The EU is an Antidote to Democratic governments, Argues President Barroso

The President of the European Commission, José Manuel Durrão Barroso, has offered one of the few utterly honest arguments for European integration. The reason we need the EU, he suggests, is precisely because it’s not democratic. Left to themselves, elected governments might do all sorts of things simply to humour their voters:

Governments are not always right. If governments were always right we would not have the situation that we have today. Decisions taken by the most democratic institutions in the world are very often wrong.

This was, in large measure, the original rationale for European unification. The founding fathers had come through the Second World War with – perhaps understandably – a jaded view of democracy. They fretted that, left to themselves, electorates might fall for demagogues. So they deliberately designed a system in which supreme power was wielded by appointed Commissioners who didn’t need to worry about public opinion.'

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