Region, Nation and Europe

There is a quite rational argument for Scottish independence and for all the other separatist movements throughout Europe, which can be summed up as “eliminate the middleman”: in the three level structure, the bottom level, the region, gives a greater degree of democratic representation while the top level, the EU, gives better economies of scale and “safely in numbers”, so there is no need for the middle layer, the nation state. This vision of the nations of Europe being dismembered into smaller regional entities under the overarching umbrella of the EU is often summed up by the phrase “Federal Europe”. It may come as some surprise to find out that it already exists, at least in the minds of the bureaucrats in the EU’s office of statistics, the Eurostat. Since the year 2000, they have divided Europe into federal regions: the NUTS 1 (Nomenclature d’Unités Territoriales Statistiques).

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