| New York, Kansas and California have more in common from the point of view of the citizens than the countries that you've lived in. You only need to look at how the EU elections are managed versus how the elections for the US Presidency and congress are seen by the US citizens. The sovereign 'countries' are imaginary constructs made real by physical, cultural and psychological factors, 'power' is such a psychological factor and I think it is far less of an item absent 'nationalism' and we're seeing a very strong resurgence of this in Europe right now. There isn't a country that does not have a far-right or far-left ultra nationalist political party that manages to get a substantial part of the vote. If anything happened at all during the last decade then it is that Europe's window for unity is slowly closing and that in some parts we're already regressing. This gets expressed in an 'us versus them' mentality not seen since the 80's, the latest nice example of that is Germany deciding to start levying toll on foreigners for the use of the German roads. (Which given the location of Germany is for many people the equivalent of an in-escapable tax.) So if you feel the Union is converging then that's great, I'm seeing the opposite, more and more nationalist sentiments, Greece possibly departing the Euro and maybe even departing the EU, the UK and possibly others no longer being a part of the union and more and more limitations placed on the original 'free travel of goods and people' mandate that enabled a lot of the EU to get closer. So, no, it's not there yet and the way things are going we're not ever going to get there either. The EU did a number of things very wrong, they tried to force the issue on a number of occasions and in fact succeeded in several of those but while they won those particular battles they lost the war in that the 'locals' are not Europe minded because they see downsides to it as well. And that's fine, but ramming unification down their throats definitely is one of the reasons all these backlashes found ground to sprout in and take hold. Wilders, Le-Pen, the UK euro-skeptics, Greek nationalists and so on all have one thing in common: they use the anti-EU sentiment as their main driving force (and in the case of Wilders, also anti-Islam, but then again, he's simply a nutcase that has found some fear buttons that he can push, like all the other demagogues in history, which doesn't make him any less dangerous). |
We have to keep in mind they were not always like this. Willingness to be part of a larger whole is key. EU members are not keen and politicians are playing divide and conquer with the EU.
The fear buttons they play are extraordinarily dangerous.