[tistoon]

This will never happen, or at most, it will be a half-baked clunky "federation" like today. Why? Because you will always say first: "I am Italian" and not "I am European" when introducing yourself. All the dreamy one powerful Europe will never happen because of this. Which makes sense because Europe, by definition, is multiple countries, identities and cultures!

[Tom1380]

And I am Ligurian, before Italian. If I can be both, I can be all three

[OKRainbowKid]

By that logic, Germany would have never formed.

[croon]

I'll add Italy, the UK, Spain, Switzerland, Greece.

[tistoon]

By this logic, we'll never get rid of nations and become one federated people of Earth... See? I can switch eras and make an irrelevant comment too! :)

[epolanski]

I'm not sure where are you from, but we Europeans do also feel Europeans.

This isn't about countries losing sovereignty over night, but about creating common frameworks and regulations step by step.

This is already a reality in some sectors, e.g. agriculture.

Agriculture sits under exclusive or near-exclusive EU control in the whole EU and the model works (albeit it's not perfect, like no model is). EU promotes countries to produce what they are good at. Thus, it doesn't incentivize Italy to produce cereals much, because Italy does not have the right land to grow cereals and that would not make much sense in economic terms. Instead Italy is incentivized to grow cheese, meat, grapes, olives, etc, things that Italy is good at and sells well.

There's other things on which all countries delegate to EU: trade (tariffs and custom rules), goods standards, aviation safety rules, competition and state aid regulations, etc, etc.

So I would say that EU has been very successful on multiple fronts in harmonizing and taking responsibility for multiple things.

But I'm gonna give you of a simple blocker at EU level: why gdpr or dma/dsa are very EU centralized, ultimately digital and data regulations are still not really delegated and national law takes precedence: this is a very heavy blocker to scale any company that requires any kind of business involving data. As soon as you cross a border you need to know the ins and outs of every single country. So it's not that trivial to build a software service company and have it scale painlessly across Europe.

Examples include: contract law, consumer protection, liability rules, and all courts remain national. Terms of service, refund rules, dispute handling is always country-specific. Expanding beyond your own borders is very expensive. Then you have tax complexity, payment and banking, labor law, data protection (as mentioned)..

[tistoon]

That's what I said. A european feels european. But it will always come after your citizenship :)