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CNNMoney.com ran an article in July of 2010 on Illinois’ debt problem by likening Illinois to Greece. Rarely are states of the US compared to states of the EU. I suspect that comparisons between the American republics and European countries were more common during the first fifty years of the US, when—as in the EU in its first fifty years—most people living in the American states identified themselves principally with their country rather than as Americans. Aspiring politicans typically had their eyes on their respective state legislatures rather than on the Congress of the union because the states that formed the union held most of the domains of power and held the attachment of their respective citizens.  So it is in the early twenty-first century in the EU. Hence, I contend that the EU today is best compared with the US during its first fifty years rather than with its condition in the twenty-first century as a consolidated empire. 

Lest Europeans be too confident that the EU could never consolidate too, they might read Madison’s Notes on the Constitutional Convention, which report the certainty of the delegates that the peoples’ identification with their respective republics could be counted upon to restrain encroachments from the US level of governance. Of course, the state identification in the US has fellen away—though it is still more evident in Texas than say in Illinois. As strong as “nationalism” is now in Europe, Europeans would be wise not to rely on it in structuring their Union for future generations. It is indeed amazing how something so salient today can be so enervated tomorrow. We tend to project our day forward, when the sad fact is that three or four generations from now almost all of us will have been forgotten.

In terms of Illinois, in the middle of 2010 when Moody’s and Fitch downgraded its debt, the republic was on the way to assuming nearly $10 billion in sovereign debt for the year (yet, like Greece, without its own monetary policy). Unlike Greece, Illinois could not count on its Union for help—as the US itself was $13 tillion in debt and the stimulus money was ending at the end of 2010 (just after the midterm Congressional elections). The EU’s help itself reflects the federal balance in that union, as the state officials played an active role with EU officials in putting together the rescue package. The lack of such a balance in the US has contributed to Illinois’ financial condition.

After years of overspending, Illinois had as much as $6 billion in unpaid bills that left schools, social service agencies, and venders waiting months to be paid, according to the comptroller Daniel Hynes. “We’re leveraging our future and that’s not the correct approach, but it was what was chosen out of a lot of bad options,” Hynes told CNNMoney.com. Perhaps not many Illinoisians were aware of the structural imbalance, given their primary attention on matters of the US.  Because the debt problem has compromised Illinois (as the same problem has enervated Greece), the failure of Illinoisians to pay sufficient attention to their immediate republic can be linked to a further “downgrade” of it. Unlike Europeans, Americans cannot count on “nationalism” at the state level as a check in keeping their state officials “honest.” (Corruption in Illinois is indeed a problem)  Lest we take this difference to be enduring, we might remember that even seemingly-solid political attachments can shift radically even as the institutions remain.

In short, Illinois and Greece can be compared and contrasted on the particularities of their debt problems, and so can the EU and US as federal systems of public governance.  Avoiding category mistakes, like comparing Illinois to the EU, is a first step (which CNN has begun to avoid, albeit in small steps) to being able to compare and contrast in ways that do not result in faulty conclusions wherein apples are compared with oranges.  Yet from the vantage-point of the early twenty-first century, both in Europe and America, the category mistake still rules like a huge societal blind-spot. To compare the EU to the US (and any of their respective states with one of the other), it is most accurate to compare the EU now to the US during its first fifty years.  In a looser sense, a state of the EU is on the same level as one of the US, and the EU itself is on the same level as the US—the American colonies having been so in the Greek rather than the Roman sense (i.e., as replicating the home kingdom, rather than as a province thereof).

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/13/news/economy/illinois_debt/index.htm