BTW Czechoslovakia split to Czech Republic and Slovakia a few years after the iron curtain fell. It was a relatively painless process and probably it led to much less tensions later on. It's something like 10 and 5 million people. Probably could split even further and I'd be very curious where is the optimum for 21st century.
EU? I wish it was just a fee trade union, nothing more. At this point it feels more like a government for governments, where my vote means absolutely nothing.
Yeah. I agree the EU is deeply in need of serious structural reform. But I think political disintegration in the form of more Brexit-like secessions is a likely scenario if that doesn’t happen. Which is how it *should* work.
I actually had a fairly intense "European Studies" class during my masters degree and it was quite eye-opening to me at the personal level.
The articles and texts the professors gave us very explicitly said that the EU has been leveraged by state-level politicians from the very beginning to bypass democratic controls and implement policies that they'd never be able to implement otherwise.
As I said, they are explicit about it, as in boasting about how clever they are in finding a smart way to implement their benevolent tyrant ideas, for the people, without the people.
I've heard about it for a looong time and either didn't care at the time or dismiss the critics of EU as alarmist. At that time I was building my biz and it was all I could think about. Not that there was anything I could do to change the direction that EU took (other than becoming career politician - maybe - but again, not my schtik).
It's probably one of the most successful examples and a case I had in mind when I wrote my note above. 5-10 million people is quite maneageable in today's terms. I would like even smaller communities, but I'm not a maximalist and this is a size I could compromise about.
5m is prob good, 2m maybe better, but of course this is not really applicable to bigger cities which are already much bigger than this.
10m is still a bit too big, you still get several regions with different needs and center-edge disconnects. I'm sure Slovaks would say the same thing, "Bratislava vs the east" etc.
Who knows if it's a good idea anywas? Would it create some very poor countries next to a rich ones just because of some geographic features? Honestly, I don't know even if I like the general idea.
