The sovereign nations of the past can no longer solve the problems of the present; they cannot ensure their own progress or control their own future.
The essential thing is to hold fast to the few fixed principles that have guided us since the beginning: gradually to create among Europeans the broadest common interest, served by common democratic institutions to which the necessary sovereignty has been delegated.
¨CJean Monnet, Memoirs
In his book After Victory, John Ikenberry examines what states do with the power that comes after winning major wars. He believes the desire to maintain power encourages the states to seek ways to limit their own power to keep other states happy. Increasingly these limits are found in international institutions used to create ¡°strategic restraint¡± on power. Ikenberry believes increasing reliance upon institutions causes the postwar order to increasingly take on constitutional characteristics. In this paper I am primarily interested in the institutions of the European Union. More specifically I would like to examine the European Union¡¯s struggle to develop its own institutions for maintaining international order. These are collectively known as its Common Foreign and Security Policy.
Europe's Collective Security
The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union (EU) was officially established by the Maastricht Treaty and became operational in 1993. However, the European Union has been concerned about collective security since its humble beginnings as an experiment in integrated economy in post-World War II Europe. After the conclusion of World War II, Europe as well as the rest of the world struggled to determine what Germany¡¯s future should be. Some nations wanted to strip Germany of its industry and turn the entire country into farmland.
Fortunately, there were those with the foresight to realize the only way to keep Europe safe was to rebuild Germany and work together to build a European Community. These men included Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer and Jean Monnet. Their vision of Europe was one where individual nations would share some of their sovereignty in exchange for a chance for peace. According to Pascal Fontaine, ¡°success depended on limiting objectives to specific areas, with a major psychological impact, and introducing a joint decision-making mechanism which would gradually be given additional responsibilities.¡± The first area that was chosen for Franco-German integration was steel and coal production.
European Coal and Steel Community
The European Union has been helped economically ever since World War II. Right after World War II’s end, Europe was struggling to hold on. The countries of the modern-day European Union thought it would be a good idea to come together and help each others struggling economy. To this day, this decision has had a very positive outcome on the EU’s economy. As shown in Diagram 1, the European Union combined together has the world’s highest GDP at 18.3 Trillion USD as compared to the United States’ 17.4 Trillion USD GDP and China’s 10.4 Trillion USD GDP. The idea
Smoking is linked with poor reproductive health in both men and women. In men it has been associated with impotence and reduced sperm count. Women who smoke have greater difficulty becoming pregnant and suffer early menopause. The risks to the fetus of smoking during pregnancy are well known and include increased incidence of miscarriage, neonatal death, and low birth weight. Pregnant woman who smoke are more likely to have babies who have an increased risk of death from sudden infant death syndrome and respiratory distress. They are also more likely to have low birth weight babies. Low birth weight is linked to many infants’ health disorders.
“Geronimo (ca. 1829 – 1909) – Oklahoma State University.” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Oklahoma Historical Society. 2007. Web. 12 December 2013. .
International organizations such as NATO and the UN are essential not only for global peace, but also as a place where middle powers can exert their influence. It is understandable that since the inception of such organizations that many crises have been averted, resolved, or dealt with in some way thro...
- Nucor Corporation is the largest steel producer in the United States and had net sales of $11.3 billion in 2004.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a mother’s prenatal smoking can lead to premature birth, birth defects, and infant death. The CDC states that women who smoke are more likely to have miscarriages and premature births. Babies born to mothers who smoke are more likely to have low birth weight and have an increased risk of being born with a cleft lip or cleft palette. Babies of smoking m...
A dystopian text is a fictional society which must have reverberations of today’s world and society and has many elements and rules that authors use to convey their message or concern. Dystopian texts are systematically written as warnings use to convey a message about a future time that authors are concerned will come about if our ways as humans continue, such as in the short stories called The Lottery by Shirley Jackson and The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury. Dystopias are also written to put a satiric view on prevailing trends of society that are extrapolated in a ghoulish denouement, as in the case of the dystopian film Never Let Me Go directed by Mark Romanek. Dystopian texts use a variety of literary devices and filming techniques to convey their message, but in all three texts there is a main protagonist who questions the rules of society, and all citizens carry a fear of the outside world who adhere to homogenous rules of society.
Peterson, J. and Shackleton, M. 2002. The institutions of the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The correlation between maternal smoking and low birth weight has been strongly established. Nicotine affects the placental function by inducing the release of norepinephrine and epinephrine into the maternal blood, which causes decreased blood flow to the placenta (1). The decreased blood flow causes a decrease in delivery of oxygen and nutrients to the fetus. This may have an effect on cell growth and development. High levels of carboxyhemoglobin are present in the blood of the mother and the fetus. This may decrease the capacity of the blood to transport oxygen and fetal hypoxia is the result (2). Fetal hypoxia and ischemia are major contributors to developmental defects, but nicotine has been implicated, in various studies, to have a direct affect on fetal development (3).
During a pregnancy there are many choices to be made and smoking should not be one of them. Smoking while pregnant can cause major effects before the birth of the child and also in the child’s future. Here are a few effects before the actual birth of the child: 1) Cigarettes contains a large number of chemicals that harm unborn babies. 2) Smoking raises the levels of carbon monoxide in your bloodstream. This gives less oxygen for baby. 3) Nicotine tightens the blood vessels, meaning the oxygen is passed over less effectively to the baby 4) Miscarriage or stillborn.
Examinations of Hitler's role in the formulation of Nazi foreign policy and his goals of that foreign policy leads to questions of the limits of his goal of Lebensraum. This introduces the debate between 'globalists' and 'continentalists'. Expanding on Trevor-Roper's emphasis on Hitler's goals of Lebensraum, historian Gunter Moltmann argued that Hitler's aims were not confined to Europe but at world domination. Andreas Hillgruber expands on this idea with his concept of a three-stage plan he calls the Stufenplan as the basis for Nazi foreign policy. This plan involved Germany gaining mastery over Europe, followed by the Middle East and British colonial territory, and later the USA and with that the entire world.
Senior, Nello Susan. "Chapters:4,15." The European Union: Economics, Policies and History. London: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.
Jurafsky, D. & Martin, J. H. (2009), Speech and Language Processing: International Version: an Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, 2nd ed, Pearson Education Inc, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
Second-hand smoke affects others around the smoker. Nine out of ten adults know that second-hand smoking affects children and infants. Still, they continues t...
“According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are an estimated 1.3 billion smokers worldwide. This number is expected to increase to 1.7 billion by 2020…According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), smoking causes approximately 443,000 deaths each year in the United States” (“Smoking”). Tobacco has over 4,000 chemicals, including some that are poisonous and some that cause cancer (“Smoking”).Smokers tend to die 13 or 14 years earlier than those who don’t smoke (“11…”). Women who smoke during pregnancy subject their baby to the dangers of being miscarried, being born prematurely, dying during infancy, and mental and physical developmental issues. The use of tobac...