Eu Democracy Quotes

Given that Europe’s legacy to the world consists in the two great goods of Christianity and democracy it is hardly surprising if the EU no longer has the endorsement of the European people, even if it has created a network of clients upon whose support it can always rely.

The USA was the explicit answer to an implicit threat of war, whereas the EU was the implicit answer to explicit experiences of war.

the intellectuals and ideologues behind these new movements have now found a set of issues they can unite around—issues that work across borders and are easy to sell online. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, both real and imagined, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative, religious worldview is another. Sometimes, opposition to the EU, or to international institutions more generally, is a third.

Somewhere along the way these countries [EU] redefined the relationship between government and citizen into something closer to pusher and addict. And, once you've done that, it's very hard to persuade the addict to cut back his habit. Thus, the general acceptance everywhere but America is that the state should run your health care. A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals, hundreds of movies at the video store, and millions of porno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions about his own body he's happy to have the choice taken out of his hands and given to the government.

The EU gave both political support and quotidian substance to the values inherent in NATO—those values being, generally, the rule of law over arbitrary fiat, legal states over ethnic nations, and the protection of the individual no matter his race or religion. Democracy, after all, is less about elections than about impartial institutions.

EU or NATO find it extremely hard to make fast decisions or big changes. Unsurprisingly, people are afraid of the changes technology will bring, and also afraid—with good reason—that their political leaders won’t be able to cope with them.

Whatever one thinks about the merits of Trump’s election, or of the UK’s exit from the EU (“Brexit”), it is profoundly troubling to think that these momentous political events were underwritten by falsehoods. And it raises a deep and unsettling question: Can democracy survive in an age of fake news?

With Petrov, everything is a zero-sum game—for Russia to rise, America must fall. Everything he’s done over the past decade has been an effort to sully and tarnish the reputation of Western democracies. Promoting Brexit, actively trying to break up the EU and NATO, turning Italy against France, stoking the fires of partisanship in the United States. And while we turn inward, trying to tame and manage the chaos Russia unleashed in our house, Petrov is systematically moving his chess pieces all over the board.

. . . in Ukraine, the Association Agreement was more than just a few hundred pieces of paper slowly making their way through the inscrutable EU bureaucracy. Alina Frolova, a public relations professional who joined the group of Ukrainians Kuleba rallied in his pro-Ukraine public relations campaign, tells me it was the first step on a pathway to Europe and a dream for which many Ukrainians were willing to risk their lives. The cold practicality with which Ukrainians are willing to endanger themselves in the face of a threat to their budding democracy is still something that shocks me, even after having lived and worked there.

Under Donald Trump, the United States appears to be abandoning its role as democracy promoter for the first time since the Cold War. President Trump’s is the least prodemocratic of any U.S. administration since Nixon’s. Moreover, America is no longer a democratic model. A country whose president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares that he might not accept election results cannot credibly defend democracy. Both existing and potential autocrats are likely to be emboldened with Trump in the White House. So even if the idea of a global democratic recession was largely a myth before 2016, the Trump presidency—together with the crisis of the EU, the rise of China, and the growing aggressiveness of Russia—could help make it a reality.

You find nothing like that among humans. Yes, human groups may have distinct social systems, but these are not genetically determined, and they seldom endure for more than a few centuries. Think of twentieth-century Germans, for example. In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel? And if you do come up with something, was it also there 1,000 years ago, or 5,000 years ago? The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that it draws inspiration ‘from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which “have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law’.3 This may easily give one the impression that European civilisation is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality and freedom. Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day EU, celebrating 2,500 years of European freedom and democracy. This is reminiscent of the proverbial blind man who takes hold of an elephant’s tail and concludes that an elephant is a kind of brush. Yes, democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a half-hearted experiment that survived for barely 200 years in a small corner of the Balkans. If European civilisation for the past twenty-five centuries has been defined by democracy and human rights, what are we to make of Sparta and Julius Caesar, of the Crusaders and the conquistadores, of the Inquisition and the slave trade, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, of Hitler and Stalin? Were they all intruders from some foreign civilisation?

More recently that has begun to change. Long divided by borders and history, some of the intellectuals and ideologues behind these new movements have now found a set of issues they can unite around—issues that work across borders and are easy to sell online. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, both real and imagined, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative, religious worldview is another. Sometimes, opposition to the EU, or to international institutions more generally, is a third. These issues are unrelated—there is no reason why you can’t be a pro-European Catholic, as so many have been in the past—and yet those who believe in them have made common cause. Dislike of same-sex marriage, African taxi drivers, or “Eurocrats” is something that even Spaniards and Italians who disagree about their respective separatist movements can share. Avoiding history and old border disputes, they can conduct joint campaigns against the secular, ethnically mixed societies they inhabit, and at the same time appeal to the people who want the raucous debate about these things to come to a halt.

