http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/15/eu.ireland

“Maybe pro-Europeans can win Ireland’s second referendum and then, in 2010 or 2011, our own. But referendums work best for the demagogue, the dissimulator and scaremonger, as Hitler and Mussolini, lovers of referendums, proved. Increasingly, Ireland and Britain are heading for the European exit and that could portend further break-up of the Union. Pro-Europeans look out.”

This seems fairer than the American system to me. The QMV scheme is designed to minimise the power that individuals in smaller countries have over individuals in larger countries, but since any solution to this issue will invariably increase the power bigger countries have over smaller countries, they require a higher population based majority than they do per country. I think this minimises the problem for everyone. In America individuals in small states have more voting power than individuals in large states. QMV seeks to balance this problem by allowing the individuals in large states to add their less weighty votes together to some extent, while at the same time not endangering a large minority in the form of a smaller state because they still aren’t allowed to vote by virtue of their numbers alone.

The only problem for me is that it isn’t really 65% of the population voting. It is actually a very small proportion of the population, in the form of government ministers, who speak (where it counts the most) for practically 100% of the population. OK so this happens in any democracy too, but in the case of a republic like Ireland, we vote our representatives in based on whether we think they can do a good job and then they organise themselves in order to govern us. In the EU:

1. We vote our representatives from among our number in based on whether we think they would do a good job of running our country.
2. Our representatives organise their own representatives from among their number in order to govern us in Europe.
We should be organising our representatives in Europe in the same way as we do in Ireland. Otherwise our voice is heard through chinese whispers. The EU tries to minimise this issue in that we do elect the European Parliament directly, and they are giving the parliament more power along with the council. I think the other three main governing bodies should share power with the parliament on every decision. The good thing about our representatives picking their representatives is that those guys are department heads in our country so it makes sense for them to organise the same stuff in Europe, but there should be a safety implemented. The Lisbon treaty has begun to implement this safety in that it has already begun giving more power to the parliament.

Also all European bodies should be completely open and should never meet in secret. Our leaders must be fully answerable and accountable for their actions before they are given the responsibility of greater power.

Once we have developed a safe system, then we can talk about introducing things like an army to protect ourselves from threats. An army is too dangerous a thing to have in an not-purely-democratic community, especially one headed by a man chosen by a body who are not elected directly nor are fully accountable. At the moment, the EU “government” does not speak for the people. As you say, their countries have been shown to be opposed to the decisions they have made.

That’s as far as I got in thinking through the treaty. I didn’t have time to look at it fully and in the end I voted no. Maybe I was wrong to do so because the more time I had to think about it, the less dodgy it seemed, but the fact is, any positives it held were something I figured out by reading what other analysts had to say and by my own mental effort. The Government were no help at all, just like in the Nice treaty!

Democracy is probably a bit of an illusion anyway because whoever we vote in will have more power than the rest of us and can possibly abuse this power, but I think we should try to make this as difficult as possible.