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France has been doing this in parts of its government functions for years, building expertise and learning what works. What do you imagine the EU institutions would bring to the table?
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Good on France for doing that work.

More countries and/or EU involvement could bring economies of scale: apart from translation, a lot of work on fixing bugs and adding features to the relevant open source projects can be done once and benefit all. So either get the same results faster, more cheaply per country, or both. Sure, that adds some bureaucracy and coordination cost too, but should be worth it overall.

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It sounds actually nutts that governments are allowed to run unknown and uncheckable binaries as their(our?) infrastructure.
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You forgot the part where the countries voluntarily join the organisation. By the way, the commission is subject to a vote of confidence by the parliament, which is directly elected. I'm pretty sure you don't get to directly vote for your cabinet members either, wherever you are.
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> You forgot the part where the countries voluntarily join the organisation.

It might be worth examining the word “countries” there.

Both France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed EU Constitution by referendum in 2005. It was then regurgitated as the Lisbon Treaty (with only superficial changes) in 2007, which was ratified with no public vote.

The Irish people initially rejected both the EU-empowering treaties of Nice and Lisbon, and a followup vote was considered necessary. You get two bites of the democratic cherry if you have enough power.

A majority of the British people voted to leave in 2016, and in the three years that followed everything possible was done to reverse the decision.

You might be spotting here a difference in desires and power between the governors and the governed.

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> and in the three years that followed everything possible was done to reverse the decision

News to me (as a Brit). Maybe my memory is hazy. Got any detail?

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