DO YOU FEEL EUROPE is politically divided

Why is America more politically divided than most other western countries?

I don’t think it’s unusually divided when it comes to the intensity of political disagreement on specific issues, as others have said. Look at how far apart the two main parties are at the moment in the UK, for example, and the strife the country has experienced over austerity and Brexit.

Where the USA might be an outlier, though, is in the correlation between different policies amongst ordinary voters and the strength of ‘bubbles’ around entire political programmes. There is an identifiable basket of ‘conservative’ policies and an identifiable basket of ‘liberal’ policies in the USA, which are largely opposites of each other. Neither are especially ideologically coherent or systematic (nor do they align with conservatism or liberalism as classically defined). Nevertheless, if you poll Americans on these issues, their answers are highly correlated, so that many Americans either agree with most of the ‘conservative’ programme or disagree with it, and ditto for the ‘liberal’ programme. There’s a lot of pressure on both sides to impose a kind of ‘orthodoxy’ across a whole range of issues that aren’t obviously connected.

There are a few issues that still cross factional lines, such as free trade and overseas military interventionism, and there’s still some ideological diversity within each faction, but the general trend has been a sorting of US political ideas into ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ ones (a bit like the division of consumer goods into ‘for men’ and ‘for women’). An example of this is climate change, which was formerly seen as a general matter of concern in the USA (as it still is in Europe), but has increasingly been pigeonholed as a ‘liberal concern’ or even a ‘liberal invention’ in the eyes of ‘conservatives’.

I feel like the political divide in the U.S. has gotten so bad the two sides will come to blows. If it does, what will the outcome be?

If you mean in a clear, civil war style fight? Probably not much of anything. If we assume that 100% of the nation who were on one side or the other decided to trade blows, there happens to be one side in full control of the government who also has a particular fixation on guns and other weapons systems. You can take a guess as to what would happen in that scenario.

A much much more realistic scenario is that 1% of a 1% of people decide trading blows is the only option, then only 1% of that percentage shows up at the “battle field” and from there the police would disperse the crowd of probably 20–30 people. There are very very few who would actually attempt physical warlike conflict in this entire sphere. The latest political elections are proof enough with a roughly 40% voter turn out.

Why is Europe divided into many small countries?

Because

each of these countries is a separate nation or group of nations
of geography
of history, especially the growth of the nation stat

Let’s go through each one by one:

Nations.

If you look at it, the “smaller” countries like Estonia (1 million people), Hungary (10 m), Finland (5 m), Slovakia (5 m) are all different “nations”.

Let’s take a look at a linguistic map of Europe in 1914 (NOTE — 100 years old)

And now a map of Europe politically in 1914

nd let’s look at the ethno-linguistic map of Europe today

So you can see that the current countries in Europe map roughly to ethnicity

2. GEOGRAPHY: Europe is split geographically into 4+ peninsulas (Scandanadavian, Iberian, Italian, Balkan) and has a lot of mountain ranges that cut off different parts of the country. This enabled separate “nations”

3. History: as you see in the map above, a lot of Europe was in multi-ethnic states ruled by a monarchy.

But the French revolution changed things — instead of people being united by a common king, the Parisian elite realised they needed another “unifier” — and that was not religion (another common unifier) — so they changed the country — before the French revolution, only about 10% of “France” spoke French (the Parisian dialect). By 1850, it was the only official language and other dialects and languages were dying out.

The Germans, English, Russians, Italians etc. took this up to create ethnically and linguistically “pure” states.

In all of these cases, minorities were trampled upon, forcibly assimilated or pressured into assimilation.

Then WWII happened — at the end of that, Stalin created ethnically “pure” states out of multi-ethnic ones.

That is why Europe has multiple countries — arguably, it should have more, but for the quirks of history, Catalan, Basque, Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, Bavaria etc. would be separate countries

Why is Britain so politically divided?

The divide is actually historical and very difficult to avoid esp. in the freedom and democracy system of Britain. The first people of this island groups the Briton are of Pre-Celtic descent. How, why and when they came to these island groups is not clear since there is the North sea between the continent and the island groups. They settle a few millennium before CE, when these island were connected with the continent. These people constructed the stonehenges on the continent Hunnebedden [Netherlands] also found in France and Germany.

These people were invaded and occupied by the Roman empire during the first century CE and the start of the diversification of this island groups was initiated. The Roman only entered the England territories and never when to Ireland or Scotland and even Wales. [Remember the Hadrian walls] During this times marauders of the Gaels [Central European Celtic] tribe entered this island groups especially Ireland, Wales and part of Scotland.

During the early medieval times the Saxon came and claim England as their kingdom. During this time this territories became Christians. But this is only only a few centuries long until the Vikings from Norway and Denmark took over England. Scotland and Ireland were able to prevent any foreign occupations and are rel. Gaelic as a whole. It was Christianed by the Irish Gaels monks.

A few centuries later before the start of the 2nd millennium before the crusades.came the Norman , Breton and other Anglo Saxon ethnic groups from France. Since this period England is owned and controlled by French royalty.

During the Reformation centuries - UK is a hell for all sides. The separation of the Anglican church, the Protestant and the Roman Catholic created chaos that divided the country more and more. During this time there is a Scotland and an England -governed by one king [James VI] Kings beheading [Charles I] and wars between protestant and Catholics, incl. fundamentalist protestants {Mayflower]was costly for the country and divide the people more and more.

This is in short in my opinion the reason why UK is divided by ethnic groups, religion, tradition and culture. Only after King George I [George August of the House of Hanover ] some unity is restored. UK is not special - Continental Europe is worse and the reason why Continental Europe has 101 small countries, like Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco etc.

Concerning British politics, do you now feel that with the politcal parties so very divided, that proportional representation would be a more viable option for the British electorate?

Yes. Brexit has completely broken our political system and the traditional two-party structure no longer works.

First-past-the-post (FPTP) has forced coalitions to form within parties rather than between parties. There was little point having a party that could only command 20% or less of the popular vote as they would be disadvantaged by the nature of FPTP, so each of the two main parties has become a coalition of interests in which members sacrificed some of their principles in the interest of being in contention for power.

Those internal coalitions no longer work because Brexit is an intensely ideological issue that cuts right across the traditional political spectrum. Centrists and liberals are largely pro-EU, while the anarcho-capitalists, xenophobic far-right, and Bennite/Corbynite far-left are anti-EU. Views on Brexit do not map conveniently to views on domestic matters.

The Conservative Party is in the latter stages of tearing itself apart over Brexit and cannot realistically survive in its current guise, while the Labour Party is not far behind. Although Labour Remainers are being kept remarkably quiet by their leader for now, that is a situation that would not continue if they were any closer to challenging for government.

We need new political parties that can represent a more granular policy set, but that only makes sense within a system of proportional representation and consensus politics based on parliamentary coalitions. As part of that process we also need to redesign or replace the Commons Chamber and do away with the adversarial layout of benches in which the government faces the opposition.