When countries grow together, different nationalities come closer, cultures respect each other and can live together, this is desirable and worthy of support.

Creating a bureaucratic, Babylonian-chaotic translation complex with free borders and a free economy does not constitute growing together. The current EU is suffering from the hope that jointly binding rules with a common currency would lead to greater understanding and unity in the long term.

What the British have anticipated with their Brexit threatens the entire EU in the medium term. Disintegration, members leaving due to lack of interest, economic upheaval and permanent crisis.

This does not necessarily have to be the case, but it will inevitably happen if the EU in its current form is not radically changed towards a common European understanding and away from the interests of individual states, tied into ever more restrictive bureaucratic rules.

A united Europe must be shaped by the citizens of all participating countries and not by political elites who send their desired representatives and who have never been confirmed by the electorate. Europe’s democratic legitimacy suffers just as much as the individual local democratic systems do.

A democracy is an evolving construct, not a rigid structure which, once designed, never needs to be improved. This is the main problem of modern democracies. A fundamental improvement of the inherent rules (e.g. the Basic Law) is hardly possible, but is absolutely necessary in a rapidly changing world.

Order is half the battle, as the saying goes. Organization is the whole of life, is the doctrine of current politics.

• Regulatory frenzy
• Overregulation
• Minor case specifications
• Individual justice
• Sanction allocation

All this and much more is an active part of the bureaucracy of a united Europe. If Europe were actually united as a result, this would be a small price to pay. Only the price is paid without receiving anything in return.

This does not make Europe more united, more understanding or even more united. It is only the rules that apply in all EU states, which the countries must adhere to, that provide a similar, sometimes meaningless, legal framework. But that doesn’t make for tolerant and positive coexistence.

Each country suffers individually from the excessive bureaucratic structures that apply to all of them. This shows once again that “more of the same” does not necessarily lead to a solution to the problem, and is in fact the problem.

Structures should be made for the people and simplify and improve cooperation and be designed in a way that benefits the majority. Fundamental structural reforms are needed here, even a new beginning, so that the achievements of the modern world can be used safely and helpfully.

Individual justice is an illusion whose absence must not lead to arbitrariness, but there must be ways that are understandable, acceptable and practicable for all members of society and yet are not “just” for everyone.

Democracy, as the rule of the people, is a classic paradox. The people, the actual sovereign of the state, have no power, decision-making or determining authority whatsoever in the modern form of democracy of the 22nd century.

The only way to maintain the illusion that the individual citizen has any possibility of influencing the fate of the state is to vote in an arbitrarily determined cycle. But that is not the case.

On the one hand, once elected, they do not have to adhere to election statements or program points, nor do they have to fear any kind of consequences for misconduct or wrong decisions. Only their own political clique determines whether and who has to resign for which behavior. Even then, it is not clear whether the political career was ended or only extremely slowed down and delayed.

This form of impunity and lawlessness, coupled with non-existent barriers to entry into the career of a professional politician, mainly attracts power-hungry and immoral people who are not or only rudimentarily suited to the actual task of representing the people in a meaningful and dignified manner.

But it is precisely these elected representatives, who hardly differ in their character image of a morally and ethically degenerate subject beyond party boundaries, who have a decisive influence on the fate of the people.

The envisaged separation of powers, which is intended to prevent an abuse of power, does not work, as the political office-holders largely determine the rules of the judiciary, which in turn controls the executive. There is therefore a power pyramid that only prevents the rapid and direct abuse of power, but not the creeping abuse that slowly erodes the protective mechanisms of democracy and can then lead to new forms of rule.

In recent history, Turkey and Russia are some of these examples.

Thus the paradox of modern German democracy is that the people are the rulers and yet have absolutely nothing to say.

To change this, the entire social system needs to be rethought. What may the parliament alone decide, where should the whole people be consulted? We need to move away from a party democracy towards a grassroots democracy with a new separation of powers that can successfully prevent the abuse of power.

A positive example of this is Switzerland