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Post-democratic decision making in the EU

From Why Vote Leave, by Dan Hannan, loc 739:

Lobbyists love the EU, intuiting from the moment they arrive that it was designed by and for people like them. There are some 25,000 lobbyists in Brussels, some in-house, some working for several clients, some representing pressure groups or regions, most representing big business. Figure Five shows the industries that have invested most heavily in purchasing face-time, but it is only fair to record that Big Oil and Big Pharma have their equivalents on the other side: Greenpeace and the WWF spent a million euros each during the same six-month period, and Oxfam managed 300,000 euros (a pretty good investment when we consider the vast millions it gets from Brussels in grants). What all these lobbies have in common, whether industrial or environmental, is a preference for corporatism and back-room deals. The EU has a special name for the procedure by which it makes law: ‘comitology’. Committees and technical experts meet and make trade-offs out of the public eye. Such a system is an invitation to lobbyists and pressure groups to reach arrangements behind closed doors that might not look very pretty if the details were known.

And from loc 1290:

Since then, the European project has returned to what is known as the Monnet Method. The EU’s canny founder, Jean Monnet, was the ultimate networker. He understood that politicians came and went but bureaucracies were permanent. The key to success, therefore, was to stack the incentives in such a way as to encourage officials to pursue an integrationist agenda. Some political scientists call this process ‘functionalism’ –although, as so often, that word has many different academic meanings.

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