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Comment by highmastdon | Hacker News Reader

Side note: don’t call the countries in the European Union “states”. They’re sovereign countries that have committed themselves through treaties to the Union, not a US like government body

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I'm pretty sure state meant a sovereign government before the united states existed.

Remember, the original idea of the united states was that it was a bunch of separate governments that were federated. It still kind of is, but the federal government used to have much less control.

The European Union (EU) consists of 27 member states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U...

I don't think it's incorrect to call them states. They're nation states. They are regularly referred to as member states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U...

Languages are strange in very different ways. The Italian word for country is "stato". How do we translate state as in "NY is a state of the USA"? Again "stato". We have "nazione" for nations but really nothing for countries. We do say "paesi esteri" for "foreign countries" but that's almost the only occurrence with that meaning. A "paese" is a town, so nobody will ever say that Germany or France are a "paese".

Actually, "paese" is the normal translation for country (optionally with capital "P" if one wants to avoid ambiguities with the "town" meaning)

> nobody will ever say that Germany or France are a "paese"

Google lists > 200.000 results for "la Germania è un paese".

Country means “sovereign state” - no-one’s suggesting EU member states aren’t sovereign nations in the sense US states aren’t.

U.S. states are sovereign states, just like EU states are. They United States government itself is also sovereign, in a sense that the EU government itself may or may not be. (Most) Americans live under two sovereigns: their state and the U.S.

Maybe so, but then we need to come up with more words. As the UK proved, a nation in the EU is free to leave the EU, but a state in the US is not. (Without consent of the US, of course.)

> As the UK proved, a nation in the EU is free to leave the EU, but a state in the US is not. (Without consent of the US, of course.)

Which article or amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbids a state to leave without permission of the U.S.?

There is of course no clause of the constitution that forbids secession but SCOTUS currently interprets the constitution as creating an "indestructible union" if I recall the language correctly.

And good luck finding a good vehicle to overturn that precedent.

The TEU at least provides an explicit process for leaving

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_Stat...

When we nitpick,

"country" = geographic unit, "state" = political unit.

The United States is itself a state, albeit a federation of smaller states.

This is a nice distinction, actually. It means we can think about "stateless countries" (like Western Sahara, perhaps), and "countryless states" (like the Sovereign Military Order of Malta).

Stateless countries are also those that cross state borders. Example: Kurdistan, Ireland.

And conversely, there are states spanning (parts of) more than one country: The UK with North Ireland and many others (perhaps England, Scotland and Wales if you consider them separate countries).

It's amazing how contrarian HN can get. The EU is literally composed of member states in its formation documents

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