The EU was formed in 1993, with precursor organisations going back to 1948, and the European Parliament has been elected in continuity since 1979. On the European continent, there can be basically almost no continuity going back farther than after WW2 because of how the war completely reshaped the continent. In that sense, the EU has more continuity than many Eastern European nations.
> Shared values and norms.
This sounds very vague. Every political entity of a nontrivial size has massive diversity of thought, that's true of small Switzerland just as much as of the EU or the US. That said, I do think that on average, Europe tend to value certain things (e.g. walkable cities) more than some other areas in the world.
The EU was formed in 1993, with precursor organisations going back to 1948, and the European Parliament has been elected in continuity since 1979. On the European continent, there can be basically almost no continuity going back farther than after WW2 because of how the war completely reshaped the continent. In that sense, the EU has more continuity than many Eastern European nations.
> Shared values and norms.
This sounds very vague. Every political entity of a nontrivial size has massive diversity of thought, that's true of small Switzerland just as much as of the EU or the US. That said, I do think that on average, Europe tend to value certain things (e.g. walkable cities) more than some other areas in the world.