Basically: In some countries, the pledge is with the constitution or the people, but in others (like constitutional monarchies), its a pledge to the (constitutional) monarch and their successors.
What is your opinion on this loyalty pledge? Do you believe it’s a reasonable request?
(For context: My mother and older brother had to do the pledge to gain [US] citizenship so the idea of deportation isn’t looming over our heads. I didn’t have do it because I was under 18 and my mother’s citizenship status automatically carried over to me according to the law.)
I’m really curious about this also! What makes some nations be, ehm, in a “sensible” state (in my eyes) and others not, given similar situations and options? We’re by no means as cool as Iceland or Finland for example, eyeing metrics like happiness index and development index, but why not?
Being a small population and/or region seems to be a part of the success mix (my theory is that this makes the government be closer to the people as well as forcing trade since you’re clearly better off working together than trying to navigate international politics alone), but there’s plenty of counter-examples so it’s clearly either not the only requirement or flat-out wrong. I tried reading a book on the topic but then the book doesn’t adequately explain it either ^^ It seems to be an unsolved problem as of yet
Either way, despite the current government I guess I’m proud of the place I’m from. You get to decide your own life (factors including: people are multilingual, relatively low inequality, euthanasia available (not that I’d currently want to, but self-determination just seems like a good principle that a crazy number of countries don’t yet have)), though iirc the rich are getting richer and both rich and poor citizens are currently voting to widen that gap (as well as other short- and long-term issues, strawman problems… the usual). We’ll see where we stand in 100 years. Maybe I shouldn’t be proud, since all that I’m proud of was built by my forebears (particularly before privatisation, which has its pros but maybe not for every aspect of society) and it’s my generation that has yet to stand the test of time 😅
aanyway, I didn’t get this part:
Could you elaborate or rephrase?
The phrase that triggered my “completly board talking about” was right after saying a setup i see as awesome you say “which seems ok to me”. This also seems inline with other dutch political takes ive seen, from bikes to red light districts to work place norms, where i see what would be a hotly talked about topic (both support and opposition) here in the US for me, is largely plainly talked about.
I cant say its wrong, as i seem to agree with coorolated polices, but it just seems in stark contrast to the American tendency to make this higher stakes and more exciting.
The closer government is something that makes alot of sense to me too. I find municple, town, county level politics much more grounded then my federal level decisions (which is more like EU scoped politics to me in comparison at about half the population but about the same land mass). State level, which an average of almost 6 million being represented by the goverment vs the 350 million the fed size has to represent, also seems more reasonable though in terms of action very limited.
I know one reform here id like is to expand the number of federal representives here to be scaled with population again. It was orginally scaled at 1 for every 30 thousand (which feels like a human scale of representation), but including our upper house its around 750,000 per elected member of congress.