I am from France so I feel a bit concerned about that and I am not sure of what to think. But to me EU must be just an economic union, or must become a strong democratic federation. Because while staying in the middle, it is under administrated and undemocratic. Lobbies seems to rule Brussels.
For the Euro, I think each country could be able to devalue his own currency to keep its economy competitive.

First, to have an economic union you need to have a single currency, and you need a single central bank to have control of the valuation of the currency if you want to keep the economy competetive.

This goes way beyond the current economic unity, it includes control over tax policy (which Ireland strongly opposes) and once you pass control of taxation to a central european finance department you remove one of the central sovereignties from the member states - ie the ability to raise monies from their state to pay for the policies they wish to implement.

That is my understanding of a true economic union.

A free trade area is something different and would have seperate currencie, risk associated with trade because markets can suddenly become more expensive if a government decides to devalue it's currency.

This limits bussinesses in the amount of integration they can have. (only bigger bussinesses will be able to afford to take those risks and small or medium bussiness will have more difficulty selling outside of their home market)

Now whether the EU and Euro currency is a good thing or not as it presently stands is a very difficult question. I can't give a uantitive answer, I can't simulate all the possible occurances and tell you what is best, I can't weigh the gans for one populance and compare them to losdses of another...

However qualitively I can say I would prefer more integration, more cross border trade, more cross-polination of ideas, and a more democratic Union with directly elected pan-european parties (so you wouldn't vote for a french representative who sits within the 'European Conservatives and Reformists' party - all europeans would vote for Conservative and Reformist party members and they would be allocated seats based on the total votes the got across the territory...

I don't know where a commission or council fits into this system, but i think that in some sense democracy is more successful on a smaller scale, which is what we have no (as compared to the US federal system, where the states have less power/control individually than EU members states)

I think EU is nice. I don't know much bout EU. But I know that the total average GDP for EU is pretty high. Like the US, EU affects many nations with its strong finance economy.
From what I heard, in the EU, they have been coordinating moves in their economy to increase growth. Also they have been getting support from the IMF, and have been following a plan created by Gordon Brown to giving decision-making authorities over banks.
Also there is a central bank for Europe called ECB, European Central Bank. The ECB has been an important role during the crisis. It has been a source of liquidity during the crisis, and lent the governments of Europe that have high concentration of debt lots of money to prevent further destabilization.
The EU has such organizations to moderate its economy as a whole which I think is a good thing.

Also, as a united nation, EU has strong influence on international affairs.

As a united nation the EU could have a strong influence on international affairs. The EU is not a united nation, it is a supra-national body (like the UN) Sovereignty remains with the member states, though some of it is now pooled - the ability of a state to voluntarily withdraw from the EU is now enshrined in the Treaties governing the European Union (as introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon) - So these sovereign nations can take back that which is currently pooled.

yea anyways..
EU is a pretty cool group.

The EU does not have a strong influence on world affairs, and its influence will only decrease. The center of world power is shifting fast to Asia, Europe is getting older and older, ethnic Europeans are barely reproducing at replacement any more, Germany is the only member with an actual economy, apart from France and maybe Britain no European country can project force effectively outside of its immediate neighborhood, un-assimilated immigrants are undermining civil culture in most European states, the list goes on.

While it might seem nice to think that the future is a relevant, social democratic, united Europe, the exact opposite might be true. It's aging and weak economies won't be able to support the welfare states which have been built up over the last 70 years.

It's unfortunate, but a likely future of Europe is that it is a less wealthy, more Muslim, and less important collection of states tied together in more or less the same way they are now sitting on an unremarkable set of peninsulas on the far western edge of Eurasia. Maybe I exaggerate, but not too much.

I would like to rephrase.
EU has strong influence in the economy today.

The EU is so full of corruption, maladministration, incompetence and fraud that their accounts haven't been signed off by the auditors since 1995! The chief accountant (Marta Andreasen) tried to go public about this a few years ago. Rather than sorting it out and putting an end to the gravy train, they fired her!

Marta Andreasen is now an MEP for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). They could shut her up when she worked for them, but they can't shut her up now! Here she is in action in the European Parliament a few days ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYxNQsu9yEg).

UKIP are a party dedicated to the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union. They get my vote every time.

Would you mind if I asked what sorts of corruption, maladministration, incompetence and fraud?

You're already on the Internet. Go look for yourself.

We'll I have a good reason why I'm not doing that.

is it laziness?

Invictus+1

@Furball1: I've done a quick google for you.
"The European ombudsman has said the commission is guilty of maladministration..."
"The European Union's watchdog has found the European Commission guilty of "maladministration" in its ..."
"EU Incompetence Threatens Air Safety"
"...the whistleblower who helped expose fraud at Eurostat, the EU data office, has been denied redress for ..."
"European Commission cleaning contracts were faked in a four-year fraud potentially worth millions of euros."

@Furball2:What good reasons?

@orathaic
bingo

So the EU is imperfect in many ways.
So the EU needs reforms as a governing body.

< Is European Union a good thing?
Potentially, yes. The actual European Union is rather not a good thing.

<Is Euro currency a good thing?
For companies and finance yes. Not for citizens.

<(Please say from which country you are from, that may be interesting)
I'm from Italy, but I live and work outside of EU (Switzerland)

@Furball:What good reasons do you have for not looking on t'internet for corruption, maladministration, incompetence and fraud in the EU?

I live in the UK, and I do not support the EU. I see our economy and the cuts going on here, then look at us giving more money to Europe. While funding other European countries and foreign aid is very admirable, now is not really the right time, and I think countries need to put themselves first. This money that goes to Europe could easily cover some of the public spending cuts here, so we lose our money to Belgians who know little about us... and, yes we get some back, but not that much.

