From the perspective of local communities, the EU is an amplifier of all that is bad with the nation-state: it accelerates the concentration of authority to the political centre, depriving communities of their capacity to govern their commons. The EU is a union of power elites from the nation-states who band together against local communities throughout those countries. technocrats operating the state apparatus; conniving entrepreneurs who stay close to the locus of power in order to hinder the free market; their facilitators, such as political parties, esteemed universities, trade unions controlled by political parties, and the like.