Join me in my Twelve Stars Debate on why The European Parliament should be elected on transnational lists

I commented on the site, but the process was a bit clunky (the discussion is hosted on reddit), so here’s my comment, for what it’s worth

In terms of mechanics, would it work to create a number of Europe-wide seats to be filled by PR, and then allow everyone a vote for these seats as well as for national-level constituencies? Eurosceptics could abstain from the Europe wide election if they wanted to.

– and to comment a bit more ”serious” –
the last time all of these ”issues” came up -(of some… ”people” in ”Urp” really – really trying to overcome some… ”things” – which made something like a ”Brexit” possible) – there were all this comments which read like:

My god – how… how… ”pony”?
-(refering to some ”ponies” supposedly somebody like Bernie tried to offer)

So – for all you dudes out there – who think like that – an thusly are hesitating to… ”chip in”

Come on guys!! – we already have our ”trans…whateverbuddy in the utmost ”trans-city” of this world – London who gladly will let any Baloon fly.

Let’s fly aloooong…

“European citizens feel increasingly alienated from European politics and from democratic politics more generally”

I don’t, and I’m European. Perhaps the quantifier “some” might be useful here, so that “all” is not understood?

”I don’t, and I’m European”.

Me Too – feel never alienated from European politics and from democratic politics more generally”.
-(even that I’m 1/32 American Indian)

And as I slowly had it – the silly and stupid badmouthing of everything ”European” – but my fellow Americans -(or any other silly Anglo-Saxon) – I would suggest for the Twelve star project to go a lot more less ”self-critical” into this battle against a lot of nationalistic creeps.

Do it the Von Clownstick way! – EUROPE FIRST!!
Nothing –
NADA! beats European Democrats -(Social-Democrats – Greens – and Socialists) in caring for ”their People” – and especially not a Bunch of Anglo-Saxon Rapture Capitalists who think ”the dough” – and ”the greed” is great!

So please my fellow Americans – don’t be Trumps – jealous an mad – that Europe has the ”Loving our working people-societies” – join in and work on it that US will have it soon too!

Transnational lists would be a good idea. People could vote on European issues deciding between European groupings, rather than treating EU elections as an opinion poll about the current national government. We might get rid of odd but powerful alliances such as the EPP, and have more sensible groupings in the EP. However, this would also require:

1) that people understand which issues are at stake at the EU rather than national level. In my non-federal country of the Netherlands, this is clearly tough even for internal elections. Provincial elections have very low turnout and are basically an opinion poll on the national government, just like EU elections. Municipal elections are a combination of genuine local issues and an opportunity to kick the national government. My (non-data driven) sense is that federal states like Germany and Belgium are much better in explaining to citizens the concept of multi-level government.

Anyway, this means that (2) if we want EU elections to be more meaningful, the EU needs a set of legislative powers (‘competences’) which make sense and are easily understood. Because the EU is under construction, this is currently not the case. I think there are strong arguments the EU needs more capability on migration, foreign policy, defence, and macro-economic stabilisation. However, how to actually do this is much more controversial.

In this respect, I am not quite convinced by the post. The EP, and even the EU as a whole, simply does not have sufficient legislative powers to make an impact on many transnational issues people are concerned by. It is member states who are in charge of budgets. (Yes, even Greece, which only needed to dance to other people’s tunes because they ended up needing other people’s money. Those other people had full control over their own budgets, irrespective of what the EP, Commission, or other States thought about how they should spend it). This is even more so the case for foreign policy and defence. Even on migration, you national vote will have a much bigger impact than your EU election vote. The EP’s main powers are as a market regulator. Important, but abstract.

If we create expectations that the EP can do things it can’t, we simply set people up for disappointment. –> For the major issues, what is required is transnational cooperation to change national positions in EU negotiations, not transnational cooperation to change the opinions of EP political groupings.

