I might be wrong, but it's not my impression that the US laws are a hodgepodge of compromises between states. In many ways the US is more coherent. Americans are also viewing themselves as Americans first, secondly as Irish, Latino, whatever their ancestors origin might be. Only rarely do Americans define themselves as being Idahoan, Washingtonian or Michigander (Exception are Texan, New Yorker and maybe Californian). For most people in the EU European wont even be their second level identification, for me personally it might be third or forth level.
My point being that not wanting the EU or parts of it, has no consequences for my identity in the same way if would for a person in the US wanting his or her state to at least partially leave the union.
The nation state are seeing a revival. Areas like Catalonia want to be their own small separate nation, Scotland considered leaving the UK. Many EU members also want to move power from a distant and anonymous EU parliament, and give it back to their national parliaments. In some cases people want to move power even closer and adopt Swiss style democracy. I don't think it's to fare fetched to see a state like Bavaria in Germany wanting to move power from Berlin to Munich.
At this point I think internationalism and republicanism in Europe is sufficiently weakened that such an outcome is impossible in the near future.
The USA is ancient compare to the EU. The EU's first days were debated on the internet. The US' were debated by pamphleteers, distributed on horseback and had slavery as a side issue midway down a list of policy questions to debated later.
Could you imagine The US expanding its union? Could you imagine Mexico joining, the constitution being re-written?
I don't think we're bounded by what the US is or has done. Even the US isn't. Times change.
On exits
I don't think that option would be taken very often. (A) It would pressure the EU to be what it needs to be, a Union countries want to be a part of. (B) It would change the local political debate. At the moment, the anti-EU Trump^ can safely talk without it meaning anything. I think the EU should be built to withstand border changes, in both directions.
^Interesting how rarely EU politics is debated on HN compared to US politics. Hello brothers from across the Atlantic.
I'm not opposed to less drastic unions, however. Super-NAFTA? Free immigration? I'd vote for both of those. The thing we should do to help Mexico first is to end drug prohibition. We'll be harshly judged by history, for the violence to which we've subjected the people of Mexico.
Incidentally, many of the pieces into which USA might be broken would end drug prohibition fairly immediately once on their own.
Unions not reversible? Ask Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, or the USSR. Or within Europe currently, the Scottish and Basque separatist movements. The growth of the EU -- largely for financial reasons (access to EU development aid and a large market) -- has been an exception in an era of fragmentation.
After WW2, commies divided the land under their control into countries and forcibly relocated people around to match new borders in pursuit of "historic justice" and whatnot.
You can't compare US and EU. US was built more or less as a coherent whole - politically speaking. EU was jury rigged on top of autonomic political entities, some with hundreds of years and some tens of years of political sovereignty.
...unless you look at Eastern Europe. Poland and Hungary show that homogenous nation states are not as much a thing of the past than you'd thought, and that their 'revival' (they were never dead though!) is doing just fine.
Sounds like an amazing idea /s
The populists in Poland and Hungary made a story where good aspects of the current development (for example: competitive workforce, open borders) are taken for granted and bad aspects like perpetuating big differences (like, wages, or quality of public institutions) between Hungary/Austria or Poland/Germany are attributed to some evil manipulation by the seemingly neutral EU.
Every explanation for the big wage differences is quite complicated: you can't rely on any popular simple ideology. If market is efficient, why the difference? If state-regulated society is just, why the difference? This leaves space for quite stupid populist "solutions" that are not true, but at least short.
Full disclosure: I'm from the Czech republic.
But then again, I am fairly certain that EU integration helped with our progress, especially since we had corrupt ex-commies running the show ever since '89.
It stopped them from being too greedy, plus the aid, advice and reforms did help.
And now if some people who left return out of a feeling of patriotic duty or just wanting to improve their home country, they'll be much more effective with the knowledge they gained in western Europe...
The ability to manufacture for cheap and export without too many taxes and customs headaches really helped, too, and we've set a very low corporate income tax to attract foreign (mainly EU) companies here (which worked).
Can you imagine a US state doing that? I don't think unions are reversible at this state in history. The national state is not exactly living a revival. This is majorly a financial crisis.
> This has left our national governments with a nice scapegoat, great for populists, nationalists and fringe politicians to use for their purposes
That is a very good observation. It's the reason Greece is suffering at the moment. But leaving the EU at this point would be even worse.