“Thus, while few Americans are disturbed by Europeans' lavish welfare states, many Europeans take offense at America's "capitalist" system.”
A recurring question has been how much European views should influence American thinking when the two are at odds”
AND
“In the judgment of advanced Europeans today, the nation-state system has proven an abject failure, at least for Europe. The world wars of the last century brought Europe to the brink of devastation and reduced it from the pinnacle of world power to a secondary position.”
VS
“America's experience with the nation-state could hardly have been more different. 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. This difference in perspective is fundamental and leads inevitably to different ways of responding to the world.”
”EUROPE HAS LONG been an exporter of ideas. Its thinkers are used to regarding Europe as the center of the world, and therefore usually fail to notice that from a global perspective, what is taking place in Europe is of parochial significance. Instead, most European theorists and their American followers have sought to universalize the European experience.
As he illustrates it is important to note that US's success are not Europe’s failures as he points out in Balkans war, Gulf war,cold war.
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."