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On October 14, 2009, Charlie Rose interviewed John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of The Economist. The editor told Charlie that his publication supports Tony Blair as President of the European Council in the EU. The editor, by the way, is British. He said that “some ex-president” of a small EU State such as Luxembourg (i.e., a mere bureaucrat) could hardly stand toe to toe with Obama of the US and Hu of China. The editor obviously viewed the leaders of the large states of the EU as vastly superior to those of the small states. To be sure, it is difficult to view the UK and Luxembourg as being commensurate polities either in terms of land or population. Even so, as both of these polities are states in the EU, the prime minister of either ought to suitable to preside at the European Council.  Indeed, that intergovernmental body is akin to the U.S. Senate rather than to an entire government. Interestingly, as the editor was being interviewed, Joe Biden, who comes from one of the smallest States in the Union (i.e., Delaware), was President of the US Senate because he was elected as the Vice President of the US.

Although the President of the European Council is not President of the EU government as a whole and is thus not equivalent to the President of the United States, the editor did tacitly acknowledge by his comparison that the EU is commensurate with the US (and China). Both the US and EU are empire-scale unions of commensurate republics (large states in the US being roughly the same size as the large states in the EU); the British colonies in North America had been colonies in the Greek rather than the Roman sense--meaning one the same scale of the host kingdom rather than mere provinces.  Put another way, in being referred to as provinces, the colonies were so as provinces, or members, of the empire (Ireland being another member) rather than as provinces of a kingdom such as France.

That a large state in the EU used to be the host kingdom of an empire does not mean that that state is somehow equivalent to the Union of which it is a member (i.e., the EU) or to other Unions on the empire-scale such as the US.   To treat the UK as akin to the EU ignores the fact that Britain is a state in the EU.  By implication, to suppose Britain is superior to any other EU state is to commit a fallacious category mistake (i.e., conflating things of different levels or categories) in a way that unjustly distends or vaunts Britain.  In other words, being a host kingdom in an empire is commensurate to being a state in a union of republics that were (early modern) kingdoms; neither is equivalent to being an empire-scale polity consisting of such republics.

Imagine, if you will, New York claiming to be akin to the US or the EU simply due to a large population or land mass.   Such a claim can scarely be imagined, yet even small states in the EU are regularly treated as though they were commensurate with the US as a whole.  "In Romania we tend to eat X. What do you eat in the US?"  Well, it depends.  A Texan might talk of steak whereas a Maine man might refer to lobster.  The US is not like a European member state but with big territory; rather, the US is a union composed of states that are equivalent in scale to a European country. In spite of all this, the same person who views Britain as a third Union next to the EU and US would scoff at a similar statement made about New York.  It is precisely such illogical hypocrisy that is not seen on either side of the pond.

Strangely, the European editor of The Economist presumed in his interview with Charlie Rose there is some “Anglo-American” thing that likens his EU State to all of the American States (even those that had been French and Spanish colonies). He presumed that the commonalities in this axis are somehow greater than what Britain shares culturally with its sister states in the EU. C’est vraiment incroyable!  Even if parts of New England still have vestages of an English culture, this could hardly be generalized across the continent. New Mexico culture, for example, is overwhelmingly hispanic.  In actuality, the present-day US contains among its republics those that had been colonies of France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Spain, as well as Britain.  That is to say, the US is an empire-scale union of republics, and various cultural ingrediants went into those republics differentially.  An empire is, in other words, inherently heterogenious. 
I raise the case of the editor because it illustrates how people can get away with playing fast and loose with comparisons, especially where ideology and vested interests are involved. If I am correct in my analysis, cross-Atlantic comparisons are rife with category mistakes.  The practical significance of the problem include faulty conclusions (such as that there is a favorite food across the US) and missed opportunities to learn from each other (such as in contrasting the designs of the EU and US).

Sources:
http://www.charlierose.com/
http://www.newsweek.com/id/217090