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Topic History of: Angela Merkel - most impressive
Max. showing the last 5 posts - (Last post first)
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Pru |
I would've thought that it was fairly obvious by now, given the experience of the past couple of centuries, that proper representation requires smaller, not bigger, units. For one thing, the bigger a political community the more complicated and difficult it is to get anything done (and, as Weber showed, the more intrusive, obstructive and problematic bureaucracy becomes), and, for another, the essence of a representative democracy is informed and judicious public monitoring of government. Now from the establishment of the US onwards, what has been shown is that it's hard enough to come close to achieving the latter even in a local sense (let alone improving it through funding education and encouraging a responsible media), and it's not adequately accomplished even in England, let alone the UK as a whole. In this context only a political naif would advocate going bigger rather than smaller in the belief that it would be either more efficient and/or 'better'. That's nothing to do with any of the constituent organisations and countries, it's to do with the practicalities of government and representation. |
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Pru |
Locked Out wrote:
The former could scarcely be worse than the latter.
And with that phrase history has a long list of sobering lessons. As soon as that phrase is heard, my advice is to think considerably harder. |
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DJones |
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Locked Out |
The vagueness you refer to isn't confined, however, to the wider Union. Confusion appears to reign in the purely domestic arrangements of the UK. We're fond of referring to our "sovereignty" and of tying it into what we are pleased to call our "constitution", claiming that both are challenged by our European Union commitments. Our sovereignty is rarely {ever?} used as a heavy-handed excuse when it comes to our dealings with the U.S. and our constitution exists purely as a concept of alleged values which can be deployed whenever convenient while remaining elusive whenever it comes to more sticky questions. In all honesty I'd be quite happy to ditch any kind of sovereignty which can be used as a stick to beat our neighbours with for practices we find unpalatable while also being used as a smokescreen to fog the record of hugely incompetent government we've been putting up with here for decades. Closer union? Federalism? Call it whatever suits you. I'd be just as happy with government from Strasbourg as from Westminster. The former could scarcely be worse than the latter. And the consensus political model of many of our European partners is one I find infinitely preferable to the playground politics of the British one. Bring it on. We have one of the oldest democracies in the world. It really is about time it began behaving like an adult. |
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Pru |
One problem is the constitutional vagueness that has never been solved (because no one wants to do it). You cannot retain political sovereignty in the UK whilst accepting the higher authority of Europe, but that's what we try to claim, and the only way the UK solves it is to pretend that anything that is enforced via Europe's powers was actually already wanted by the UK powers. That's a ludicrous mess that needs ending once and for all.
The concept of federalism is also hopelessly confused in the European model. The official line has always been that European nation states are not going to be 'completely' unified politically but merely move 'increasingly closer together' - which is a bit like saying I'm not going to shut the door, I'm merely going to move it increasingly close to the door frame. There's an economic and political logic to these things that just isn't being acknowledged. Yet again, the people advocating these things lack the faith in their own models to say what they really mean.
Until the European political ideal is genuinely believed in by those who advocate it it'll never be realised. |
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