3) In the long run, I would certainly prefer an EU with a stronger element of representative democracy, based on political/ideological debate, and a reduced role for inter-state power politics. But more power to the EP and its Parties implies less powers for the States: hardly something they will accept unless the EP has much more support and legitimacy. And the current trend of rising nationalism is more likely to empower the States further. Good for big States, but, I suspect, less so for the others

Europe is not a nation-state. There are big divisions between the countries within it. Hence, a transnational political party would not be able to respond equally in different countries to the same issue. Either it would have to be dishonest (big surprise there, UI know) or else it would have to accept that in some countries it would enjoy very limited support.

This raises questions about how democratic the proposal (which contains no hard details) actually is.

Also, is it not extremely likely that small countries would find their local votes for the transnational party getting swamped by the votes from larger and more powerful countries? In which case the effect would be more, not less, disillusion with the democratic process as applied in Europe.

On very clear and specific issues, I can imagine that a transnational party might — for a period — be meritorious. But on such issues, I can also imagine that domestically-elected parties would be able to cooperate with each other across national borders. Wouldn’t that be a better start on Europe-wide political activity, rather than enforcing a transnational vote which could easily lead to a more opaque system if nobody except the central authority was able to call the elected representatives to account?

”I think transnational lists could draw the attention to the fact taht there are soem things taht teh Parliament can actually do”.

And more important – transnational lists could draw the attention to the fact – that any narrow minded ”nationalistic policies” in Europe are as damaging to the ”currency” -(as a parable for ”value”) to any ”nationalistic narrow minded nation” .

Transnational lists is a good idea that faces many challenge, some institutional (to begin with, it seems to be in direct contradiction to the treaty-instituted repartition of MEP in rough proportion to the population of each state). However, the greatest democratic challenge faced by the EU is not in its institutional forms, but in the fact that citizens of the European Union do not form a public in the deweyan sense. This is clearly seen in the post already, as “austerity, the Eurozone governance, EU solidarity, how to manage the refugee crisis” are all issues which are largely or even entirely outside of the scope of the European parliament or even the Commission, so whatever the putative results of elections with transnational lists, they wouldn’t significantly affect policy choices about these topics. Even a complete overhaul of the institutional framework of the EU, say one that would make it democratic in the usual sense (an idea that has little political support, to be moderate), would seem to me insignificant compared to the gap between the political representations of the different polities of the EU. In particular, when I read “many theoretical discussions have gravitated around the problem of the lack of a European people which regards itself as having a common fate”, I cannot help but wonder about the connection between these theoretical discussions and reality. The reality of today’s Europe is that even people in century-old nation states and that have shared decades of common democratic practices, a language etc. do not regard themselves as “having a common fate” and show little “interest in settling disagreements democratically” (Scots and Englishmen, Catalans and Castillans, Walloons and Flemish, urban educated citizens and rural uneducated citizens everywhere…). The continued political unity of many of the states forming the EU is already unclear. The question of the political unity of the whole consequently seems to me premature, to say the least.

Harry B There is one thing that I am curious about — if we adopted transnational lists what would the nationalist right do?

In fairness, I don’t think the problem is especially acute for the nationalist right. Parties in this movement all agree that Islam sucks and that migrants should be kept outside, and that’s two major issues (for them) on which they are in perfect agreement across Europe. Honestly, not many other political tendencies (center-right, christian democracy, social democracy, center-left, Greens, socialist left, neoliberalism, autonomists…) can say the same about any of their major issues (well, there might be broad agreement in a large part of the political spectrum across Europe on lower corporate and capital taxes compensated by the privatization of the public sector, but I don’t think they can quite run explicitly on this). So I don’t see that it would be that much harder (or much easier) for True Finns, Austria’s FPÖ, the Lega and Denmark’s DPP to agree on a common platform than for France’s LR (or LREM), Germany’s CDU/CSU and Spain’s PP to do the same.

I think the comparative politics data is clear. At large elections and PR tend toward multi-party electoral systems, which in turn are good for democracy and the Left. Federalism and single member districts and powerful executives, bad for the same reason.