> Are European countries not primarily socialist republics? No? At most we're a continent of mostly social democracies. The workers don't own the means of prod

> Are European countries not primarily socialist republics? No? At most we're a continent of mostly social democracies. The workers don't own the means of production here in general, although cooperatives can be quite strong here. We also have way stronger labour unions than those in the US, for example (although funnily enough, in some ways that distances us from socialist republics since those tended to have the habit of banning labour unions, ironically enough), but these things don't make our countries socialist in nature. Personally, I come from a Nordic country (Finland). Now, some American socialist pundits and politicians, like Bernie Sanders rather famously, tried to argue that the Nordic model is socialist and that we're socialist countries. They'd be wrong on that. While welfare states, we also explicitly have free market economies, which was even brought up by the Danish prime minister after the Sanders comments in 2015 in direct response to the latter. And in general, many people here would probably even be slightly offended by calling us socialists, or at least confused by it. And I think that this would also be the case for people in other parts of Europe, and especially those who were on the Eastern Bloc.