I get very dissapointed about how little changes. Like you, I watch that show and see exactly the same problems played out before us, and exactly the same solutions being applied. Luckily the show is incredibly funny, and really well scripted and acted. It's one of our best.

I haven't watched the US house of cards (it's on my list), but if you do try the original then I've heard it is a more subtle venture. Francis Erquhart is a slow and insidious character (the whole premise of the show is his descent into corruption), it won't have the pace of the US version. Do try it though, it's very good.

Nice try. Ukraine isn't European. Americans promised it NATO support and Europeans monetary aid, should its leadership "defect" to european union. We saw what became of it, as the end result of this little stunt. Europe and america is full of lies, fake promises, double agendas and when the trap they themselves set springs inevitably, they even accuse the ones who simply take action to restore order and were former pals to the "victims", in same former union, too.

Add Georgia in the picture, too. Be proud of European active meddling in foreign countries' affairs. And find the REAL culprit behind their tragedies.

NATO is desperate to operate bases under the nose of Russia and they are very provocative, as of late; hell, recently they violated russian borders, too and got repelled, with a nasty "accident" barely prevented (mostly because their sailors pissed their underwear, seeing the russian aircrafts swoop next to them at open sea)!

Watch the larger picture. And do follow militaristic news... Besides, the double standards are hard to miss; Obama declared Erdogan "within rights to drop the Russian plane" and "Turkey should be respected to defend her borders", while daily Turks abuse our own borders, sometimes multiple times during same day and no one says anything, puts them in their place, or urges them to respect our borders. Great allies; "With allies like those, what do we need enemies for?", a local saying goes.

Don't start that. Ukraine may be in Europe, but this thread is about TTIP, and that applies to the EU member states. I hate to say it, but Bradley actually has a point.

When I mentioned Ukraine, I was referring to a european state that governs itself for itself and is not part of any larger structure just as KiNgBrAdLeY7 wishes for every other european country to go about its existence.

I have yet to see the US either. I thought of starting with the original one.

What is wrong with Switzerland?

mmmm, somehow I wished I could live in your fairyland :o)

The whole concept of "unity" is totally useless if people don't have the same goals and even more so when there is a socio-cultural-economical gap. What's the common point between Germany and Romania? Why should we accept Turkey in the EU? Do we want to become American's dogs?

Unity is only relevant when countries can blend together, like we did with the Benelux. On the opposite side, we just have to look at the history of Yugoslavia. A new model of Europe would be better off based on the Benelux model with different "blocks" of independent countries only having some economic agreements between them to help them being relevant internationally while being able to keep their national policies (as it's not the case with EU currently). Example of "blocks" based on economic regions: Greece/Macedonia/Bulgaria/Romania, Denmark/Sweden/Norway/Finland, Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania, Spain/Portugal, Poland/Slovakia/Hungary/CzechRepublic.

And for "lone" countries, Switzerland is doing well and it can even be seen as much more democratic than EU as they do referendums regularly.

And what exactly is the "common point" in all those immigrants that created USA, especially considering the native americans? The common point between Romania and Germany is for example in actually being European. Some people might even say that the common point is christianity. Others might refer to the roman heritage of Romania which creates the "common point" between Romania and a whole bunch of countries that speak latin languages etc.
There is no "oh no we can't see the mythical common point and therefore we can never ever work together on anything". The point is to create a compromise and that new "common point" on which to base a common goal.
And if your common goal is supposed to not be someone's doge, than you better gets some friends to help you out since a lone country is always someone stronger's doge.
Unless you're something like Switzerland or Luxembourg or Monaco with an intricate banking network so that everyone in the world, legit or nonlegit, pours money into your country like crazy. You don't have to do much governing at that point.
And if you don't have all that dough from all around the Europe then your governing dudes would still want to be as rich as they feel entitled to by their political status, as rich as the other soloists like Switzerland, no matter that the country doesn't have enough money for the politicians to be rich and the little people to get at least decent money to get by so that everyone would be happy, just like in Switzerland.
And if your leaders want to get rich yet there's only their citizens to get the money from then your badass solo country that rules itself and shuns everyone around turns into Ukraine or Belarus.

Yeah UK is rich, Germany is rich, France is rich, there's a whole lot of european countries that get by well enough, but if it's a question of being someone's dog or not then not a single one stands a chance against USA, Russia or China. And then if there's a lone Germany being for example USA's doge, then Czech republic becomes Germany's doge, Poland would love to become USA's doge yet they wouldn't give a crap so it would become Russia's doge, again, like it or not etc.

