IMO, that's why American progressives admire it and want to emulate it.
...The problem with the E.U. is that it was, at its founding, grounded in false assumptions about human nature and the role of the nation in creating a people's identity.
These assumptions have for 200 years been accepted as facts, when actually they are questionable ideas challenged by history.The E.U. is just the latest example of the powerful Enlightenment idea that human nature and civilization, through the expansion of scientific knowledge, are progressing away from the cruelty, oppression, and collective violence created by irrational superstition, religion, and ethnic or nationalist loyalties. Once liberated from this destructive ignorance, people can create political and social orders that will promote peace, social justice, political freedom, and prosperity.
...The unprecedented carnage of World War I, in which the peoples of highly civilized Europe
killed each other with nationalist and ethnic fervor, did not lessen enthusiasm for such idealistic internationalism....Nor did the even greater horrors of World War II disabuse the West of its idealism, most obviously manifested in the creation of the United Nations, which has done little to save the some 41 million victims of invasion, genocide, civil war, political murder, and ethnic cleansing since World War II.
This record of failure would not have surprised political theorists from Thucydides to the American framers. In that tradition, human nature is permanently flawed by what James Madison called "passions and interests" that necessarily conflict with those of other people or nations, and often lead to violence between them.
...Nor did these realists believe that better education or prosperity could permanently rein in these flaws of human nature, for dangerous world of "imperious necessities," as Thucydides called the tragic contingencies of human existence, would always create stresses that prove "a rough master that brings most men's characters to a level with their fortunes." The gruesome carnage Europeans inflicted on each other in the twentieth century proved Thucydides correct.
