David Cameron and the EU s Waterloo

The EU s Rules to Default By

Noise like this, according to the European Union, is reducing the health and the quality of life of 25 percent of the population of Europe.

The European Union will participate actively in that very important meeting.

Quite simply, EU politics has not kept pace with the scope and level of the Union s problems.

Many Europeans now resent the expanding powers of EU bureaucracy.

An immigration influx into Italy spills over into other EU countries.

Frankly, the functioning of the EU and its institutions during the crisis has been a part of the problem. For many people, EU decision making is opaque, inefficient, and removed from democratic control.

Indeed, the European Union s future still seems acutely uncertain, owing mainly to a mismatch between rhetoric and reality.

And, when it finally does do the right thing, it pretends not to be doing it. The reason is that European Union politics is mostly national politics, which addresses national issues with a European dimension, but not European issues.

Europe s democratic deficit is less a gap between European institutions and European citizens than between national politics and European problems.

That was the purpose of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which established the European Union.

Egyptian blogger Eman discusses the difficulties of getting a Schengen (European Union) Visa in this post.

Orbán s remarks, and his subsequent announcement of plans to implement his vision of an illiberal state, were greeted with shock. How could he profess such views as the leader of a European Union member state, even as he stuffed his government s coffers with EU subsidies?

The fiscal compact is an empty gesture that may be the last attempt to pretend that EU members are moving toward political unification.

We need to assess what can be achieved at the national level and what EU institutions should do.

In all these instances, national policies have had severe repercussions for other EU states. European issues were governed at a national level, and other Europeans paid the price.

Romania associates itself fully with the statement that will be delivered later by the Ambassador of Luxembourg on behalf of the European Union.

Judging from opinion polls, the European public has come to see the EU s handling of the euro crisis as a success. Confidence in the EU has increased from 48 to 58 during the last three years, after a period of steady decline skepticism about the European project dropped from 46 to 36 .

As a matter of statistics, the EU can clearly accommodate a million or more refugees. This would amount to just 0.2 of the EU s total population far less than the number of people that member countries will need to admit in the coming decades to replenish their aging workforces.

In that regard, the European Union welcomes the fact that a human rights expert will be one of the main advisers of the Executive Director.

European integration has sparked increased mobility especially in the aftermath of the euro crisis. But what it has not yet done is generate the institutional framework needed to make mobility acceptable to the EU s residents.

All of these changes concern the eurozone s members first, of course, but they are clearly relevant for the wider EU. At the same time, setting eurozone members apart from the wider EU would be inadvisable.

Now two weeks ago or so, the European Union passed a law banning the use of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups.

Two percent of the population of Europe that's 16 million people are having their sleep devastated by noise like that.

France is a different matter. According to a recent poll, 54 of the French would prefer Britain to leave the EU.

The EU s rules on how much capital banks must hold are about to be revised. The rules, which are detailed in a 500 page legal proposal, called CRDIV and published recently by the European Commission, will increase the amount of capital banks must hold, but only for lending to the private sector.

This is what the EU s democratic deficit really means No EU member state has yet to fully internalize the consequences for their democracy of the interdependence generated by integration.

The EU must also be made accountable not only for what it spends, but also for the wealth that it generates.

Through its counter terrorism coordinator, Mr. Gijs de Vries, the European Union is currently working to promote greater coordination between the various counter terrorism initiatives, policies and activities of the European Union.

Moreover, such a bailout could undermine the ECB s trustworthiness as guardian of the euro s stability, particularly in light of the new political power that it would obtain. And it would further undermine the rule of law in the EU at a time when confidence in the Union s governing treaties is already fragile.

But, to do so, we will need to make EU institutions more efficient, with better regulation and a lower administrative burden.

EU leaders need to acknowledge this reality before it s too late.

The Eurocrats knew what was best for Europe s citizens, and they knew what needed to be done.

But if Greece is not solvent, either the EU must assume its debts or the risk will hang over it like a sword of Damocles.

The larger issue at stake is whether Europe is prepared to establish the common political space that is needed to manage the monetary union and strengthen the European Union s influence in world affairs.

Banking union, Europe s leaders agreed, means creating a single supervisory authority.

Once the EU binds its aid to some states to their adoption of certain policies, it should be equally accountable for the outcome of those policies. Democratically addressing the consequences of financial interdependence requires both a European voice on individual states policies and a correspondent European democratic accountability.

It gave Greek Cypriot leaders the possibility of blocking progress in negotiations between the EU and Turkey.

Now is the time for EU leaders to present Lukashenko with a clear alternative to dependence on Russia.

Yet there is much more that EU leaders can do to undermine the regime economically.

The EU s leaders will try hard to keep the IMF at bay.

For instance, she is now the president of Finland, but Tarja Halonen was the foreign minister of Finland and, at a certain stage, head of the European Union.

It is already clear that the EU s recently agreed fiscal compact will not constrain budget deficits or reduce national debts.

Likewise, neither narrative alone can provide a vision for the EU the gap between them can be filled only by trust.