[ysleepy]

Germany has a different history with surveillance and authoritarian state control.

Not only did the nazis use the resident register to find undesirables, but also the soviet union used any and all avenues to spy and control people.

Privacy and scepticism of making the sate a mandatory middleman is deeply entrenched for historic reasons.

Specifically this cryptographically tight identification, electronic-only payment etc. are very contentious for this reason I believe.

But overall your point is still correct, there is a strong bias towards the status quo and the new thing has a lot of proving itself to do before being accepted.

[usrusr]

That's the main reason but not the only one, federalism is the other (unless you consider that also a consequence of certain 20th century events, which in part it absolutely is and in others it absolutely isn't). The ID is clearly federal, but almost everything you might want to implement on top of it is not. The Nordics are small enough to country-wide standards easy.

[ChuckNorris89]

>The Nordics are small enough to country-wide standards easy.

Size of a country has nothing to do with this. Neighbouring Austria is tiny and is also federalized, with each state having several degrees of autonomy and potentially causing various bureocratic nightmares depending on what you want to do.

Same with Switzerland and its cantons.

[usrusr]

True, but I'd expect that those smaller units still have it much easier to pragmatically standardize procedure even when those are formally below federal than in larger units.