> the american state, which distributes the federal taxes somewhat more "evently", and there's no "Us vs Them" mentality.

The level of naïveté displayed in this comment is shocking.

In threads about the EU/Brexit, I've seen repeated arguments about how the EU can't function like the United States because of how much more unified Americans are now and historically. It all quite laughably ignores how all of our stability has only come from increased federal authority whenever we've had similar crises. I guess Europeans are as ignorant of American history as we are of their's.

Not really — that's the exact crux of the argument for many British and Germans, etc: "Is the EU a full federal project, with all of the responsibilities and expectations that encompasses?". In both countries and the likes of Greece, the answer has been a resounding "NO!" which leads to the inevitable and existing impasse the continent currently faces.

America is politically able to let, for example, Detroit, die a lingering death. For obvious reasons the Greeks would rather a similar fate wasn't in store for their country.

"Damned if you do, damned if you don't" as a famous early 90s child philosopher put it.

The US was not a fully federal project at its outset either, and has had to repeatedly renegotiate the terms of its union towards increased federal authority in order to avoid collapse and takeover by outside powers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Articles_of_Confe...

States, despite all this fanciful nostalgia, do not exist in a vacuum and their continued sovereignty today is dependent on belonging to a larger unions. It's the only way to protect themselves from the imperialism of powerful federal unions like the US, Russia, and China. If any European state thinks that it can exist independently of a federal (or worse) arrangement, it has misunderstood 20th century history.

And I would also argue the election of Trump demonstrates that you actually can't allow Detroit and similar regions to wither without significant political repercussions. The Democrats tried that and it cost them the election.

That's not true at all. There is a lot of conflict in the US relating to federal spending in "blue states" versus "red states." Red states tend to be poorer, have more agriculture, and have more military bases, so they get disproportionately more federal spending relative to their taxes paid.

I'm not sure that is quite correct ( http://www.businessinsider.com/the-states-the-most-and-least... , http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/03/27/which-states-take-... ) are just a few of many references that show where the tax dollars are distributed in the United States. Here, states that tend to be more fortunate/productive subsidize the other ones (note: most of the charts specify return on their own tax dollars, and are likely sourced from same data). This has come up in several recent elections, blogs, etc. Not to the point of the EU debates, however it is definitely a source of animosity to some. I don't have data to back up why each state is the way it is (a very complex web to unravel). We can speculate all we want (I'd rather not since political ideology invariably trumps factual discourse, pun intended)...however, if somebody has a definitive answer, they should definitely write a paper :).

I don't understand why you would compare "having a shared set of values" and "bitching about contribution and payback". Yes, the feeling of "being a European" has gotten weaker every year, especially since the financial crisis, but this is not what I was talking about.

The shared attachement to democracy, peace, to solidarity versus exacerbated nationalism, refusing death penalty, of some version of social democracy in the broad sense of the term, is much stronger than what divides us.