Well, Europe has different dynamics, rooted in ancient times... and a lot of inertia.

It's hard to steer all people in a certain direction, especially from quite different cultures.

We're not Europeans; we're Romanians, Greeks, French, Cypriots and so on. We have a sense of belonging, not to each other, but to our individual nations.

It is a "hodgepodge", but we must keep it together somehow. What happened last century must never happen again.

I'm really keeping my fingers crossed for the EU; not necessarily for my generation, but for my kids and grankids.

USA on the other hand is an "engineered" country, people got there relatively recently and said "Ok, that's it, let's do things this way". Of course you will see more homogeneity and agreement. And nationalism actually helps keep stuff together instead of dividing people.

Remember, most of our countries formed in the 19th and early 20th century. Before that Germans for instance were Prussians, Bohemians, Moravians, Bavarians and so on. (39 states)

The French for instance only commonly adopted the same language in 1914. (When literacy rates were high enough for everyone to know French instead of regional languages).

Most countries in Europe were the same less than 200 years ago. I can easily see us being Europeans 100 years from now.

I know Slovenians (where I'm from) still considered it a novelty to think of themselves as Slovenians as late as the 1840's.

Well, if this goes on for long enough, with open borders and such there's going to be a lot of mixing..

I'm not sure what we're going to call ourselves, but if nothing "explosive" happens in the next 2-3 centuries, I predict we'll be mostly brown-skinned and speak some sort of English.

>USA on the other hand is an "engineered" country, people got there relatively recently and said "Ok, that's it, let's do things this way". Of course you will see more homogeneity and agreement. And nationalism actually helps keep stuff together instead of dividing people.

Go study up on the American civil war. It was an extremely brutal conflict, and you see lingering resentment today, in the 'red states' and the 'blue states' - hell, I still make (offensive) jokes about how "we should have let them leave when we had the chance" - I mean, I don't know how it compares to the Germany vs. France thing, but even today, there is a pretty significant north/south divide in US politics (and urban/rural divide.) From my understanding of things, we (the northern, industrial states) conquered the southern, agricultural states through force of arms, (well, through force of superior production) - and we've kept them in the union since through a generous application of money. (It's seen as funny, that the "red states" generally speaking, consume more federal tax dollars than they give back, and yet those are the people who make a lot of noise about cutting the size of the federal government. The "blue states" are the opposite. The way I see it, we just figure it's cheaper to buy them bread and circuses than to fight 'em again, while they are frustrated by their powerless position. From what I read, (and culturally, I think) we think of the south as producing brave, but poorly equipped soldiers. (and often we think of the southern leadership as having more guts than brains, that, or just having generally less concern for the lives of their soldiers. The south, at least by Northerners, is perceived as having a lot more respect for it's aristocrats, and less respect for it's peasants, vs "the only color that matters is green" north, which tends to style itself as a meritocracy.) The turning point of the war is often considered to be 'Pickett's charge' - A very brave, but arguably, considering the weapons the union had in the area, the space they needed to cross, and the range and effectiveness of the Minié ball, very stupid military action.)

My point here is that being more homogeneous (and we are... there are big cultural differences, but we all mostly speak the same language) does not save you from war. Civil war can be just as bloody and brutal as wars of conquest between different countries. When you get down to it, brothers will slaughter oneanother just as readily as strangers who don't speak the same language.

Perhaps the more powerful EU countries should get used to giving handouts to the poor EU countries in order to keep things quiet; that is how I think things work here

The EU is one thing, the eurozone another. Overall I don't think either has advanced the cause of European brotherhood very much and I think now the eurozone may actually be setting that goal back quite a bit (ask the Greeks or the Cypriots how they feel about their French and German European brothers).

" the economic differences between regions in the US aren't nearly as large as in the eurozone"

I think the origin of this and other problems is the lack of a significant EU-wide tax system. The US federal tax system serves as a wealth distribution mechanism (some states like NY and CA pay much more than they receive, and other states like OK receive much more than they pay). A similar system in europe would help the net import nations like Cyprus and greece.

This works in the US because there isn't actually that great a disparity between the wealthiest and poorest states in the US, whereas the disparity is much, much greater in the eurozone. More so, the "poor" states in the US are still pretty wealthy even compared to some of the wealthiest European countries, whereas the poor countries in the eurozone are quite poor on an absolute scale (Estonia and Slovakia have a per capita GDP of around 15k USD, much less than half the poorest US states). Also, the poorest eurozone countries are quite populous, there are tens of millions of people who are living at less than 3/4 of the mean per capita GDP of the eurozone, whereas in the US the same figure is around 2 million. It's a much, much harder situation to deal with and the eurozone has fewer options and tools to do so.

Take a look at this table http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas-f... to see how income is distributed in the US between the states. New Mexico has received over two-and-a-half times its 2009 GDP more in federal spending than it has sent in taxes over a twenty year period. The equivalent for Europe would be akin to Greece getting over $760 billion. Yeah, Europe has to work on its "union" aspect a bit.

That's not comparable: one is subsidy, one is spending. US spends money in New Mexico by maintaining military bases and hiring New Mexico residents to work for them [1]. They serve the entire country, not just New Mexico. In contrast, the EU sending checks to Greece or forgiving its debt is pure subsidy. Only Greece directly benefits from it.

It's one thing to spend money in exchange for goods and services, and another thing to give it away in exchange for nothing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico#Federal_government

Indeed. Excepted that this is not a financial crisis. The financial crisis is just a catalyzer. The fundamental issue is state who continuously spend more than what they made because states are run by politicians who can't count (because 99% of them are lawyers and lawyers can't count and they'll only accept advices from economists going their way: that is "more state").

We're now witnessing what happens when states spending more than what they make are running out of money.

Of course socialists are trying to pretend it's a financial crisis and that without the financial crisis in the U.S. nothing would ever have gone wrong with all these highly socialists states in Europe spending more than they're making and creating an ever bigger state debt.

Seriously who's buying that? When you're borrowing more money than what you make at one point payback time comes.

And payback time is coming for socialists. And they don't like it.

For all the ranting about socialism, deeply social democratic countries--namely, countries like Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden--are doing mostly fine. If not for the Eurozone crisis, I'd say they'd be much better places economically than the USA, let alone a country like Cyprus or Greece. This is despite having more generous public sectors than the Mediterranean.

Nor is it simply corruption, though there's PLENTY of that to go around. Lots of corrupt countries aren't about to spontaneously collapse. But it's not totally crazy to imagine Italy, Spain, and Greece collapsing into chaos by the end of April. Or, if you're a pessimist, by the end of March...

It's sectoral imbalances and a deeply broken EU.

Norway is kind of a special case since they have oil. Denmark, Sweden... they have another decade or so before it hits there. Germany is such an industrial giant that again they are not your typical Eurozone country.

Well, once you've explicitly excluded the quarter of Europe that counts as "rich" and "social democracy" as special cases, of course you won't have examples available that suggest that being an economically successful social democracy is possible.

That doesn't even touch on the UK or France. Which, although certainly having their problems, also aren't the same kind of basket cases PIGS are. I excluded them initially because although they seem to have more severe problems than, say, Germany, they're still pretty economically successful and stable. By the time any of them get to a hypothetical debt crisis, the PIGS will have long-since imploded, and it'll be a totally different ballgame anyway that resists prediction.