jeba wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2017 5:54 am
I don´t know that guy but he was appointed by a PM with democratic legitimation. If that was a stupid decision it wasn´t the first stupid decision perfectly in line with democratic principles. There are many examples for that ranging from building bridges where there are no streets to connect to electing Hitler, just to name 2 examples from my home country. Democracy doesn´t protect from stupidity.
I think you have just put your finger on not only the immediate problems, but why the UK were never a particularly comfortable member of the EU anyway.
If you look at the way the EU is structured, it is not the way it is because it has evolved that way, it is actually undemocratic by design.
If you look at mainland Europe after the war, you see a continent devastated and in economic chaos, a situation it would be difficult not to lay at the door of the Nationalist aspirations of Hitler, Mussolini and, to a certain extent at least, Petain. So how do you defuse that nationalist potential and make sure it never happens again? Well you break down the main element of nationalism, the independent nation state, so that any conflict in Europe can no longer be along national lines, but would need to be effectively an ideologically based civil war which thanks to brilliantly good and brilliantly bad contributions made by your fellow countrymen [the German tradition of theological criticism and the idealism of Hegel and Marx] the two main potential vectors for that war, dogmatic religion and communism had effectively been defanged. In addition the very reason that the situation had risen in the first place seemed to be that there was always the danger that charismatic ideologues would use the democratic process to whip up the mob and again bring chaos to Europe.
So the answer was clear, define a political process which made national boundaries an irrelevance, and took the decision making process out of the hands of the easily swayed mob, and into the hands of a trained political class, not dependent on popular support, but guided by their own expertise and conscience. The legislative tradition of Civil Justice [where massive tomes of regulation dispense justice from above] also gave them an ideal vector for doing that.
The situation in the UK couldn't have been more different, we had just won a war [although it was somewhat a pyrrhic victory] , where our strength [so it appeared to us, anyway] in fact our main uniting factor was that very same nationalism, we were fighting a war, so we were told, for democracy and our major ally held democratic ideals in even higher regard. This was also in the tradition of common law, where legal principles naturally emerge from the exercise of the legal process, rather than simply authorised by our betters.
So we end up with a Europe culturally divided, where continental Europe believes the western worlds current woe's arose from aggressive nationalism fuelling a drive for the imperfect system of democracy to generate dangerous ideologues, and therefore peace could only be guaranteed by a benevolent dictatorship of the elite, and the UK and the US, who saw dictatorship, however benevolent it claims to be as the problem [with the obvious exception of the emerging political and chattering classes, who of course believe dictatorship is not a bad idea, as long as they are the dictators, of course
] and that the remedy for this, and the only guarantee of peace and prosperity is a fierce defence of the democratic process and personal freedom. Traditional liberalism if you will, in the John Stuart Mill sense, at least.
Hence the clash in the UK, between the traditionalist adherence to democracy, common law, personal liberty, traditional liberalism and natural communities formed by cultural accretion, and the soi-disant elites would be political dictatorship of the 'culturally better equipped' where democracy is 'popularism' if it questions their judgement, positive cultural accretion is bigotry, and dictatorship is 'acting in the peoples best interest' as they are clearly too stupid to be able to work it out for themselves, being so 'low information' as they are.
Philosophically and practically, I know which side I'm on, but then again maybe I'm just a victim of my cultural programming and 'low information' status
