EU is obsolete and useless.

Superficially, the EU seems to have made great progress since the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Almost every aspect of policy is now determined by bureaucrats in Brussels in combination with the European Council and the European Parliament. The EU even has its own foreign service and is struggling to create its own intelligence and federal police services. No wonder it impresses Arabs and Africans, whose own struggles for unity have, relatively speaking, gone nowhere. The trouble, however, is that the EU as a whole is in absolute demographic decline and relative economic and technological decline, and its major policies — whether the common fisheries and agriculture policies or the euro and monetary union — have failed. In terms of foreign and security policies, it is an international joke. It spends next to nothing on defense, and even its main contributors in this area, Britain and France, have seen their armed forces so severely cut recently that in the Libyan war, where Europe "took the lead," they were entirely dependent on U.S. logistics and supplies. If the EU boasts of its reliance on "soft power," that is because it has no choice. Its head of foreign affairs, the British baroness Catherine Ashton, has been called "the world’s highest-paid female politician," yet she remains anonymous and has no influence on world events whatsoever. Her position sums up everything that is wrong with the EU — expensive but ineffective. The fundamental problem with the EU, however, is that the people of Europe have no faith in it and do not identify with it. A 2010 Eurobarometer poll found that only 49 percent of EU citizens think their country’s EU membership is a "good thing," while only 42 percent trust EU institutions. Meanwhile, those institutions, like the EU’s whole ethos, are positively anti-democratic. Its key decision-making bodies — the European Council, Court of Justice, and European Commission — are, for all practical purposes, unelected, unaccountable, and removed from the people (commissioners are usually washed-up has-beens whose political careers in their home states have ended in failure). Their decisions are irreversible in national parliaments, and the European Parliament, while vested with powers of co-decision-making with the European Council, is also remote. The Parliament is a glorified debating society — not a government with an official opposition — and its parties cannot promise any fundamental policy changes in their election manifestos; indeed, its election outcomes rarely have an impact on the course of EU politics. Its members are unknown and despised as opportunists who merely seek inflated salaries, perks, expenses, and pensions. Voter turnout in the EU’s parliamentary elections is low and falling, reflecting the widely held belief among EU citizens that the EU doesn’t protect or represent their interests. One of the most egregious examples of the lack of democracy in the EU is the practice of making small states that vote "no" in EU referenda vote again. Denmark had to vote twice on the Maastricht Treaty, while Ireland was forced to go two rounds on the Nice Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty. Big states are not immune from this kind of bullying treatment, either. When voters in France and the Netherlands rejected an EU constitution in 2005, European leaders tweaked about 4 percent of the original wording, renamed the document the Lisbon Treaty, and then rammed it through the French and Dutch parliaments despite the popular votes. When then Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou suggested a referendum on the Greek bailout last year, he was maneuvered out of office within days. The EU does not believe in the tolerant British saying, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." Instead, its policy is, "When in Rome, do as the Germans do." Altogether, the outlook in Brussels and Berlin is like that of Napoleon in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: "He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?" The official German attitude is summed up by the regular fury from German politicians and the German media whenever an EU country calls for a referendum on initiatives from Brussels. When Ireland announced in February that it would hold a referendum on the EU’s new fiscal treaty, Der Spiegel marveled, "The Irish Again!" while Süddeutsche Zeitung declared that if the Irish fail to realize that the fiscal pact "is in their national interest," Germany "will not be able to help them." Perhaps nothing captures Germany’s elitist attitude better than an essay last summer in Der Spiegel by German political scientist Herfried Münkler titled, "Democratization Can’t Save Europe: The Need for a Centralization of Power." Münkler argues that elections and referenda cannot be trusted in Europe because "the European population has never been and still is not a European people." EU elites, he adds, "need to improve — and power has to be taken away from the periphery." Can you imagine a leading U.S. magazine printing such stuff about American elites and voters in certain states? But this is exactly what is happening in Europe today. Power is being taken away from the periphery by centralizing elites. But these elites are failing. The EU’s key policy — monetary union — has been a disaster. The simple fact is that you cannot have a successful monetary union without a political and fiscal union, with monetary transfers between rich and poor areas legitimized by democratic institutions. (In a currency union of disparate economies where changes of interest and exchange rates are forbidden to members, weaker economies have no means of competing with stronger ones if there is no legal arrangement for democratic agreement among members that stronger economies will bail out weaker ones when they get into debt.)