[normalnorm]

> I doubt the EU will survive in its current state.

A lot of people desire this to be true, but that does not mean that it is. It is a particularly weird opinion to hold in the wake of the most recent challenge to its continuity -- the Brexit fiasco, with the EU having maintained a united front for more than 4 years, while the UK emerges out of it in a terrible state -- and the worst is yet to come.

The EU is not perfect by any means (what is?), but it is a terribly ambitious project that has been painstakingly built over decades. Every step of the way, someone like you was claiming that it was impossible, that it was surely about to collapse. Well, we are 27 member states strong and we are dealing with the economic challenged posed by COVID better than most of the rest of the world.

If we look at objective measures, such as economic inequality, political polarization or civil unrest, we are perhaps forced to conclude that the US are closer to collapse than the EU. To be clear, I do not desire the collapse of the US. I think that that US and the EU are natural friends, in a world where they have much more in common than what separates them.

[disown]

> It is a particularly weird opinion to hold in the wake of the most recent challenge to its continuity -- the Brexit fiasco, with the EU having maintained a united front for more than 4 years, while the UK emerges out of it in a terrible state -- and the worst is yet to come.

If would be a weird opinion to hold if the EU managed to keep britain. But the fact that the EU lost a major nation doesn't make it a weird opinion. It makes it a sensible one to hold. Did you think the soviet union losing warsaw pact members was also a sign of stability?

> If we look at objective measures, such as economic inequality, political polarization or civil unrest, we are perhaps forced to conclude that the US are closer to collapse than the EU.

No. If we lost texas or california or ny, then you might have a point. Also, none of what you listed actually lead to collapse. The US has been going strong for nearly 250 years. We survived the civil war without losing any territory or collapsing. Do you think the EU could survive the same? We have the same language, history, culture, currency, etc at this point. There is no legitimate secessionist movement here. There are a few in europe. Also, the EU has fault lines that separate people by language, history, culture, currency, etc.

If economic inequality, political polarization or civil unrest lead to a collapse, then we would have collapsed a long time ago. The US survived the gilded age, civil war, the 60s, etc. The EU faced a stiff breeze and lost britain. Imagine what real issues would do to the EU?

The problem with the EU is the lack of a strong central government and a sense of identity because european or eusian ( heck EU members don't really have a name do they? ) is really a meaningless designation like asian. It's too big and broad of a term to be sensible political identity. Like the soviet union. Or dare I say even the russian federation or china.

[kilburn]

> heck EU members don't really have a name do they?

This is very funny assuming you are from the USA. What do you call yourselves?

[ricohboy]

Americans?

Do you identify as solely as European?

[kilburn]

The funny part is that you don't have a name that only applies to people from your country. As the other comment said, there many millions of Americans that are not from the US.

In the same vein, people from the EU call themselves Europeans even though there are many millions of Europeans that don't live in EU countries.

To answer your question: I identify myself as European, Spaniard and Catalan. Just like I'm pretty sure there will be some people in the US that consider themselves Americans and Texans or Californians or New Yorkers or whatever...

[jessaustin]

Technically, Mexicans and Canadians (and others) also live on the continent of North America. Lots of other not-USA-people live on the continent of South America.

[imtringued]

Nobody only possesses only one identity. People are complex.

[tick_tock_tick]

I don't understand how you can look at the world and honestly think the US is closer to collapse then the EU. Also what world do you live in where the EU is doing better then most of the world? Half the EU countries are in the top 20 deaths / pop.

[MauranKilom]

> Also what world do you live in where the EU is doing better then most of the world? Half the EU countries are in the top 20 deaths / pop.

...because the EU was the center of the first wave, at a point where the whole world was scrambling to find and implement appropriate mitigations.

Try this chart: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=eur&are...

In any case, the post you're replying to claimed that "we are dealing with the economic challenge[s] posed by COVID better than most of the rest of the world."

I'm not sure why the death numbers, even if they were not confounded like this, would be a meaningful measure for that.

[raxxorrax]

I wanted to write "in its current form". I don't think it will dissolve, but people will realize that some countries have different ideas about government. Especially with the planned addition of new countries. Many countries favor democracy a lot less and we are blindly expanding.

Many people believe we need the union to defend our values, but it becomes more apparent that we might loose them on the way.

[nbevans]

I just read this and your comment history. You need to cut back on that Kool-aid.