Map Comparing World Countries With U.S. States

[Christians4LessGvt]

http://universalfreepress.com/just-how-rich-is-the-u-s-this-map-comparing-world-countries-with-u-s-states-might-surprise-you/

[Plane]

   Haha!

  That is pretty enlightening, I became aware years ago that Europeans are generally very provincial but think that they are more aware of the world than Americans.

   One cause is that they discount the importance of the USA States, and inflate the importance of European Countries.

     The United States of Europe already exists, and the countries there could be labeled with the States that had similar economic contribution.

[Xavier_Onassis]

The political subdivisions in European countries  are less powerful then the states, in federal nations, like Germany and Russia, and much less in the smaller unitary nations

[Plane]

   The nations themselves are not what they were.

    Their federation is not as strong as ours , but is it likely at all that they will become less federal?

     Will people identify themselves as Europeans as we identify as Americans?

[Xavier_Onassis]

I think that Europeans identify themselves as both Europeans as well as Catalonians, Austrians, and Scots. The states are largely artificial constructs compared with European nations. There is more difference between the two parts of Belgium (Walloon and Flemish) than there is between any two states in the US: different languages, national dance, music, religion and identity. Most European nations have national identities that go back centuries. Only a few states have anything similar.

[Plane]

  One State used to be a Republic , one used to be a Monarchy , one state started as a refuge for victims of religious persecution and another was started as a refuge for debtors and criminals .

    A couple were started as company property and one started as a reservation for Indians .


    One used to speak Russian , several started as Spanish, a few as French and of course there were hundreds of native dialects.

      The biggest dissimilarity between the States and The nations of Europe is that there is free travel across the borders,

        Oops, the blending may have started late there , but we are helping so it may not take so long.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Very few states are as different as European nations.

The Republic of Texas lasted for nine years, and was bankrupt most of the time. The California Republic was a sham, based on Texas.

There were maybe five small towns in Russian Alaska at most. To say that Alaska spoke Russian is a gross exaggeration.

[Plane]

   There are some European countries with a lot of commonality, I understand a Dane can understand a Norwegian that speaks slowly enough.

     As job hunters travel across borders and mate seeking breeches language barriers the potential of unity grows.

    Also of course they are all watching American TV with appropriate subtitles.

     There used to be enough differential between the states to make war, is there enough commonality between the EU states to make love?

[Xavier_Onassis]

Europeans mostly all learn English in school, far. far better than Americans do. Scandinavian languages (not Finnish) are all mutually intelligible if people speak slowly. The same is true of many Slavic languages. But the fact remains that European nations are much more different from one another than the states of the US. People from all the Midwestern states have cultures that are nearly identical. Indianapolis, Wichita, Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines, Denver all share a very close connection.

[Plane]

Yes that is true now, a century and a half after the war.

We missed a chance to separate and diverge, and our language has become more similar rather than more different.

    Europe is in the same process we went through , with a later start , but with TV and our example.

      Their interdependence isn't total , but is trending to increase.

      Really,... is it rare for romance to cross those boarders now?

[Xavier_Onassis]

It is not just the failure of the Confederacy to secede that has homogenized the USA. It is the shared media. Canada is very much like the US: it resembles the US culturally more than it does the UK. 

From what I understand, international marriages are more frequent now in Europe than they used to be.
Europe is not the US and will not follow the same pattern. It will resemble the US in some ways, and not in others.

There are advantages to diversity, but there are also advantages to a population NOT being diverse, as it makes for a country where most people share the same goals, as it does in Japan, S. Korea, Denmark and Iceland.

[Plane]

  The US got homogenized a lot by the railroad , then radio , then Highways, it is still going on , I myself have an intermediate accent and people guess I am from the heartland even though I have always been a Georgian.

    I think I have Cronkitus.


    Europe gets a later start because their great wars are more recent , but now that they are more free to cross borders and are blessed with a Chunnel I expect they will go through the same process we did but at greater speed.

     After all they have TV, and TGV.

    What will the European Language sound like in a century?

      Just guessing , I think it will be a new version of English with plenty of amalgamation from other languages , but the French are fighting this trend with a will.

[Xavier_Onassis]

The French do not really fight changes in the language. The just like to post articles in the media about it. You cannot force people to use or refrain from using this word or that. Years ago, I was a passenger on the Ticabus between San Jose Costa Rica and Guatemala City. There were 68 seats on the bus and there were people from 37 different countries. The driver would ask everyone for his passport, and then present all of the passports to the customs people. After a half hour or so, he would return them all stamped.  Leaving Costa Rica, a Panamanian kid bought a bottle of rum and drank way too much of it. At a restaurant stop in Nicaragua, he  managed to get himself arrested for public drunkenness, (as I recall, he threw up on some merchandise) and we took up a collection to bail him out. I think each of us had to part with something like a dollar and change. This led to a lot of discussion  between passengers. Almost everyone spoke some Spanish or some English, and as I spoke both, I spent a lot of time explaining how the drunk promised to turn over his bottle to the driver and drunk no more. The Europeans mostly all spoke English, others spoke some Spanish. There was one Bulgarian kid who only spoke Bulgarian and a bit of French. The parley took about an hour. The money was raised, the drunk bailed out,and we were on our way again to Managua, which was where we spent the night in some sort of hostel cobbled together out of 4 X 8 sheets of plywood. This was about a year after the horrible earthquake

There will not be a "European language". Europe will be like Catalonia, where all the Catalans speak Catalan at home and to each other, and Spanish to all who do not understand.

[Plane]

  That is a good story.