Quote Originally Posted by Philippus Flavius Homovallumus View Post
But what need for the German Federal Government after EU Federalisation? Surely the various states also have sub-divisions?

France has sub-divisions but not as many as as Germany, and they are not really of the same nature.
That's the point, the sub-divisions can stay the way they are unless the people living there want to change them after a while.
The federal governments would stay in the sense that they would be responsible for applying the EU policies to their country/region.
The German states currently have a "minister-president", who is like a chancellor for that state, as well as a parliament, a minister of the interior, a minister of finance, minister of education, etc. The US states have a very similar model and I never saw you asking why we don't dispose of them. They don't have the same power as the federal government and can be overruled by it on some things, but they do provide a local representation to take care of local needs. Even cities often have their own "parliament", headed by the mayor and so on. To go even further, city districts can have their own mayors. Even certain differences in how they operate are usually no problem in the federated model.

What the federalization could change for example, would be certain educational standards for all of Europe, common monetary and tax policy and several other things. Especially tax is an area I would like to see centralized more and more because the competition effectively leads only to tax havens for corporations. Even Bavaria turned out to have given Ikea a tax deal with 1% corporate tax or something like that. The argument that corporations would leave if taxed properly doesn't fly if the market is large enough that they can't just give it a pass.

And that is the major driver for european unification, that global corporations can just play the individual countries against one another and thus drive the wealth divide further and further, whereas a united EU can dictate the terms as they wouldn't want to pass up on a market of >400 million people either way.

At the moment we have a half-arsed situation where Amazon sells products in Germany "from Luxembourg", but ships them from inside Germany and yet claims it only operates logistics in Germany which allows it to pay the workers less while the corporate tax and other laws are very low/lax in Luxembourg as well. Or look at Monaco, where tons of rich people live to avoid taxation and the plebs, while France, the country that fights with poverty problems, guarantees its defense. Which more or less means the French middle class lives in a problem zone and gets taxed (and may be required to die) to defend what is basically a rich people enclave. I don't even care why or how that may have come to be historically since we should let these medieval constellations behind and apply the same laws to everyone. Ideally this would even be done worldwide because it's basically the poor competing for the favor of the rich and that's not a healthy kind of competition.