Diskusia o problémoch eurozóny sa na Slovensku zneužívala nielen pred voľbami, ale aj po nich. Prezentované postoje sa dosiaľ niesli skôr v rovine emócií a politických hesiel. Slovenskí politici si však zrejme neuvedomujú, že z hľadiska momentálne platnej legislatívy, ale ani z politického či praktického hľadiska nemožno z eurozóny len tak jednoducho vystúpiť a legálne nemožno ani žiadnu z krajín eurozóny vylúčiť. Rozpad eurozóny by znamenal koniec Európskej únie samotnej, čo by neprospelo žiadnej z krajín a poznačilo vývoj v Európe na niekoľko desaťročí dopredu. Ekonomická a monetárna únia (EMÚ) totiž ako taká nemá právnu subjektivitu. Samotná EMÚ je integrálnou súčasťou EÚ, o čom hovorí aj protokol Maastrichtskej zmluvy. Európska únia je teda už od svojho založenia úniou menovou. Všetky krajiny, ktoré vstupujú do EÚ, preberajú na seba záväzok skôr či neskôr prijať na ich území euro ako platidlo. Krajiny, ktoré euro dosiaľ neprijali, majú zatiaľ udelenú derogáciu, teda dočasné odloženie tejto povinnosti. No záväzok prijať euro naďalej trvá. Prakticky môžeme hovoriť o tom, že krajiny, ktoré majú euro, ale aj tie ostatné v eurozóne "uviazli".

The future of democracy in developed countries will depend on their ability to deal with the problem of a disappearing middle class. In the wake of the financial crisis there has been a rise of new populist groups from the Tea Party in the United States to various anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties in Europe. What unites all of them is the belief that elites in their countries have betrayed them. And in many ways they are correct: the elites who set the intellectual and cultural climate in the developed world have been largely buffered from the effects of middle-class decline. There has been a vacuum in new approaches to the problem, approaches that don’t involve simply returning to the welfare state solutions of the past. The proper approach to the problem of middle-class decline is not necessarily the present German system or any other specific set of measures. The only real long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in pushing the vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills. The ability to help citizens flexibly adjust to the changing conditions of work requires state and private institutions that are similarly flexible. Yet one of the characteristics of modern developed democracies is that they have accumulated many rigidities over time that make institutional adaptation increasingly difficult. In fact, all political systems—past and present—are liable to decay. The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will

If you want to know the real reasons why certain politicians vote the way they do - follow the money. Arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg (a.k.a. JackOff Grease-Smug) stands to make billions via his investment firm - Somerset Capital Management - if the UK crashes unceremoniously out of the European Union without a secure future trade deal. Why ? Because proposed EU regulations will give enforcement agencies greater powers to curb the activities adopted by the sort of off-shore tax havens his company employs. Consequently the British electorate get swindled not once, but twice. Firstly because any sort of Brexit - whether hard, soft, or half-baked - will make every man, woman and child in the UK that much poorer than under the status quo currently enjoyed as a fully paid up member of the EU. Secondly because Rees-Mogg's company, if not brought to heel by appropriate EU wide legislation, will deprive Her Majesty's Treasury of millions in taxes, thus leading to more onerous taxes for the rest of us. It begs the question, who else in the obscure but influential European Research Group (ERG) that he chairs and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) that he subscribes to, have similar vested interests in a no-deal Brexit ? It is high time for infinitely greater parliamentary and public scrutiny into the UK Register of Members' Financial Interests in order to put an end to these nefarious dealings and appalling double standards in public life which only serve to further corrode public trust in an already fragile democracy.

