re: #266 KGxvi

In fairness, there are 9 EU members that don’t use the Euro. The UK and Denmark have a special exemption under the original treaty creating the Euro. And the EU hasn’t actually tried to force any of the other seven members to adopt the currency.

The thing is, the EU has always been on a course towards a United States of Europe super-state. I’d argue that the EU is effectively a state under international law at this point, but the world just sort of pretends that it is not.

You could argue that the EU is sort of the US pre-Civil War: While on the world stage it appears a united state, in practice it’s still effectively a loose confederation of individual nation-states which pay lip-service to the idea that there are a singular nation. It wasn’t until the Civil War that went from the “the United States are” to “the United States is.”