The EU’s formal decision making powers are vested in the national governments (but they only each get one vote) and in the commission (but each member nation gets one commissioner, apart at the moment from France - since Romania’s commissioner seems to be a naturalised Frenchman). As a result there’s a massive disparity in democratic representation between the large countries and the small. A Luxembourg voter has more than 1000x the influence on European affairs of a German voter (and not un-coincidentally gets more net benefit per capita than any other EU state). In the UK, Rotten Boroughs (minute, corrupt and unrepresentative constituencies) were abolished in the 19th Century. And yet we seem to have recovered them in the 21st.
Ah, you might say, but this balances against the influence larger countries can wield. In practice, that’s only applied to Germany and France. If the UK came into the “centre of Europe” (something rarely tried over the last 40 years, but it has been tried), France regards this as a threat (France exercises influence principally through its relationship with Germany) and acts to disconnect it.
Not to say that the UK “can’t win” (there’s an article in this week’s Economist about the UK’s emerging relationship with other Northern European economies), but it’s difficult to get there from here.
Personally, I don’t vote UKIP and have no intention of doing so (ironically, UKIP only has MPs in the European Parliament, and wouldn’t have been able to make a breakthrough without the EP’s proportional representation system, which is a different voting system to the UK parliament). But I don’t believe that the EU is even remotely democratic. I think that its collection of massively disparate interests (see here 1) means that it won’t get there without an exponentially more concerted attempt at homogenisation than we are seeing even now, and I’d prefer not to be there when that happens.
So if we can keep free trade and get out (and nobody at this point knows what they’ll be voting for in the referendum) that’s the way I’ll be voting. If we can keep free trade, govern ourselves and stay in, fine.