Reflective nostalgics miss the past and dream about the past. Some of them study the past and even mourn the past, especially their own personal past. But they do not really want the past back. Perhaps this is because, deep down, they know that the old homestead is in ruins, or because it has been gentrified beyond recognition--or because they quietly recognize that they wouldn't much like it now anyway. Once upon a time life might have been sweeter or simpler, but it was also more dangerous, or more boring, or perhaps more unjust. Radically different from the reflective nostalgics are what Boym calls the restorative nostalgics, not all of whom recognize themselves as nostalgics at all. Restorative nostalgics don't just look at old photographs and piece together family stories. They are mythmakers and architects, builders of monuments and founders of nationalist political projects. They do not merely want to contemplate or learn from the past. They want, as Boym puts it, to "rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps." Many of them don't recognize their own fictions about the past for what they are: "They believe their project is about truth." They are not interested in a nuanced past, in a world in which great leaders were flawed men, in which famous military victories had lethal side effects. They don't acknowledge that the past might have had its drawbacks. They want the cartoon version of history, and more importantly, they want to live in it, right now. They don't want to act out roles from the past because it amuses them: they want to behave as think their ancestors did, without irony. It is not by accident that restorative nostalgia often goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories and the medium-sized lies. These needn't be as harsh or crazy as the Smolensk conspiracy theory or the Soros conspiracy theory; they can gently invoke scapegoats rather than a full-fledged alternative reality. At a minimum, they can offer an explanation: The nation is no longer great because someone has attacked us, undermined us, sapped our strength. Someone—the immigrants, the foreigners, the elites, or indeed the EU—has perverted the course of history and reduced the nation to a shadow of its former self. The essential identity that we once had has been taken away and replaced with something cheap and artificial. Eventually, those who seek power on the back of restorative nostalgia will begin to cultivate these conspiracy theories, or alternative histories, or alternative fibs, whether or not they have any basis in fact.

These policies would come back to haunt Europe in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse. Instead of the vigorous, countercyclical fiscal, monetary, and debt relief policies called for in the wake of a 1929-scale crash, Europe’s institutions promoted austerity reminiscent of the post–World War I era. The debt and deficit limits of Maastricht precluded strong fiscal stimulus, and the government of Angela Merkel resisted emergency waivers. Germany, an export champion, which in effect had an artificially cheap currency in the euro, profited from other nations’ misery. Germany could prosper by running a large export surplus (equal to almost 10 percent of its GDP), but not all nations can have surpluses. The European Central Bank, which reported to nineteen different national masters that used the euro, had neither the tools nor the mandate available to the US Federal Reserve. The ECB did cut interest rates, but it did not engage in the scale of credit creation pursued by the Fed. The Germans successfully resisted any Europeanizing of the sovereign debt of the EU’s weaker nations, pressing them instead to regain the confidence of capital markets by deflating. Sovereign debt financing by the ECB went mainly to repay private and state creditors, not to rekindle growth. Thus did “fortress Europe,” which advocates and detractors circa 1981 both saw as a kind of social democratic alternative to the liberal capitalism of the Anglo-Saxon nations, replicate the worst aspects of a global system captive to the demands of speculative private capital. The Maastricht constitution not only internalized those norms, but enforced them. The dream of managed capitalism on one continent became a laissez-faire nightmare—not laissez-faire in the sense of no rules, but rather rules structured to serve corporations and banks at the expense of workers and citizens. The fortress became a brig. There was plenty to criticize in the US response to the 2008 collapse—too small a stimulus, too much focus on deficit reduction, too little attention to labor policy, too feeble a financial restructuring—but by 2016, US unemployment had come back down to less than 5 percent. In Europe, it remained stuck at more than 10 percent, with all of the social dynamite produced by persistent joblessness.

Democracy has spread and endured because it has been nurtured and supported: by the norms of the liberal order, by global pressures and inducements to conform to those norms, by the membership requirements of liberal institutions like the EU and NATO, by the fact that the liberal order has been the wealthiest part of the world, and by the security provided by the world’s strongest power, which happens to be a democracy.

As James Heartfield, author of The European Union and the End of Politics, noted, to follow such events is to ‘Step through the looking glass into the EU-world where the rule of the people is dictatorial, but the rule of unelected experts is democracy.’5 The

What I saw all around me that looked so lovely was no longer built on a structure belonging to or owned by the people. As they would learn in 2020–22, the puppeteer’s hand could sweep the entire action away in a moment. The edifice of the beautiful drama of “European democracy” and human rights could come crashing down at any time. In fact, having for so long lived under EU governance left continental Europeans especially easy prey for the COVID tyrants.

At any rate, since the rise of mass democracy no political leader has seriously proposed to use the ‘ignorance’ of the voters – any more than their level of education or the lack of taxable property – as excuses to restrict the right to vote at national or local elections. From the viewpoint of democratic theory, therefore, the arguments of integrationist leaders and their academic supporters against ratification by referendum, are flawed. In refusing to meet the requirements of modern mass democracy, pro-integration leaders are conditioned by a political culture in many respects similar to that prevailing before the great reforms of the franchise in the nineteenth century, when policy was considered a virtual monopoly of cabinets, diplomats, and top bureaucrats. In this as in other respects the political culture of old-regime Europe still influences the supposedly post-modern system of governance of the EU (Majone 2005: 46–51).

