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Comment by nixxle | Hacker News Reader

Lol, can't blame the writer for not understanding how Europe works. It's actually a bunch of countries, not states.

EU legislation doesn't use the word 'country' anywhere, and neither does anyone working in the Commission. The EU is made up of 'Member States' in the parlance.

Good thing too. 'Country' is a loaded word with various populations both claiming and denying their geographic locale as a separate country from the legal entity (or 'Member State') they're a part of.

The countries in the EU are known as 'Member States'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_Un...

Edit: Also the author of the piece is a native of an EU member state

Edit2: Also now that I look I don't actually see the article mention the word 'state'.

What the hell, man?

I think he was simply implying that Germany doesn't control the rest of the countries in Europe like the US government controls its states.

They don't control the rest of Europe (though right now with the Euro situation they probably just about do), however there are provisions for legal precedent in one Member State to apply in every. I have no idea how it works and when it applies, though. It's definitely not so direct as in the U.S.

Courts in Europe are not precedence-based. At least not in all countries. Here (Poland) there is no such thing as precedence in courts, not to mention basing a verdict on precedence in foreign court.

Just to confuse things even more, some of the member states are made up of more than one country.

This is just false. Just to clear things up:

- a state with lower-case S is a subdivision of a Federal Country.

- a State with upper-case S is a synonym of Country.

- All members of the EU are States/Countries. Some of these countries are Federal (Germany for instance) and are subdivised into states (Länder in the case of Germany).

- Some States of the EU include multiple Nations. UK is one of these. Scotland is neither a State nor a state for example, but it's a nation.

- Some States of the EU have territories that encompass States that are not members of the EU. Monaco or the Vatican are examples. Some of these States belong to the Eurozone though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microstates_and_the_European_Un...

That's an amusing taxonomy, but don't fool yourself into thinking this stuff can be so precisely and unambiguously delineated. There's a continuum between a province with some autonomy to fully-fledged independent nation state, and the application of various English words to refer to particular entities that lie in different places on the continuum is governed primarily by history and culture, not by legal and political specifics. For any set of properties you care to define for nationhood or statehood, you can usually find entities that are not evenly cut into one or the other.

The Commonwealth shares a head of state; for example, Canada would be a sovereign state (small s) within the terminology of the Commonwealth. The Common Travel Area has passport-free travel; Irish and UK citizens can vote in one another's national parliaments, while EU citizens generally can only vote in local and EU elections. British crown dependencies are distinct from its overseas territories. There aren't enough shades of meaning in the miserly handful of terms you defined above (and seems rather German-centric) to adequately cover all the dependent and independent relationships involved.

Not to mention the fact that, as far as I am aware, the term used for the constituents parts of the UK is "country":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_United_Kingdom

I don't think many people answer "British" to the question "What country are you from?".

Not many people would answer "British" to the question "What country are you from?", because "British" is not a place, but a nationality. ;)

If you asked me what I am, I might respond "British" - whereas if you asked where I'm from, I might respond "Britain".

Where are the isles of man, guernsey and jersey in that list of constituent "coutries"? That is, where do they fit within the kingdom?

None of them are part of the UK, and they are also outside the EU. Somewhere I have a Jersey Pound...

I was merely trying to disambiguate the notion of state (as in United States of America) and the notion of State (as in Member State of the European Union), but you're right in putting a big warning sign on my taxonomy, since it's easily the kind of things that could (and actually has) lead to wars.

Oh and good thing my terms are German-centric, since I'm French. We don't even have the notion of state here in our civic system (but we do have tons of others of course).

> Irish and UK citizens can vote in one another's national parliaments

That's not true in general. People in Northern Ireland are entitled to one or both citizenships which makes it true in that limited case.

I'm Irish, yet I am on the UK electoral roll and get voting cards for general elections, which my German girlfriend does not.

http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/faq/voting-and-registr...

"To vote in a UK general election a person must be registered to vote and also [...] be a British citizen, a qualifying Commonwealth citizen or a citizen of the Republic of Ireland"

http://www.dublincity.ie/yourcouncil/votingandelections/Page...

"Elections for Dáil Éireann: Both Irish and British citizens can vote in elections for Dáil Éireann (the lower house of parliament)."

The article doesn't use the word state anywhere, but one of the definitions of state is "a politically unified people occupying a definite territory; nation.", so yes, Europe consists of multiples states.

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