Europe - a good thing or a bad thing?

As a Brit, I don't hear politicians saying that Europe is good for us.  There are plenty of politicians who think it is, but they seem afraid to say so.

The British view of Europe is narrowly focussed on the European laws and regulations that affect us.  We often complain bitterly that "they" in Brussels are controlling our lives.

I work on medical devices.  Before Europe published the Medical Device Directive, my company had to obey separate safety regulations for each of the (then) 12 countries in Europe.  Afterwards, we only had one regulation for 12 countries.  Since then, the EU has grown to 27 countries.  The European regulations are simpler than many of the national regulations, and they allow manufacturers complete freedom as long as they obey the one set of European safety regulations.  How could this be bad?

As one of the authors of international standards,  I am one of the "they" that Brits complain about.  Even worse, I am writing standards that will probably be recognised all round the world, not just in Europe!

Other Europeans have a quite different view of Europe.  For the French and Germans, Europe is about ensuring that the terrible wars of the past never happen again.  For most Brits it is about a free-trade area.  Brits don't want a United States of Europe.  Germans generally do.

Yesterday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to the European Union for keeping the peace on the European continent from 1945 to the present.

The joke is that Norway has never joined the European Union!

Turning to the USA, you might expect that a federation of states would do better.  But the USA has never taken that final step of ensuring that the federal government is supreme.  The consitution, written in the days when it took 6 weeks to travel from Maine to Georgia, allows states the power to pass different and contradictory laws.  And the civil war ensured that state's rights would never again be seriously challenged by the federal government.

So it seems to me that on both sides of the Atlantic, we don't have agreement on whether we want political union and, if so, how we might achieve it.