It will be either big or democratic, but not both

it will be, as usual, a compromise, like the nation-state was. But it's about time we admit it's going to happen, or we can really get used to irrelevancy. US and USSR had a strategic interest in Europe as political and economic battlefield, I believe China and India will not share that interest.

I agree that a confederation is probably better than a federal state.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

I wasn't talking about democracy or representation. I was talking about an european entity expressing itself on the global stage. Have you ever seen how european nation-state leaders greet people like Bill Gates? Not as peers, but as servants. They realise that someone like Bill has MUCH MORE POWER and on a MUCH WIDER SCALE than them, and are scared shitless to pick a fight with him. That's why the only serious challenges to the MS monopoly came from EU institutions, that DO express power on a much bigger scale. I'm not so utopian to think that a federal EU will be more democratic or more responsive to its citizens than nation states. It just happens to be the only way we can introduce some friction in the cogs of globalized corporativism, recreating some sort of antagonism. We need someone that can scare back big companies (and yes, the american friends as well, for they tend to create quagmires too much and too near our strategic interests) -- not Blair, not Schroeder and certainly not Chirac can do that at the moment. We need checks and balances on a global scale, even though they are not "100% direct democracy". When never had direct democracy anyway, we have little to lose.