How Are Sausages Actually Made?

"The result is almost impossible to read or understand. And that is entirely intentional. Many things happened at the summit. But perhaps the most important was that the EU finally abandoned the idea that it wants ordinary Europeans to understand what it is doing" - Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times on the new "Reform Treaty" of the EU. Rachman claims that the original Constitutional Treaty was an attempt to clarify what the EU really is, but that people of the EU does not actually want to know it in the end. At least not in France and the Netherlands. In Finland we will never know since our wise parliament made the desicion for us(the only thing we know is that according to the Eurobarometer we are among the most eurosceptical countries in the EU).
Well, Otto Von Bismarck once said that normal people should not know how sausages and politics are actually made because then they would loose their appetite...

I have been following the summit lazily from a distance, laying on a beach in Barcelona concentrating mainly on my sangria. The result seems to be what most of the "big leaders" wanted. Britain succeeded in eliminating the charter of fundamental rights and France removed the commitment to "undistorted competition" and Germany and Merkel were happy with having at least something. The problem is, as I was thinking while sipping my sangria, that this treaty will not help solving the fundamental problem of the EU which is to make it transparent and understandable to the citizens. The citizens should have a stronger say in the democratic processes of the EU. The idea about a European wide referendum on a revised constitutional treaty in 2009 that has been put forward in some debates would in my opinion have been a more honest way of dealing with this treaty. It would have forced a debate among the citizens on the EU in every member state.The argument presented by some, like the Finnish MEP Alex Stubb, that the EU would have collapsed without a treaty right now, is not true. If the EU eventually will collapse it is because it does not have the support of people living in it. And that support can only be built by involving the citizens in an actual debate on our European Union.