The US were a blank page, with roughly the same crowd starting with the same common goal and aspirations. Europe comes with 15centuries of nationlike structures and history. Latin and AngloSaxons have very different approaches on life and work (particularly visible in the “PIGS” recent controversy...).
As someone said, you cant make the european omelette with nations hard boiled eggs.
The mere facts that the euro bank notes has zero european symbol (because they couldnt find one) speaks for itself. So they put bridges and windows... India has Gandhi.
And in contrast, this thread's point: that attempts to unify disparate cultures via democracy and mutual agreement, celebrating differences, have difficulties and failures when constituents decide to abandon good faith.
The idea that nation states are old, and multinationalism is new is fallacious. It's only post WWII that borders, political control, and ethnic homogeneity are strongly national... Yugoslavia being the most recent example.
I would love to (interested in the topic)
First national exhibition hosted by the Vichy government during occupation: “la France europeenne”. Showing maps of future europe, where nation-states would have disappeared.
French far-right at the time was also calling England, “the enemy of europe”, for instance on a book from M. Déat, another politica leader from the 40s.
"Anglo-Saxons" are not part of the federation anymore, and stuff like "PIGS" is simply casual racism. Do Northern European countries have a casual-racism problem? Very much so. Would that stop a federation from working in the long run? I doubt it very much. Otherwise Texas and New Jersey would have parted ways a long time ago.
Also, comparing diversity is tricky - natives from Lappland have 0 in common with say Greek or Spaniards. Same would go for india's extremes, its rather impossible to say who is more different (personally I would still say Europe, since ways of life are almost the same if you look on India east, south, north, west, very similar cuisine etc... not so much in Europe).
We have proven track of how it doesn't work here in Europe, no need to spin another set of wars to re-confirm it.
Also, India sees quite a bit of domestic terrorism in its eastern parts exactly due to mindsets like yours. Not something we like to see here in Europe.
There are independence tensions within European countries (eg. Spain/Basque, UK/Scotland).
You have to be a blind idealist to think this would work. There are going to be a lot of crisis scenarios for EU in the next few decades, refugees being the looming one EU failed to reach a consensus on and botched previously (that helped radicalise parts of it like Hungary and further alienated UK). The pending post COVID inflation/economic shock could also storm the Euro zone, Greece is still devastated from the "bailouts" in the financial crisis.
You are confusing independence from nationalism. They are very different things and you can have the first without the second.
Measures were not dictated by EU, each country decided it's own policy.
Russia had vacation faster, China as well.
Von der Leyen even said so herself, and she still believes it was the right thing to do to stifle the big countries in order to maintain the EU.
What if some US state with most of the vaccine manufacturing had stopped the export of vaccine over state borders? Would that be fine by you because it's in their self interest?
No, they did not. Here's a site where you can see the share of people vaccinated against COVID-19: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
... Wait, what makes you think that? Per OurWorldInData, except for a brief period in early January, EU total doses per capita have always been ahead of Russia and China, until June, when China drew ahead (Russia is still _far_ behind). And even then, that wasn't supply-driven; if you consider EU countries with high vaccine acceptance (Ireland, Germany, Denmark etc), those are still ahead of China; China overtook the EU as a whole due to vaccine reluctance in parts of the EU.
Normal, with 27 participants all responding to different national and political interests. Try having a flatshare with 27 families and agreeing on how to paint the wall.
Eh, that's a dubious narrative. In practice, Europe made an at the time fairly reasonable-looking bet on the wrong horse; significant production problems were expected with mRNA vaccines, while no-one really expected big problems with viral vector vaccines.
As it turned out, mRNA production went amazingly smoothly (to the point that overdelivery by Pfizer/Biontec largely saved the EU programme) while viral vector production was a _disaster_. If AZ and J&J had been able to deliver what they planned, or even modestly underdeliver, the issue of contracts would not have arisen.
Same for Switzerland, I just can’t imagine they would have it better if they split to four national states.
At least in those two cases national diversity worked great.
And somehow me, a person from Denmark, has more cultural overlap with a hacker hipster from Mexico than most of my childhood classmates. And somehow I still coexist peacefully with my neighbors.
The internet and global travel are breaking down the national cultural barriers (largely induced/imposed by mass media). Meanwhile, power imbalance and widening gaps in the social fabric are increasing issues globally, even in monocultures and regardless of immigrants.
I think the points you raise are orthogonal. Except that you're most likely right that most people don't want this - because the illusion of the shared nation-culture and history has been so deeply imprinted in us by propaganda from the education system, the government, advertising, and media.
EU is made of countries and having countries merged does not mean that cultures has to be, actually hundrends of cultures and subcultures live together with other cultures in present countries, even as parts of nations, even inside cultures (subcultures).
It is a basic human need and necessity to collaborate, everybody wants and needs that!! (except those living in a lone grumpy bubble) Those not doing it are not really viable: see Yugoslavia. : )
The EU - and in fact many many countries with hudreds of years of success - is made of and founded by former arch enemies btw....
People need to think beyond these tribes and up it a level. A random person from Bulgaria is very similar to a random person from Netherlands. I welcome the day that our tribe is Earth...
Because outside of your bubble nobody wants this. A random person from Bulgaria is going to have a very different culture from a random person from Netherlands. What do you think happens with power in such conglomerate ?
If you want to see what happens when you create a forced conglomerate of different nations (but still more similar than EU member, languages were way closer and cultures were close as well) into a super state look up Yugoslavia.