care to illustrate your contradiction ? maybe providing a better example than the EU in that building of a cooperational system ?

The Norwegians may not be integrally part of the EU but the cooperation level is as high as it gets (part of the single market and the Schengen area, norwegians are also allowed to vote locally when residents in the EU and so many other stuff i could list)

Greece is perhaps the single example of a EU defection. If you allow yourself to pull your face from your butt cheeks' pressure and look at, say, a 20 years scale, the number of ties between our regions, institutions and cultures is on an accelerating pace, more than doubling the number of members, increasing the weight of influence at national level to the point that most national laws are the declination of EU directives

It s as if the british euro-sceptics live in a lost valley riding diseased dinosaurs and wondering how to make fire to heat their tea (made of dirty filthy leafs and roots)

Obama winning the peace price was a joke. Nobel price in itself has become quite politicized. Maybe it was always so but i was less skeptical when i was younger.

Exactly. Long-run, the European Union is going to be a powerful force for good in the world.

If we need a historical example, look at America; dysfunctional as fuck up until after the Civil War. But that didn't stop it from being a good idea before the civil war, which proved itself more thoroughly afterwards.

i hope it will soon start having more influence on intenational policies, the way the US and China, and to some extent Russia, Israel, and Iran have been behaving these past two decades is increasingly worrying.

It seems that for national political reasons, mainly staying in power, they rely a little too much on passion and not enough on reason. When the US and the UK were starting conflicts over WMDs the EU could have, with a supra-national minister of affairs, and through the vote of mainly France and Germany, tempered the idiotic duo of Blair and Bush

It was only ten years ago that these two so-called modern democracies engaged in two of the most idiotic conflicts of our times.

The EU should start negotiating a specific role in the UN organization to better prevent weak democracies as the US and the UK to renew their crap tactics.

Too disparate, eh?

Not disparate enough to match America, i say. Belarus isn't even in the EU.

Yeah, exactly like the UN is a powerful force for good in the world, with emphasis on powerful.

LOL. Blimey.. next thing you know they'll give it to NATO :|

The names over the states portray a country with GDP roughly equal to that of the state, so, for instance, New Jersey's gross domestic product is about as much as the whole of Russia, or New Mexico on the level with Hungary.

It sinks the "GDPs are too disparate" argument right quick, when you've got France, Sweden, and Austria living in harmony with Uzbekistan, Ecuador, and Algeria.

That we have a lot of states with a lot of people. The fact that they are populated largely by the same sorts of people who speak the same language and have the same basic culture means nothing because there's a lot of them.