Or maybe people could at least try and work towards a common goal.

That only works up to a certain limit. Once society (or even a company/organization) gets too large, sizing up becomes inefficient and even counterproductive because of administrative costs. The biggest mistake you can make with a massive collection of people is "top-down" government.

The main problem with top-down government:
-Inherently suppresses the will of the people; promotes oligarchy
-Inevitable corruption and political misbehavior as the scummiest people do whatever they can (disregarding ethics and the will of the people) in their bids to get into office.
-Ever-increasing government management/administrative costs

The only way to scale up a society/group of people to a theoretically unlimited size is a "bottom-up" approach (similar to how the USA was originally founded) - where decisions must be made at the lowest level/smallest group where they could be practically implemented. Any choices where the individual knows best should be left to the individual. Small, localized decisions should be left to city/town/local governments. If wider regulations are needed, then they are made at the state/federal level. The bottom-up approach keeps people closest to the governing law that affects them the most, so there's almost no need for central management and massive bureaucracy.
(Before anyone counter-argues that the USA already has central management, oligarchy through mega-corporations, and massive bureaucracy: the main reason why that happened is that the nation's founding principles and Constitution have largely been ignored for decades.)

The biggest problem with a one-world government is that there's no personal freedom of choice. You either accept the one world government or... find another planet to live on. A side note: A lot of the conflicts around the world would disappear if there was just another place to go. In the old days, most of the land on Earth was unclaimed - if you didn't like how your local government was ruling, you could always pack up and move out ("voting with your feet"). These days, almost all habitable land has been claimed.

Good fences make good neighbors. Great borders make great nations. If every culture gets its own land and the freedom to prosper or collapse, then the most worthy cultures will attract the most people while the most unworthy/self-destructive/oppressive ones collapse through their own mismanagement and stupidity. Immigrants should be required to adopt the cultures of their host nations to prevent "metastatic migration cancer" (where a particularly destructive culture destroys its own nation and land, then migrates somewhere better and brings all of its problems in, eventually collapsing its new host nation)

Unity through mutual agreement preserves local customs and culture. Forced unity destroys it. The reason why the USA works is that it was built from the ground up with somewhat independent states allied together under the Constitution and the federal government (that isn't working too well now, but that's a different matter entirely).

China's government has been selectively destroying local and/or traditional customs and culture. In recent years, Christians have been increasingly oppressed there (mostly through government-mandated church demolitions). There are also various Eastern religious groups (mostly variants of Buddhism/Taoism) that are heavily persecuted in China. The Communist party there has also increased its suppression against dissent in recent years.

Russia's government is currently broke due to the oil crash and they have widespread corrupt and government inefficiency problems. After the U.S. broke the Soviet Union back in the Reagan era, the former Soviet "satellite nations" drifted off and continue to have large corruption problems and widespread crime.

The Eurozone is currently a mess and its government is largely stacked against its people:
-There's a central European Parliament with "representatives" from each nation actually appointed by the nations' governments (instead of being elected through a popular vote).
-The Eurozone regulations affect every member nation, so there's always an incentive for member nations to have laws written in a way that favors them at the expense of everyone else.
-European states aren't American states. The USA was built united from the ground-up. On the other hand, some of the Eurozone's member states were at war with each other 70-100 years ago.
-The USA has traditionally been culturally and linguistically united. Europe has a hodgepodge of various languages and cultures.
-Eurozone-wide regulations produce a "one size fits none" effect where many laws might be a poor fit for a large number of member nations.
-There's too little protection from member nations acting in bad faith then expecting others to bail them out. Examples: governments spending and borrowing their future away, then demanding that the rest of the Eurozone bail them out. There's no framework in the Eurozone to force governments to balance their budgets, and the rest of the member nations are stuck being tied to other member nations with big government debt-machines.
-Another major problem: the "spread the migrants around" push. This allows some member nations to cheap out on border enforcement, then send any migrants they are unable to handle elsewhere.

That wasn't "government for the people by the people". That was corrupt big business and the United Nations climate change agenda (another one-world-government facade) forcing inviable power plant "solutions" on the public (through taxes, regulation, fearmongering, and big media/public education lies).

Ukraine's chock full of corruption. Bad example.

America and the Eurozone only did that to spite Russia.

