[wideawake]

I think your viewpoint is valid.

However, there is a fundamental disconnect in the European Constitution.

You have the European Parliament, analogous to our House and which is elected according to population.

Then you have the European Council which is analogous to our Senate.

However, unlike our Senate, the Council's 27 ministers (one for each country) have unequal, weighted votes.

If I were Poland I would demand that - as in the US Senate - each state receive one equal vote in the Council.

That would be far more useful than any sort of reparations.

[CarrotAndStick]

Isn’t the European Parliament impotent in front of the respective national governments of the constituent EU states?

One-equal-vote-per-state-regardless-of-its-size-or-population-policy that you suggested might make a greater mess than the current situation has, with tiny city-states having as much power and influence as the big ones.

Anyway, Europe has always been its own worst enemy, so I don’t know if history is going to come back full circle now. Isn’t it around when this time, last century, WW-I was in the plans?

:^)

[CarrotAndStick]

So basically every EU state has its own national and regional governments to be “taken care” by, then the added headache of the European Parliament, and as icing, the European Council?

That’s a lot of “government” for countries the size of provinces.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

The EU parliament isn't all that analogous to the House of Representatives, and the EU Commission definitely isn't all that analogous to the Senate (in its present, directly voted form), because the EU is not yet a single country, and its member states still wield powers which American states do not.

The EU parliament has relatively little power, though the constitution--and potentially this new treaty--could change that. The EU Commission makes most of the EU's rules, and the Commissioners are selected by the member states' national governments.