Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "What might the EU look like in 2029?" video.

2:26 The two isn't mutually exclusive. You can have a confederate model where it's the individual states that have the power while increasing integration, as long as the ultimate power is at the individual country level. 5:30 This is my preference. States should have the ability to join or leave unified structures at will. I don't mind having some shared taxes, a complimentary EU army, shared welfare, shared migration policies etc... But countries shouldn't be forced. Essentially in my view countries should be able to choose competencies themselves. There may be benefits or drawbacks with adding or removing a competency to the EU for a country and a country taking on responsibilities comes with responsibilities, like ensuring compatability with the rest of the EU and ensuring that there's no unfair benefits or drawbacks for either nationals or other EU countries. 9:17 You fail to consider the multiple possible hybrid scenarios between 3 and 6. For instance you can make individual EU competencies opt in ones where nation states can choose themselves on each competency if they want a unified EU governance of that competency or if they want a local one, with different nations making different choices there and possibly going backwards and forwards there. And also you can have groups of nations choosing to split up a competency to a more regional level where they might wish to share it with similar countries but not the whole of the EU so you could have a competency being split into two or three groups each with separate rules from each other in that competency but sharing them with other members in that group, while there's individual countries doing it alone for that competency.
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@thomasmerlin4990 No, I'm against a federal model and in favour of a confederal model. The difference is that in a federal model the states have some legeslative power unlike in a unitary government, however the federal level supercedes the state level. Essentially in a federal model the power goes from the top down. In a confederal model that power goes from the bottom up. The UN uses a confederal model, and Switzerland used to use a confederal model and used it for centuries before switching to the federal model instead. The EU is currently using the federal model because compencies where EU law supercedes state laws exists, although it's as close to a confederation as a federation can be, but it is a federation never the less because states cedes power upon joining instead of granting power. Essentially in a confederation a higher body may be granted power, but it's essentially borrowed by the lower levels and the lower bodies still retains said power and the ability to discard decisions made higher up. I'm ideologically against any democracy containing too many people that's not using a confederal model, as any federal or unitary state with more then single digit millions of people will run into issues where you can't have someone in the political leadership from every category of people that is being ruled. Where you don't have politicans that knows how it is to live in a location or in a profession etc. And therefore decisions are made that's outright harmful to parts of the electorate who due to the size of the electorate can't be properly represented. Even we here in Norway are having some issues with that despite intentionally skewing our system to favour rural communities and using a proportional system so we unlike the catastrophy that is first past the post doesn't drown out issues. I believe Norway is a touch too big as a country and would prefer us to split up into smaller units working together using a confederal model, although a federal one might be acceptable for us. In our last national election we after all did ensure that a issue where about a third of one of our constituencies doesn't have access to a hospital when the weather is bad lead to a representative making it to our parliament, as the third largest party in their constituency, with 4 908 votes (that community had mountains between themselves and both the two hospitals in the constituency that is blocked during winter storms that also makes air ambulances a non-option, meaning that people there doesn't have access to help in case of a heart attack or if they start giving birth early/unexpected if the weather is bad as it often is in that region. But our electoral system with just 169 seats representing about 5 million people despite being proportional and having good proportionality at a national level among the parties still managed to ensure that this small community could have their issues represented in our parliament. We're very lucky to have that system even if it meant that my party that's more city based had 110 973 votes for our 3 seats, or 36 991 votes pr seat on average. (Our national level proportionality doesn't kick in before you get 4% of the total votes in the country as a whole, before that you only get seats proportional to the votes in the individual constituencies) We can represent 4 908 voters who don't have access to hospital (and unlike some other voters in said constituency considered that issue important enough to change party alignment in our system to a new political party instead of staying with another party making empty promises) But it's impossible for something like a whole continent to do that. Either you'd need so many representatives that you wouldn't get anything done and the individual representative wouldn't have any real power anyway, or you would give small communities too much power to the point where larger ones would be underrepresented, or you would have smaller communities underrepresented. Europe has a population of about 7,4*10^8, the EU current has 705 seats, but let's be generous and say that with more countries joining we'll increase the number of seats to 1 000, assuming a equal distribution of seats between the voters that would leave 7,4*10^6 voters pr seat. As opposed to the 4,9*10^3 voters behind that representative in my country. And any way to modify the electoral system to favour rural communities in such a system would mean taking too much power away from other voters. Even just limiting the numbers to just the current population of the EU instead of the whole of Europe you'd honestly run into the same problem... You simply can not have a fair democracy with more then single digit number of millions of voters. A equal distribution of seats between the voters is not fair, and the more voters you have the less fair it is to start favouring sub groups thats small enough to not get their own set if the seats are equally distributed yet different enough that they can't be said to reasonably be represented by any seat that's equally distributed. Germany is trying with their MMP system, but honestly they're failing. and Germany is just too large. And the EU is even worse. And no, I'm not a EU sceptic that want everything to be done at a national level. I'm in favour of some shared taxation, a EU army, shared immigration policy, shared markets with shared regulations etc, freedom of movement for Europeans and so one and so forth. And I recognize the value of the EU in preventing wars in Europe. But while I don't mind other countries having a influence over each state in Europe I believe as s a principle that the last say should be made at as local a level as possible. And it's better with individual states that choose to work together in a confederation then with states being forced to work together in a *federation*. Do you understand what I mean? Does all of that make sense to you? And yes, I have very strong opinions about this and strong feelings about it. I live in Norway, and we've already had laws forced on us due to being part of the EEA that while they might work in high population areas like the Ruhr valley (that I'd a single valley with a larger population then our own country) they simply does not in a low population density area like ours. And part of why we never joined the EU was that the fishery laws the last two times we voted on the issue was decided by large nations that while having a lot of fishermen also had so many voters pr seat that the people making the decisions didn't realize that they where encouraging fishermen to throw overboard fish that was already caught and dead instead of bringing it ashore, causing overfishing... As it is fisherman where fishing in Norwegian waters then sailing out to EU waters to throw overboard fish there to avoid issues with the quota then returning to fish more... While EU waters where being severely overfished, we managed to keep ours somewhat healthy. In part because we actually had fishermen from small communities in our parliament able to explain what consequences each law would have as well as fishermen who has fished from larger boats able to process the fish on the spot.
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