Yes and no. The government, media, and a lot of megacorporations are full of lies, double agendas, and fake promises. Most of the average people are good and honest though. The last time so many governments have been stacked against their own people was in the Middle Ages.

Add Israel in the picture, too. Europe spends a crapload of money sending NGOs and other troublemakers to undermine the only democracy and Western-style nation in the Middle East.

The entire "Cold War 2.0" is a massive waste on both sides. It's a waste of the West's money provoking Russia, and these counter-provocations (usually Russian military planes buzzing U.S./NATO planes and ships) are a waste of money that Russia isn't able to afford.

It's more than just the Greek border. Turkey under Erdogan has been a major bad actor in recent years and a big part of the Eurozone migrant apocalypse. First, in the middle of the Syrian civil war, the Turkish administration "threw more fuel on the fire" there, prolonging the civil war and displacing massive numbers of Syrian civilians. Next, they are using the migrant apocalypse to twist the Eurozone's arm into giving Turks easy visa access (what's next, demanding membership in the Schengen zone?). The entire European "migrant exchange" agreement with Turkey is a farce and a setup - a lot of these migrants set sail from Turkey. The Eurozone should just send all the migrants back to Turkey (after all it was the Turkish administration that was largely responsible for the migrant apocalypse), then build a wall along the Turkish border and make NATO pay for it.
Oh, and Europe should never forget the recent weeks where Erdogan has been aggressively pushing to censor European freedom of speech.

The way you vaguely tried to link Romania and Germany just show the bias I was suspecting you have. It's like you were saying China Japan, South Korea and Taïwan should be together just because they're Asian. Actually, your point of view is aligned with the USA as seeing the EU as a big project to make new market by erasing regional traits where the word "unity" is just a synonym of "homogenization". As I'm already living in a country with two very different cultures, that kind of foreigner's point of view somehow makes me smile.

The internal process of the Union over the years has been to slowly overrule the laws and desires of participating countries, the Dutch referendum on Ukraine and how it was perceived by the eurocrats was a recent example of this. Another good example is making all railroads available for the "free market" (sorry, don't know the correct word in English) thus making local politics totally useless to decide what's good for their country. Also the lobbying in EU headquarters is widely recognised and they get on a much more important scale than if they were involved in a national governement thus we can easily doubt the decisions of eurocrats regarding the interests of the common European people.

Actually, just yesterday the EU got a new project to "increase" the pseudo-unity of Europe:
For countries which don't met their quotas of migrants, they will be fined of 250.000 euros per people (the money going to the country where the migrant is finally located)..... ==>> I'll let you medidate on how it's supposed to make the common people loving more the pseudo European Union.....

Since most of the countries that refuse to take in any immigrants are also the ones given the most money from EU I'm totally fine with this. They won't contribute anything they can leave and fuck geopolitics.

I don't see any problem in Romanian working together with the German unless you try really hard to invent the unbreakable obstacle according to which a common goal for people of different countries is completely impossible because of them being from different countries.
So you might want to meditate on how isolationism benefits anyone, especially if that particular isolationist doesn't want to be anyone's dog.

And there is no "homogenization" omg. No such thing can ever occur anywhere in the world since even all those USA immigrants that go rooting for Donnie Trump all the time eventually go home and surprisingly keep up their irish/polish/whatever heritage.

Speaking about EU "giving" money to countries, there has been an article from the German newspaper Handelsblatt about Greece and their financial aids which went almost entirely into the pockets of banks instead of the state:
https://global.handelsblatt.com/edition/423/ressort/politics/article/study-finds-greek-bailouts-saved-banks-not-people

What's new about that? Much of Greece financial aid went to helping banks tied to richer European countries. That's why EU suddenly started to make demands of Greece. They didn't fear a bank domino collapse anymore.
The acute financial aid to Greece was to bail themselves out. Now it's just to keep the dream of a unified Europe going. By punishing the Greeks. :S

Most of the financial aid during the financial crisis went to banks. Yeah it certainly helps to kickstart a economy by moving money from consumers to banks. That doesn't lead to stagnation. Nooo...

You're a funny guy: Where did I promote isolationism? Where did I say people can't work together? You have the same kind of rethoric as the eurocrats: confusing the presence of borders and local politics with isolationism, like you're forgetting centuries of international trades.

It's even more funny because your just reminded me of the sad story of European producers who couldn't export their products to Russia anymore because of the EU sanctions in response to the Ukraine crisis.

It's "new" for Germans that they start to admit that Greek people are not lazy bastards living of "free" EU money ;)