They were always arrogant, anti-democratic swine

David Marquand has, in this article from last June really put his finger on the way in which Europe works. Of course he thinks that it is a good idea,

"the statesmen who launched the European project 50 years ago were taking immense political risks, and that if they had submitted their project to a referendum, it might well have been defeated. In France, the Communists and Gaullists were hostile; in Germany, the Social Democrats were at most ambivalent. The founding fathers - Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak, Alcide de Gasperi and Jean Monnet - did not follow existing public opinion. They dared to create a new one".