... and the Commission could do with being appointed by the directly elected, supranational Parliament rather than the indirectly elected and intergovernmental Council.

But as long as the power to propose treaties is vested in the Council, and as long as the national electorates continue to send small-minded, parochial conservatives like PiS and UMP to the Council, well...

On plebiscites, however, he's off his rocker.

The problem with plebiscites, and the reason the eurocrats are so deathly afraid of them, is that most decisions require unanimity among the member states. The EU is still at this point in time an intergovernmental construct rather than a true federation.

Unanimity requirements are great when it comes to enforcing consensus-based decisionmaking (which historically was one of the major points of the Union), but it also means that opponents to a proposal only have to defeat it in one (1) country in order to defeat it in every country. And it doesn't matter whether this country is Malta, Luxembourg or Germany.

If the referendum rules were changed so passing a referendum required simply a qualified double majority rather than the current mess, then opposition to referenda could be called anti-democratic (given a certain understanding of democracy, which is not universally accepted but to which I happen to subscribe).

As an aside, what we have now is not actually real unanimity - it's a form of first-past-the-post unanimity, which gives you the worst of both worlds: All the sluggishness of unanimity requirements and all the gerrymandering and other pseudodemocratic antics of FPTP systems.