1) The United States and Europe share many similarities, and often the United States acts like a European country. Yet it is also clear that the United States has some marked differences from most of Europe. Please discuss ways in which the United States and Europe are similar. Word count: 250

The United states and Europe share many similarities: a devotion to fundamental democratic principles, a strategic alliance that has defined the world order for more than a half-century, and, despite major economic challenges in recent years, some of the greatest living standards in the world.The EU and the United States are now comparable because they represent two distinct species of the same political genus: compound democracy. The unification of states and their citizens is the distinguishing trait of compound democracy. States agree to pool their sovereignty into a greater integrated supra-state or supranational framework through such union. They do so because these partnerships are largely peace treaties. Because the states that formed those unions were and continue to be asymmetrically correlated, any attempt to establish an united polity. That is, a political system in which decision-making authority is monopolised by a single institution is doomed to fail.