Without this value, the state can continue to erect legislation in the name of "safety", or any other perceived inequity in society, until you can no longer move.
How perverse that English law used to be a bastion of civil liberty protections. Here's a great scene from A Man For All Seasons that shows what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
The UK however, maybe. Brexit was a real dumb idea.
What in the world are you talking about? The US has all of this internally. If on the one narrow point you want to claim that EU has open-borders to the rest of the world, no you don't and that's not something that's good to have anyways. Both US and European citizens are fighting their own governments to decrease immigration as polling shows large opposition to current immigration levels for many years now. A big part of the crackdown on speech in the UK is to restrict criticism of immigration policy.
A better example would be Americans being able to travel freely to USMCA countries.
If you mean liberty as in Human Rights, it waxes and wanes. Broadly speaking in the EU in the 90s/00s human rights were improved and expanded. The European human rights courts were strengthened, more laws passed aimed at opposing discrimination. And the Human rights act in the UK was codified into law in 1998, for example.
The pendulum is presently swinging the other way, mainly due to a populist revolt against mass migration to Europe. It also doesn't help that mass surveillance has become so cheap and an easy way for politicians to be 'tough on crime'. Plus American tech treats privacy as a revenue model rather than a right, and that bleeds into policy expectations via lobbying.
It’s (nominally) a union of states after all
The US is over 2 times larger by land.
Population is about a quarter smaller. Still, Massachusetts has more people than Denmark, New York has the same as Romania, California has more people than Poland.
Our original founding documents cite "these united states", interestingly and very tellingly "these", not "the." States are their own entities, and you'd find many to have very different cultures and laws — probably the same level of variance you'd find in the EU.
The rearmament initiative is particularly concerning. Over the past three years, communities in Italy, Spain, Greece, and Germany have been devastated by flooding, wildfires, etc. Rather than prioritizing investment in resilient infrastructure, leaders are channeling resources into rearmament to confront Russia and China (or so they say - since they are acting as clowns anyway no one really pays attention). My concern is that these weapons may ultimately be used by Europeans against one another; It happened twice already.
[^1]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/temporary-border-controls-to...
[^2]: https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-europe-...
European liberalism is the wellspring of American liberalism, but Europe has - for obvious, historical reasons - much better organised reactionary elites. The equilibrium between the European publics and elites does indeed wax and wane.
In the 1990s a whole bunch of elite shibboleths were encoded into supranational law (so that no elected government is able to repeal them) as incredibly vaguely defined "human rights", which in turn have given rise to a vast bureaucratic apparatus to administer them (often staffed by the children of elite families). This apparatus is used as a cudgel to chip away at basic liberties - abstract, ill-defined communitarian rights (eg "safety") are used to sweep aside actual, tangible individual rights (eg speech, privacy).
(As an aside, the Soviet Union did effectively the same thing with their emphasis on "social rights" - such as those in the ICESCR - as opposed to "bourgeois" individual rights - such as those in the ICCPR. Didn't work out great for Soviet citizens.)
Since the 1990s, as a result of misgovernance by its chronically incompetent elites, Europe has been in decline by almost every metric. In the past ten years or so, the European publics have been in increasingly open revolt about this. A bunch of populist opportunists have seized on this revolt to offer various alleged alternatives, but been unable to deliver any sort of tangible change. (There is no reason to believe any change will come from this group, since they are basically just the second-rate members of the existing elite who have bet on populism as their ticket to the top.)
Europe tells itself stories about being a "human rights superpower" as an adaptive mechanism for its clear decline in prosperity, freedom, and relevance.
IMHO, Europeans deserve much better than this sad, managed decline. But given the deep structural barriers to protect the elites and prevent change, I just cannot see how this gets better.
Will the last European please turn out the lights?
Also, for better or for worse it helps that almost everyone speaks English everywhere.
But European countries are much more different from one another than the States are. I think it's actually quite a challenge to doing business there - growing into another country means you have to appeal to a very different culture, deal with different laws, speak a different language.
The US states have their differences but there's a reason they're part of the same nation.
Hard to take the rest of your post seriously as that is EU history 101. Pre-101 really, they teach it to teenagers.
In reality, the ECHR was effectively toothless before the 1990s. It's no coincidence you single out dates in the 1990s in both this and your earlier post. It's no coincidence virtually every major bit of leading European human rights jurisprudence is dated from the 90s onwards. It's no coincidence that there was a marked growth in state- and quasi-state institutions in the 1990s. There is an obvious pre-90s and 90s-onwards era of European human rights jurisprudence.
But you already knew this. You yourself correctly singled out the 1990s! You're just trying to hand-wave points you don't like with an argument to authority (and a very strange one, given the authority appears to be... children? And their understanding of the periodisation of human rights jurisprudence? Maybe we should consult European toddlers for their take on the œuvre of Montesquieu, just to make sure we're not missing anything?)
It's kind of striking to observe you reject my point that the human rights narrative is just a story that Europeans tell themselves, on the apparent grounds that that criticism doesn't jibe with the story that Europeans tell their children about Europe. This kind of makes my point.
So long as Europeans cling to fictitious narratives about their having transcended history into some kind of human rights nirvana, they will remain unable to push back on the actual, real decay of their freedoms and societies. Which is the desired outcome as far as elite institutions are concerned, so expect that narrative to be roundly enforced within Europe.
Hashtag celebrating seventy years of the ECHR! So much freedom - insert face here, thank you!
What usually is that they spend a few hundred millions in consultancy and plans. And then off we go for the next round :-)