As for the euro, not living in a eurozone country I can't really say that much. From what I can see it doesn't seem like a brilliant plan on not being able to devalue your currency to avoid some economic problems though. First Greece, now the Republic of Ireland. Portugal, Spain and Italy are a bit shaky.

Coincidence that all of them are eurozone countries?

"Coincidence that all of them are eurozone countries?" - Well no, but only in that you didn't list all the countries in economic trouble that *aren't* in the Eurozone.

The German economy is still going strong, although the news over here suggests they're also getting rather annoyed about the idea of bailing out someone elses mess.

I would be very happy to leave the EU though. We might not be the biggest international power, but we're still at least on par with Switzerland. The EU made trade agreements with them, so I don't see why they wouldn't with us. That said, I'm almost certain we'll never leave it. Would be interesting to see just how much Europe wants us if we tried to though...

I'm a USAmerican living in Spain. Joining the Euro was a boon for Spain in terms of the welfare money they received especially for infrastructure. that dried up, of course, and we're left with the pain: massive inflation as prices from bread to real-estate, as prices have gone to the level of Germany or France while the salaries have stayed low. When I came, we still had the peseta and I thought I was in paradise, I'd never gotten so drunk so cheaply and with good quality! Maybe it's a good thing that didn't last... Anyway, I'll echo Chamois's concerns: there's no accountability and it's undemocratic. It shouldn't stay in it's present form, but should regress to a simple free-trade zone or progress to direct elections and accountability.

As for the Brits patting themselves on the back for maintaining control of their currency and being able to devalue, I have to laugh. The biggest bailouts of this crisis were with English Banks. For now the pound has been immune, mostly, I think, because London is such an important financial center and they get very kind treatment from the ratings agencies. They haven't come under attack yet from the markets unlike those media darlings, the PIGS. We'll see how they hold up when Asia starts devaluing it's currencies too. Of all the banks in Europe, Spanish banks have weathered the storm best, yet Germany didn't stop pointing the finger at Spain to draw attention from the poor condition of their own banking system until Spain insisted the stress test results be revealed.

It's fine to talk about corruption, maladministration, incompetence and fraud in Europe, but it's endemic to Western Civilization, as we have already entered into an accelerated decline into decadence and terminal irrelevance. Indeed, these be interesting times. My sympathies are leaning to the revolutionaries and anarchists who seek to bring on the fall even faster, the sooner to be refounded from it's ashes.

The EU was fine when it was he EEC - a common market with common standards. The idea of being able to buy a product made anywhere within the community and know it was made to the same standards and was what it said it was is laudable.

Unfortunately, lobbying, local politics, pork-barrel funding and media misrepresentation have soured the system, along with the corruption and pocket-lining endemic in any system of government.

I'm in favour of the idea, but not the execution I guess.

And as for the Euro, I'm glad we in the UK aren't in it (the conditions weren't right) but only a true idiot would want the currency of (arguably) our major trading partner to fail.

And to those who want out, I would like to point out that the country that is most compliant to EU regulations about goods is ....... Switzerland, who have zero say in the shaping of those rules. Better in and having a say (from a business prspective)

eu is the best thing that ever happened

alamothe -1

As somebody once said: "I have no problem with all of Europe having a single currency. And the sooner they're all using the good old British pound the better!

Wait, undemocratic?

We elected our governments to rule our countries, and they appointed EU commissioners to direct the EU (allowing them create directives which our governments are then legally required to write into their own laws)

The sovereign power is still held by the democratically elected representatives of each country. The Commission is very powerful, sure, but it's just another layer in the democracy between the people and the power, and really big countries usually have state level and also top level layers. I don't have a problem with not directly electing the EU commission or president.

I didn't directly elect the Taoisheach of Ireland either, some goons in Laois-Offaly elected him TD and his political party elected him leader of the party, while his partiy's coalition with the Green party made him the leader of the Government....

see already lots of layers of complication within a 'democracy', er, republic... Nobody is complaining about the lack of democracy in Ireland, are they?

@Orathaic: Sheesh, seriously? If they aren't, maybe they should be complaining. I hear people from the US complain all the time about how undemocratic the system is, particularly with our electoral college. Also, it's a two party system that limits the scope of ideologies. And corporations are allowed to make unlimited contributions (and money raised, it turns out, is a good indicator of success in an election in the US). And that's without mentioning pregnant chads and supreme court interventions. Spain's even worse because they just vote for a party and the party is allotted representatives according to the percentage of votes they received, but they get more representation if the votes are highly concentrated in a particular region and generally, being a representative of a particular party obliges you to vote with the party line. So I can't speak to Ireland, but I'm not too happy about what generally passes for Democracy. And no, the EU does not meet my criteria for what I consider sufficiently democratic.

"Spain's even worse because they just vote for a party and the party is allotted representatives according to the percentage of votes they received"

I'd love that system. In Ireland we do have a party whip, so you have to vote on party lines when called to, but you also have local politicians elected by 20-30,000 people. Each of them pandering to their local area, so instead of having a party/government which is looking out for the country as a whole, you have a group of individuals looking out for their own local area... i'd much prefer if the national government looked after the nation. (we have local government to look after local issues but it is basically powerless) - thus should be elected by the entire nation voting together for whatever party list they want to give their votes to...

"And no, the EU does not meet my criteria for what I consider sufficiently democratic." - well at least the EU doesn't pretend to be a democracy, it's a private club which has 27 democratic states as it's members, I doesn't do a good job of being a democracy because it is not one. (and now i think i've taken a completely different point, but again i'm just saying it is what it is...)

@Orathaic: that was one of the funnier turns of conversation I've seen recently. So, I guess we agree then.

"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever." Freud on the Irish