Hey Walter,

>>Democracies where the culture is not completely inline with the government are fragile, perhaps I should have been clearer. This, IMHO, is why dictatorships arose in Europe when the economy is bad. America, OTOH, was founded in a democratic revolution and has no historical alternate form of government to turn to as the people are deeply invested in the republic. A good example of this is the American Civil War. If there was ever a time of stress on our country, it was then.
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>Hmmm, IMO, any democracy in a country with huge economical or regional issues is fragile. A democracy needs to have a solid fundation in order to work. As shown too many times, you cannot force a democracy. That would even apply to the US. With all respect, the civil war in the US is little insignificant dispute compared to what happened over here. Napolean wars, arround 2.5 million, WWI costed about 20 million lives, and WWII about 72 Million. (More than 100 times as much). And don't forget about the number of those increasingly violent wars.

The Civil War killed off about 620,000 so I wouldn't call it insignificant. And I'm not referring to body county, more like stress to the political system.

>The US is a much different cattle of fish. First of all it is very spread out and the density of population is very low, even today. There is much less reason to fight for territorital reasons.

There's NO reason because we didn't have that history Europe had of every ethnicity hating just every opther one at some time in the past. Illinois has never coveted Indiana, for example.

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>>And I totally agree that the situation in Europe was too complex to have a wholesale grafting of American democracy on the existing institutions. As to holding off Russia, well, if you look at the GNP defense allotments in the 70's and 80's it was the US holding off the Soviets while most European countries were able to plow an inordinate % of their GDP back into their growth.
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>I cannot disagree with that. But what are you trying to say with that? The europeans already has nuclear programs before the war, but suspended that becuase of the US presence: There was less need to develop a nuclear program.

I wasn't talking nukes, I was speaking to ground and air forces.

>>In the end, though, I don't think the EU is all that different from the US as far as the average citizen's rights and responsibilties are concerned. Yes, the structure may be different but the goals are the same. Maybe the rights of the individual and liberty is what we gave back to Europe.
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>Did you read the article link I gave you in the previous post? I think there are very fundamental differences. Jeremy rifkin excellently points out what the differences are between the european and american culture. You can disagree about the rest of the article all you like, but certainly read the part where he sums up the differences.
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>Europeans do far less value the rights and liberty of individuals, but far more the rights and liberties of the people as a group. As Rifkin sums up. Americans find happyness in individualism, europeans in embeddedness.

I read the article and I agreed with a lot of points as well as the one you just posted.