Comment by umanwizard
10 years ago
It doesn't make sense to compare going from France to Germany with going from France to the US. A better comparison would be France to Germany vs. California to Arizona.
Both European states and US states are sovereign political entities with their own laws and territory, but with an agreement for freedom of movement. (the US constitution in one case; the Schengen agreement in the other).
The affirmation that US states are sovereign is not unanimously agreed upon :)
That said, even if that's technically true, I think it blurs the history, which is part of what makes it feel special. An US citizen takes that border crossing for granted since birth, but as an European, I'm aware that my grandmother already as an adult had to cross it clandestinely, at the risk of her own life, and even my parents still had to pass through customs and declare the purpose of their trip. I'm the first generation of my family for whom crossing the border is truly a free experience.
"Sovereign" might have been the wrong choice of words, then. It's not a binary thing -- sovereignty is a leaky abstraction that groups together a very wide range of different statuses. US states are not 100% sovereign, but what I was getting at was that they are, in many but not all respects, more similar to sovereign nations than to administrative subdivisions of a country. They have totally independent legal systems, budgets, administration, and so on. Even in countries in Europe that are also federations, the level of sovereignty of the sub-entities is usually less (in Germany, for example, criminal law is handled centrally, not delegated to Lands).
One notable exception is the sub-entities of the UK (England, Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland), which have a high degree of autonomy.
As for the historical bit, we have simply had more time than you :). The current push for European integration only started after the war - 70 years ago. It's been going on in America for over 200 years, and our last major internal war was 150 years ago.
I'm not disputing your sentiment, though. I think anything that improves freedom of movement for people is great, and I'm happy that Europe has been moving steadily in that direction since the war.
Whatever the current level of integration within the EU, it is far from being anything like a federal state, so isn't a valid comparison. The closest equivalent you'd get is US to Canada.