Consequences of EU for national governments

Here in The Netherlands, our political landscape is made up of four hierarchical layers: city councils, provincial government, national government and the EU. For the last 20, or so, years we've been going through a process where the influence and importance of the provincial government is slowly diminishing, to the point where they are only responsible for public transport. Likewise, a parallel trend was, and still is, to decentralize the national government, by handing out more and more tasks and responsibilities to the local level.
On top of all this, the main thing our national government is responsible for is making sure that European legislation finds it's place in our national law. And because of the fact that so much of the carrying out of legislation has been decentralized to the cities and municipalities, our national government has been degraded to a translation agency for EU legislation.

So there are two trends at play here:

1. Decentralizing the national government.


2. Becoming obsolete as a legislator.

Extrapolating these two trends, the only conclusion is that the national government will itself become as unimportant as the Dutch provincial government is. The EU will determine the legislation and the local government will carry it out. This trend to unimportance also explains why so many national politicians in the EU are showing nationalists tendencies. It's simple job protection for them.

Zaaf

Location:Rijksweg,Muiden,Netherlands