> IMHO the US is special, as it doesn't have the baggage from the history that spans thousands of years on the record.
Interestingly, there were civilizations in America thousands of years ago, as there were in Europe. The USA was founded a coupla hundred years before the EU.
The EU didn't conquer and replace the old society, most of the governments in the EU predate the EU. The US did take many concepts from Europe (common law, republic government), but threw away many others.
The EU looks a lot like the US articles of confederation which the US scrapped after about 10 years for the current constitution because the articles were not powerful enough. (though I personally think the articles only needed some minor tweaks - that is a different debate not worth getting into). The EU's is seeing the same problems those who wanted to replace the articles with the constitution were seeing - but are the worth replacing/fixing is an open question that the EU should be debating.
Sure, the the EU has _massive_ cultural baggage because it's comprised of civilisation whic, by-and-large, have thousands of years of history with each other, on the same (limited) land. The US is vastly more culturally homogenous, with more land, and a unified government.
> have thousands of years of history with each other
Not really.
In many parts of what is now Germany, people spoke dialects that were incomprehensible even to people in the next valley; this was as recently as the 19thC. In the 20thC, a British leader could speak of Czeckoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little". Modern Frenchmen would regard their countrymen from 2K years ago as completely alien. Modern Greeks speak a language that is recognizably derived from ancient Greek, but in other cultural respects, modern and ancient Greeks are very different.
Those ancient societies regarded their neighbours as barbarian enemies, not as neighbours they shared a culture with. It's only since (say) the 5thC AD that European culture began to become more homogenous.
BTW, the idea that the US government is "unified" looks like a sick joke, from my perspective.
Interestingly, there were civilizations in America thousands of years ago, as there were in Europe. The USA was founded a coupla hundred years before the EU.