Comment by dependsontheq

It's complicated. There are some factors that make any such comparisons very difficult, the EU is a complicated political entity uniting nearly 30 different cultures. That is a stunning achievement. It's also not really one market, in many ways it is but to actually sell something in all member countries I need to adapt to at least 20 different markets. There are the new eastern european members who actually often have difficult political problems, there are old members like Italy with ridiculous political problems (it's not the EUs fault that founding a company or taking another company to court takes ages in Italy). It's also a rapidly aging continent, that makes a comparison to the US difficult. Sure some things are stupid, sure the EU is bureaucratic (but I always wonder how a common market with 30 countries can be done any other way), sure it's slow (how could it be any way else), but it represents more than 400 million people trying to build a shared future. And it's the only example of something like that in human history. Look how good the relationship with between the US and Mexico works, the way the US structures its relationship (guns, border walls) is mostly responsible for an insane drug war. Look how China structures it's relationship with it's neighbors. I think it's highly likely that most neighboring countries will join the EU step by step, ant the EU will adapt change, become more effective, less effective. But it's hard to compare such a unique human experiment with anything.