Naturally, fissures and imbalances are developing constantly in the complex U.S.-Europe relationship. What has often gone unnoticed is that many of the more serious tensions have resulted from the fundamental contradiction between the United States’ concern to safeguard its national sovereignty and the EU’s advocacy of global governance. This has been the key point of friction in the U.S.-EU dispute over the International Criminal Court. Even the near break between the United States and many EU member states over Iraq during the George W. Bush years had much more to do with this fundamental difference in worldview than most observers realize.

A final, crucial point about the European Union: the EU’s global governance ideology grew partly as an answer to the devastation of European wars, but also in response to a spiritual void. In essence, it is post-Christian. The loss of a religious sense of purpose has left a hole in the European soul, which is being filled for many by a belief in the vision of supranational governance.

Indeed, the consensual nature of the EU itself has meant that EU-level institutions are far weaker than certain federal institutions in the United States. These weaknesses were made painfully evident in the European debt crisis of 2010–2013. The United States Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Congress responded quite forcefully to its financial crisis, with a massive expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, the $700 billion TARP, a second $700 billion stimulus package in 2009, and continuing asset purchases by the Fed under successive versions of quantitative easing. Under emergency circumstances, the executive branch was able to browbeat the Congress into supporting its initiatives. The European Union, by contrast, has taken a much more hesitant and piecemeal approach to the euro crisis. Lacking a monetary authority with the same powers as the Federal Reserve, and with fiscal policy remaining the preserve of national-level governments, European policy makers have had fewer tools than their American counterparts to deal with economic shocks.

The political scientist John Ikenberry lauds the liberal international order America has built.11 The global order is today durable and stable thanks to the many multilateral mechanisms America helped build and continues to support: institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, and NATO that have fostered security and development, or the EU and NAFTA, which have promoted prosperity and lured the likes of Mexico and Turkey to embrace capitalism and democracy.12 America has lost some of its own authority to international institutions it created and sustained. But that is a good thing. It means that the liberal international order has legs; it will last longer and continue to define the world order around values and practices that will foster peace, freedom, and prosperity. As Ikenberry notes, “The underlying foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive” without America’s guiding hand.13 In the Middle East, though, where simmering instability threatens global security and prosperity, America has done very little institution building of the kind Ikenberry writes about. There is no equivalent to ASEAN or APEC (the Asia Pacific Economic Council), or rival to the SCO, which is backed by China, Russia, and Iran. Perhaps America should help create those kinds of institutions, which could foster order but also make the region’s security and prosperity less dependent on the exercise of American authority. Only then should America think about pivoting somewhere else.

The implication of the “No Demos Thesis” is that, as Weiler [1995, 1] maintains, in the absence of “a demos, there cannot, by definition, be a democracy or democratization at the European level”. Eurobarometer 62 [2005, 16-20] reports on the way democracy works at European and national levels. It states that in 2005, 57% of the Europeans were satisfied with the way democracy worked in their own country [Eurobarometer 62, 2005, 16], while 48% were satisfied with the way democracy worked in EU level [2005, 19]. These data show that the implication derived by the No Demos Thesis – that without a European demos there cannot be a democracy at European level – does not appear to be valid.

This illustrates the difficulties confronting the EU’s defence capacity. A critical mass of member states must agree to an action before it can be undertaken; for substantial operations that require Nato facilities and hence American consent, the Americans may not agree to what Europeans want to do, which would give rise to tensions within Nato; and where a European critical mass and American agreement are both available, the intergovernmental arrangements may be too weak to devise and manage a successful operation. While Nato’s system is also intergovernmental, American hegemonic leadership has caused it to work. There is no hegemon among the member states; and while this makes it more feasible to develop the EU as a working democracy, it will at the same time make an intergovernmental system in the field of defence hard to operate.

As far as the Balkans were concerned, the result of the EU’s initial failure was a return to the drawing board and the production of a Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe. This overarching set of policies, designed to strengthen democracy, human rights, and economic reform, was later followed by Stability and Association Agreements between the EU and each of the West Balkan states. This is backed by the EU’s Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance, which provides the West Balkans with some €500 million per year. With the slow stabilization of the region, the EU has been able to offer membership to Croatia; full candidate status to Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia; and a provisional status to the others with Stability and Association Agreements, thus providing a strong incentive for local politicians to follow the example of the other Central and Eastern Europeans.

