You can also vote out your representative in the EU Council (and the council of ministers) because the UK member of the council also has to be a UK MP.
So the power in the EU rests with directly elected politicians and with the Commission, which is appointed/approved/dismissed by directly elected politicians. The Commission alone cannot pass laws.
In some countries, neither the prime minister nor cabinet ministers have to be elected politicians (unlike in the UK). This additional level of indirection obviously extends to the members of the EU council from these countries, but that is a function of national constitutions.
Of course you can vote out your MP, however there is a calculus at play: your MP might be great at the local issues, but then they may support a European rep that is not as good. It would be much better if the EU were directly accountable to the people upon whom they inflict their decrees.
But I actually think that none of these technicalities matter that much. What's missing in the EU democratic process is an EU wide platform for debate, a platform for campaigning on EU wide issues.
This is made more difficult by the fact that we speak so many different languages and that English proficiency is very unevenly distributed among the economic classes (and among countries).
I think what could spark EU wide political debates and allow campaigners to create real political pressure on an EU level would be a directly elected EU president. A face that you can properly hate and blame and really really want to kick out of office :)
I am very much in favour of the United States of Europe, modelled after the USA.
More theater, and a punchbag to sacrifice, like Bush was for Cheney. No thanks!
This is the fundamental problem with representative 'democracy' in general (at least with regard to legislatures); representatives aren't and inherently can't be held accountable for more than one thing per election cycle.
You can say "that's democracy", but it's so diluted it's almost homeopathic.
No. He needs a majority in both the Council _and_ the directly elected EU parliament. Nothing homeopathic about that.
Like in many democratic countries, the head of the EU executive body is not directly elected by the people.
In order for the government to achieve something at the national level, it would have to have to convince its MPs to publicly vote in support of it and risk losing their seats over it at the next election. The power in the EU rests with people appointed by people appointed by the people we vote for, and that completely diffuses all responsibility. (The elected European Parliament are pretty toothless compared to the unelected appointees.)