feeding nationalist sentiments, as was the case with both UKIP and the British National Party (BNP).[1]  Slightly less stridently, but insistently, many other politicians have played a similar game – perhaps in the belief that they would garner votes by feeding the fantasy that Britain could be unaffected by the world around it.[2]

·      As seen from the perspective of any individual country, it is not surprising that not all EU decisions are in its favour; that is the nature of any collective bargaining.

·      Few national politicians try to explain or defend the multinational decision-making process. 

Clearly, improvement is always possible, and any system will suffer from human failings, but the most difficult problem remains the need to explain that the collective benefits are worth having and that national autonomy has been pooled, not lost – and not all aspects of governance are affected.

© PatternsofPower.org, 2014