The three Baltic republics of the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, declined to join Russia in the successor Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and became EU members in 2004. Among the states that stayed with the CIS, six could claim to be European: Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia itself. They could therefore, if they came to fulfil the conditions of stable democracy and competitive market economy, apply for membership of the EU.

The EU’s relationship with Russia remains an ambiguous one. While the military rivalry of the Cold War has largely gone, the uncertain nature of Russian democracy under Vladimir Putin in the new century has created new points of tension. The more aggressive stance taken in its diplomacy—not to mention its actions, including the annexation of Crimea in 2014—suggest that despite the continuing reliance on Russian energy sources for many EU states, there is almost no scope for building more enhanced links beyond the current Partnership and Cooperation Agreement. Indeed, the growing concerns about Russia as a security threat have tended to push the EU back towards a stance not so far from the one held during the Cold War: relatively low in trust, and focused more on the risks than any potential benefits. Until Putin leaves office that is unlikely to change.

Even with their strengthened rights under the Lisbon Treaty, citizens still lack a meaningful connection with the EU; and it would be unwise to ignore the track record of representative democracy as a major element in citizenship. As long as citizens do not see the Parliament as being on an equal footing with the Council of Ministers, they are not likely to regard it as a sufficiently important channel of representation. The Council of Ministers, representing the states, is an essential part of the EU’s legislature too. But despite the progress in holding legislative sessions in public, it remains at the centre of an opaque system of quasi-diplomatic negotiation. Representation in a powerful house of the citizens may well be a condition of the latter’s support for the EU over the longer term.

However, the EU also agreed for the first time to expand on the provisions of the treaty and laid out what became known as ‘the Copenhagen criteria’: stable democracy, human rights and protection of minorities, the rule of law, a competitive market economy, and the ‘ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union’. While political union meant different things in different member states, the significance of ‘the obligations of membership’ was clear enough, including the huge task of applying not far short of 100,000 pages of legislation, mostly concerning the single market. To allay fears that widening would result in weakening, there was also the condition that the EU should have ‘the capacity to absorb new members while maintaining the momentum of integration’.

The road to the European Union is paved with good intentions. .

Those experiences helped to convince me that European civilization depends upon the maintenance of national borders, and that the EU, which is a conspiracy to dissolve those borders, has become a threat to European democracy.

They have a new playbook, and they’re a bigger threat than ever,” he continued. “With Petrov, everything is a zero-sum game—for Russia to rise, America must fall. Everything he’s done over the past decade has been an effort to sully and tarnish the reputation of Western democracies. Promoting Brexit, actively trying to break up the EU and NATO, turning Italy against France, stoking the fires of partisanship in the United States.

Milos Zeman is the President of the Czech Republic. He is pro-Russian, is friends with Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage, endorsed Donald Trump for President, and has ties to Hungary’s Jobbik movement. Zeman has justified the civil war in Ukraine and has denied that Russia has a military presence there. He stated, “I take seriously the statement of foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, that there are no Russian troops [in Ukraine].” Zeman had been consistently verbal in his support for the lifting of Western sanctions on Russia and was against EU sanctions on Russia. He was re-elected President in January 2018 with 51.4% of the vote. He won the majority of the rural vote by exhorting a populist anti-immigrant slogan: “Stop Migrants and [opponent] Drahos. This is our land! Vote Zeman!” Zeman’s chief economic advisor is Martin Nejedlÿ, a former executive of the Russian oil company, Lukoil Aviation Czech. Lukoil was once the second largest oil company in Russia following Gazprom. Martin Nejedlÿ of Prague was also owner of Fincentrum, a financial advisory firm with “more than 2,500 financial advisors” on its website with offices in Prague and Bratislava. The firm has a history of alliances with the Kremlin. The Prime Minister of the Republic’s coalition government is 63-year-old Andrej Babiš. He is a media and agribusiness mogul and the second-richest man in the Czech Republic. ANO is the Action of Dissatisfied Citizens Party that was founded by Babiš that holds a center-right populist platform like many European and American conservative right-

Although Spanish politics is among the most corrupt in Europe, political corruption is in the basic DNA of almost any political system, the USA and EU included, and one of the factors that has had the biggest part to play in the crisis of legitimacy. If

Moscow’s orbit and make it a Western bulwark on Russia’s doorstep. The key ingredients of this boneheaded policy were NATO and EU expansion, coupled with democracy promotion, which effectively means installing pro-Western leaders in countries like Ukraine—and maybe even Russia itself. Not surprisingly, Russia has fiercely resisted the West’s efforts to win over Ukraine, which is now engulfed in a civil war.