Quote Originally Posted by Beskar View Post
Depends on definition of "Big Government". The term is very wishywashy, you could say, just having one government in Brussels is far smaller than 20 odd different governments at once.

If you are talking about centralisation, then how much is centralised and what powers occur there? Usually, it would just be general foreign policy, etc.

Hypothetically speaking, is everyone having the same currency, the same plug sockets, the same road laws and various regularisation and standardisation a bad thing? If anything, it brings far more unity between the nations, the ability to walk into the country next door and knowing that there are pretty much the same exact laws and that you don't need to convert money, or needing to re-train or relearn things. Knowing that your plug for your laptop works without fiddling with millions of different changers just to load up totalwar.org. These are just the general populace benefits, there are masses of economical benefits to this as well.

There is another way of thinking about it as well. We can either join America, join Russia, join China, etc, or we can forge our own European Superpower, and when America tries to force us into pointless wars, we can just stick up our middle finger at them, instead of some nations (like Britain) being slave states to the American Empire.
The problem is that for example how would you set up taxes for the central government, when the average incomes are dramatically different from country to country? Also how some central government could be aware of the special circumstances which can be found from all over Europe. The thing is that in Federal State we would only be creating another layer of government in the center, while the former National and regional governments would have to remain as the central government could not fill in to their role because lack of understanding of the regional conditions. We can create as many European standards we want without turning into a federal state. In matter of fact its happening right now.

Why exactly we have to forge our own superpower? In our current state we can defend ourselves and also project force and help outside the Europe. Why exactly we need to become a superpower? So instead of fighting each other like it was in the past, we could be able to enter or create global conflicts? Id rather live in peace then be a part of powerful superstate that has the need to project its power on the global scale, thank you.