The Right Size for the Job
Nobody builds two sets of water pipes down the same street. One pipe is enough, and a second one would just be waste. But nobody wants one single company running water for the whole of Europe either. A city's water belongs to the city. A shared border-crossing power line belongs to the whole continent. Neither of these is really a debate about "local versus European." It's a much simpler question, asked over and over at every level of government: what is the right size for this particular job?
Most of what makes government work well or badly comes down to getting that one question right.
Decisions Should Sit Close to the People They Affect
Here's the basic idea, and it isn't complicated. A decision should usually be made by the people who actually live with its results. The people who know a local road best are the people who drive it every day. The people who understand a fishing harbour best are the people who fish from it. When a decision gets pushed further away from the people it affects — to a national capital, or further still, to Brussels — something is usually lost along the way: local knowledge, speed, and the simple sense that ordinary people have a real say in the things that shape their own lives.
This doesn't mean everything should be local. It means the opposite of "everything should be local" is not "everything should be centralised." There's a third option, and it's the right one most of the time: put each decision at the level where the people affected by it actually are. Sometimes that's a village. Sometimes it's a whole continent. The size of the decision should match the size of the problem — no bigger, no smaller.
Moving a decision upward, away from the people it affects, should require a real reason. Not habit. Not "that's how it's always been done." A real reason.
Why a Stronger Europe Doesn't Mean a Smaller Local Voice
Here's where most people get this backwards. It feels natural to assume that if Europe becomes stronger and more united, local power must shrink to make room for it — like a see-saw, where one side only goes up if the other goes down.
It doesn't have to work that way, and understanding why is the whole point of this essay.
Right now, a lot of decisions sit at the national level not because that's genuinely the right size for them, but because the nation-state is the default box everything gets sorted into, whether it fits or not. A country manages its own version of things that would honestly work better shared across a continent — and at the very same time, it holds onto decisions that would honestly work better handed down to a city or a region, just because letting go feels like losing control.
Now imagine Europe took real, clear ownership of the small number of things that genuinely only work at the continental scale — a shared currency, the big shared infrastructure that no single country can sensibly duplicate, defence that only makes sense pooled together. Once that handful of things has one clear owner at the right level, something interesting happens: countries no longer need to hoard authority over everything else "just in case." The instinct to centralise, which usually comes from insecurity about losing control of the big things, has less to hold onto. And decisions that used to sit awkwardly at the national level — because that was the only available shelf, not because it was the right size — can finally move down to where they actually belong: to regions, to cities, to communities.
A stronger, more unified Europe at the top and a more local, more decentralised Europe underneath aren't opposites. Done properly, one is what makes the other possible.
The Water Pipe, the Power Grid, and the Power Line
The clearest way to see this in practice is infrastructure, because infrastructure forces the "right size" question out into the open — you can't dodge it with rhetoric, because the pipes and wires either make economic sense at a given scale or they don't.
A city's water system is a natural monopoly at the scale of a city. One network, one owner, because running two competing sets of pipes underneath the same streets would be senseless waste. A regional electricity distribution network — the wires that actually reach into homes and shops — is a natural monopoly at the scale of a region. And the big transmission lines that move large amounts of power between countries are a natural monopoly at the scale of a continent, because no single nation gains anything from building its own separate version of a connection that only works if everyone shares it.
Three different scales, three different owners, and — this is the important part — European electricity law already recognises this and builds it in on purpose. Local grid operators handle the wires that reach your street. National and continental operators handle the transmission backbone. Nobody had to invent this as a political argument. It already exists, quietly, as plumbing.
That's the whole principle, stripped down to something you can hold in your hand: don't ask "should this be local or European." Ask "how big is this thing, really," and let the answer decide.
What This Makes Possible: Cities and Regions With Real Character
Long before nation-states existed in their current form, much of Europe's wealth and creativity came out of cities and regions that ran their own affairs — trading cities on the Baltic and North Sea coasts, Italian city-states, regions that built strength around a particular craft, a particular trade route, a particular skill. They weren't uniform. They didn't need to be. Each built its own kind of excellence, and Europe as a whole was richer for having many different centres of strength instead of one.
Centralisation flattened a lot of that, not out of malice but out of habit — it's simpler to run one system than to trust dozens of different ones. But the cost of that simplicity was real: places lost the room to specialise, to build a genuine identity around what they were actually good at, to matter on their own terms rather than as a subdivision of a national plan drawn up somewhere else.
A Europe that puts decisions at the right size again has room for that to come back. A region strong in renewable energy can lead on energy. A coastal city with a shipping tradition can lead on maritime logistics. A university town can lead on research. None of this needs permission from a national capital if the decisions involved are actually the right size to sit with the region or city in the first place. Real local character isn't a nostalgic add-on to a modern Europe. It's what you get, almost automatically, once decisions stop being centralised out of habit.
The Few Things That Do Need One Answer
None of this works if it's taken too far. Some things genuinely do need a single, shared answer across the whole of Europe, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of mistake.
A currency only works if everyone using it trusts it the same way. Certain infrastructure only makes sense built once, for everyone, rather than duplicated dozens of times. Some threats only get answered properly if the response is genuinely unified rather than twenty-seven separate ones layered awkwardly on top of each other.
The trick is that unifying these few things doesn't mean making everything else the same. A shared currency doesn't require Helsinki and Athens to look alike, sound alike, or run their local affairs identically. Weaving separate, distinct threads into one strong piece of cloth is not the same thing as melting them down into one uniform colour. Europe can be genuinely unified where it matters and genuinely diverse everywhere else, at the same time, without contradiction — as long as everyone is honest about which category a given decision actually falls into.
What Actually Grows Out of This
Two things follow naturally once decisions sit at the right size, and both are worth wanting on their own terms, not just as side effects of tidier government.
The first is speed and resilience. When something goes wrong, the people closest to it can act immediately, without waiting for permission to travel up a long chain and back down again. A short, sharp crisis on a European border in the summer of 2026 made this visible in real time: the country actually facing the problem had largely resolved it before a scheduled coordination meeting elsewhere had even finished convening. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when the people closest to a problem are also the people trusted to solve it.
The second is participation, and this one matters more in the long run. When decisions sit far away, in a capital or an institution most people will never set foot in, politics starts to feel like something that happens to you rather than something you take part in. When decisions sit close by — in a city council, a regional assembly, a level of government an ordinary person can actually reach, question, or one day even join — politics becomes something people can genuinely be part of again. Not as spectators. As participants.
That, in the end, is what getting the size right is actually for. Not tidiness. Not efficiency for its own sake. Room for everyone to actually take part in building the thing they're a member of.
JP Ahonen is a transformation director, Finnish defence reservist, and independent analyst based in Porto Rafti, Greece.