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by carefulfungi
354 days ago
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When thinking about the complexity of the United States it might be useful to compare it to Europe as a whole. The US is physically larger. The EU has 1.5x the population. Spain, Germany, Italy, and Hungary are four very different places. As are California, Ohio, Alabama, and Alaska. Does it feel strange to you that there aren't EU-wide social or health insurance programs; or that Hungary has different politics from Luxembourg; or that Greece and Germany have different economies? It is a very sloppy analogy. However, it is closer to comparing like orders of magnitude. |
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I'm not surprised by the fact that California has a different politics to for example Florida (I hope I picked good "extreme" cases there ). That is, as you said, very similar to the EU - you have extremely conservative Poland/Hungary and you have very liberal France (for example). But in EU the federal enforcement mostly works through the local governments and is not a completely separate entitiy.
In the EU we really don't have "federal law" in the same manner you seem to have in the US. When the EU passes a law, all states implement it locally (even though the local implementation may vary) and the local law enforcement enforces that law. We don't really have a federal ICE for example, it is always a thing that is handled by the local state. (Well, perhaps there is an official part of the Europol that handles immigration, I have never really heard about it nor have I seen anyone).
We don't have a "federal" EU army, too. Every state has its own armed forces, that are completely independent (well, chain of command-vise) to the others.
Another difference is - as you pointed out - that we are much more densely populated (like 3 times the population density). That's why some of the things we said really surprised me, because you cannot really escape others in the EU. Almost anywhere you go, you are at most 30m by car to some form of "civilization" (for example city/village with working internet and a pub). Btw even though this might be a little bit of an exaggeration, it is not a big one