As a huge pro-European, I admired the way the Germans, virtually single handed, saved Greece from disaster. Merkel strikes me as an excellent politician, with all the best characteristics of her race. Despite the fact that my father was given an OBE for fighting in the Second World War, and was a prisoner of the Germans, I've always admired and liked them. Angela came across very well indeed in her speech in Parliament. Far better than our own politicians.

I work for a European based business (French) and deal with them all of the time..........including other nations.

I can honestly say that culture and ingrained attitudes (and I include the UK people and myself) are the biggest barrier to free and easy and correct communications.

National stereotypes DO apply......its a massive mixed up world of national interest first (kind of understandable, revert to what you know and who pays you), then a big degree of national stereotype 'etiquette' where hierachichal protocols are massively respected in France, less so elsewhere, and for some reason a really pinickity attitude towards covering your arse from certain mediteranean areas....if the UK (me) have any stereotypes, I believe we are seen as gungho in terms of project work, we don't triplicate paperwork and we don't ask every concievable question imagined but still complete a project on time........not having a mass of paperwork and not being able to answer questions that are asked, but that are also not relevant drives the French mad.........................

So scale that up into a European Parliament? and tell me its working

The quality of debate about Europe is epitomised in the phrase 'eurosceptic,' which is an absurd phrase. Some people love Europe as a continent, love the constituent nations, love the cultures that each nation has, but have concerns about, say political federalism, or unified economic policy, or uniform legal authority, etc etc. So some may be debating for one thing but not another. And to group everyone together under the banner 'eurosceptic' is a guarantee that very few people actually understand each other's terms of debate. Anyone would think that such confusion suits an agenda...

Anyway, Angular Merkel - she's always looked more like Spherical Merkel to me.

My only reservation about One Europe - run and controlled by far fewer but the very best executives (well paid), making the most of each country's assets and strengths is... we MUST use the very best. With the whole of Europe to choose from we should get great economists, judges, administrators.

The danger is - if we settle for second best, it will be as badly run as most countries are the moment.

JK2006 wrote:
My only reservation about One Europe - run and controlled by far fewer but the very best executives (well paid), making the most of each country's assets and strengths is... we MUST use the very best. With the whole of Europe to choose from we should get great economists, judges, administrators.

The danger is - if we settle for second best, it will be as badly run as most countries are the moment.

You sum up my own viewpoint; that far from being the bogeyman that too much public debate presents, Europe - and an increasingly close Europe at that - continues to present a huge opportunity. There are so many who continue to talk of "our relationship with Europe", as if Europe is still something other. We are in Europe, yet so much talk is pitched in such a way as to deny a link which already exists, and has done for years. We signed up of our own free will, we should stick honourably to our word and do our bit to help. rather than simply throwing in the towel when things get tough and ranting incessantly about getting our own way or withdrawing like petulant children. Like it or not, we are Europeans, and we owe it to each other to stick together.

You see I'd much prefer Merkel to be involved in running the UK than Cameron, Clegg and Miliband (they could make tea, coffee and carry the milk in Strasbourg).

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.

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.

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.