"This cannot help but have an impact on the social fabric of each of the EU member nations individually and on the EU as a who."

If course it does, but the EU is a vastly different entity from the US, and it was founded for economic and (I suspect) military reasons and it's attempts at social enhancement have had mixed success and are the subject of vigourous debate. Even the idea of an EU president and a written constitution have been rejected by the people and there is some very intense discussion happening now about how to carry the whole thing forward.

In Europe we've long looked past our own borders and I think alanabit's viewpoint is very much a European one. We're not insular by nature and isolationism is (thankfully) a state few European countries have ever been able to achieve. Even at the height of the cold war Europeans were deeply interested and involved in each other's affairs, and now we are reunited, gathering new members into the trading block and we are experiencing the biggest internal changes since the end of WWII.

In my opinion, patriotism for the EU will always be a non-starter - it's not what it's about. The sovereign nations have lived together in peace and war for so long these are not simply regional differences in a disparate group people from varying backgrounds all mixed up and settling a (to them) new land as the US was, but countries whose people share a common history which dates back to before the last ice age, but who have very different languages and culture.

I'm very pro-Europe, but only as an economic entity to counter the steamrollering capitalist behemoths of the US and the Asian economies (there are still socialists in Government in Europe, though none left in politics in the UK), which the member states alone could not hope to stand up to alone. I'm no more likely to wave the EU flag than the Union Flag or any other national flag come to think of it.