Probably because most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time when the EU was, comparative to today, insignificant in # of countries, population, GDP, and general importance, and so very little talked about in either news or text books compared to Europe as an economic and political block. And since Europe was abbreviated 'Eur' well, easy to see how dropping the 'r' hasn't resulted in universal US intuition that it's not the same thing. In general though it does seem pretty understandable to think something calling itself "The European Union" is comprised of just about all of Europe. Especially back with the expanded in '93 countries it was a little presumptuous at only a small fraction of the continent getting together and calling itself that? I do remember learning something about it in school at the time, under the EEC name.

Want to avoid confusion? Call it something like "United Nations", 'UN'. Confusion solved, Americans happy, call off the tariffs, peace, etc.

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antonvs 3 days ago | parent [-]

That's a lot of justification for what ultimately just amounts to ignorance of the outside world.

It's certainly not the case that "most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time..." The EU exceeded $3 trillion in GDP by 1980. The original EU countries included Germany, France, and Italy, so were hardly insignificant.

	▲	ineedasername 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You don't seem aware that the "EU", in 1980, didn't exist, nor did you do the sums on the ages of the population in school by the time it did exist to realize that yes, by typical textbook replacement timelines in schools, something like the existence of the EU is unlikely to have been in the textbooks during the school days of most people over the age of 30.