[Goetz_von_Berlichingen]

"The nation-state has not failed Americans--indeed, it hasn't occurred to the average citizen that its status could be doubted. Americans turn instinctively to the nation for security, and they regard it as a permanent locus of meaningful political life."

He is certainly right that this has not occurred to the average citizen, because the majority of the country is blind to its own history. The American "nation-state" represents a rejection of the Constitution (especially the Tenth Amendment), effected by the extremely bloody, destructive, and unnecessary, War Between the States. Lincoln was the American Bismarck, uniting -- "subduing" is probably a better word -- the sovereign states into provinces of his empire. To a Constitutional conservative, the U.S. nation-state has been as much of a disaster as its European counterparts.

The answer is not a bigger and better super-national state, but rather a return to provincial (or state) sovereignty -- distributivism. The partisans of one-Europe (or one-world) government conveniently ignore the fact that many "nationalists" are, in fact, "provincialists."

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Actually, the US looks like the EU in important ways. It's been an attempt to transcend smaller units and provide a large common market for economic activity. Had we broken up into smaller units, each jealously guarding their power and identity, they might well have left the kind of bad taste behind that European nation-states did.