E. U. lecture (cosmopolitan)

So hey there and thanks for attending my lecture about the European Union. This is a topic I wanted to share for a long time, as a European citizen and a big supporter of the Union itself.

This lecture will be divided in 4 big parts: a classic introduction with cool statistics, a part about culture, a part about history and a part about euroscepticism.

Let's begin with an introduction, which could sound familiar for the Europeans out there but also for the others.

The European Union is a political and economic union of 28 member states that are located primarily in Europe. It has an area of 4 475 757 km² (1 782 099 mi²) and an estimated population of over 510 million.

Its motto is "In varietate concordia", latin for "United in diversity". Could hardly do something more related to the domain of "Cosmopolitan" o/

Here is a map of the land covered by the European Union

http://i.imgur.com/MesldtF.png

As you may notice this is a very large view, simply due to French Guyana (South America) being included in the picture; other than that it covers most of Europe as a continent.

The 28 members are the following: Republic of Austria, Kingdom of Belgium, Republic of Bulgaria, Republic of Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Kingdom of Denmark, Republic of Estonia, Republic of Finland, French Republic, Federal Republic of Germany, Hellenic Republic (Greece), Hungary, Republic of Ireland, Italian Republic, Republic of Latvia, Republic of Lithuania, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Republic of Malta, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Republic of Poland, Portuguese Republic, Romania, Slovak Republic, Republic of Slovenia, Kingdom of Spain, Kingdom of Sweden and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

This makes a total of 21 Republics, 6 Kingdoms and 1 Grand Duchy, all considered to be democracies.

http://i.imgur.com/wJJBEDt.jpg

The metropolitan areas with the largest populations, which I will give in term of millions of inhabitants, are London, UK (12.5); Paris, France (11.9); Madrid, Spain (6.5); Ruhr, Germany (5) and Berlin, Germany (5). Other notable and world famous cities include Barcelona, Rome, Athens and Brussels.

http://i.imgur.com/3rHE4wM.jpg

In terms of religions, there is an assumed proportion of 48% Roman Catholic, 23% irreligious, 12% Protestant, 8% Eastern Orthodox, 4% other Christian, 2% Muslim and 3% other faiths. This is a general assumption because such statistics are illegal in some countries like France.

http://i.imgur.com/xerjoIh.png

This is a map of the dominant religions in the EU: blue is catholicism, red is Protestantism, pruple is Eastern Orthodoxy and Green is Islam. Irreligion is not shown.

Regarding the languages, the European Union has 24 official languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, and Swedish. Important documents, such as legislation, are translated into every official language.

http://i.imgur.com/yMP8qDL.jpg

This trilingual plaque in Romania is in Romanian, Hungarian and German.

The most widely known language is English (51%), followed by German (27%), French (24%), Italian (16%) and Spanish (15%). 16% of the European are native German speakers, 13% are native English speakers, 13% are native French speakers, 12% are native Italian speakers, 8% are native Spanish speakers and 8% are native Polish speakers.

The most widely spoken languages are the ones that belong to the most powerful European countries: UK and France are both permanent members of the Security Council of the UN, Germany is Europe's most powerful and richest country (4th in the world after the US, China and Japan), and Italy is a member of G7 alongside the other 3 countries. English is helped by the United States being a superpower, and Spanish by its importance in South America and in the world in general.

That being said, translating everything into 24 languages can quickly become overwhelmingly hard, and this is why some institutions only use certain working languages. The European Commission, for example, uses English, French and German only, while the European Court of Justice only uses French as a working language.

Some regional languages (Catalan, Galician, Basque, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh) do not have the official status, but are given a semi-official status: official translations of the treaties are made into them and citizens have the right to correspond with the institutions using them.

The European Union holds a certain position in maintaining equality through its member countries, in the following ways:

While basic education is up to every member country, higher education is highly supported by the European Union, and a lot of programmes supporting exchanges have been created.

http://i.imgur.com/rUikCmv.png

The most notorious is the Erasmus Programme which is a university exchange programme; it began in 1987. In its first 20 years, over 1.5 million university and college students have been able to fulfill their dream by studying for a certain period in another EU country. It has become a symbol of European student life.

Personally, as a college student (I'm studying Spanish language, culture and history), I'd love to spend one or more year(s) in a foreigner country, theoretically Spain but why not Sweden or a bunch of other countries. This is feasible thanks to the scolarships created by the Union and the individual states, and one doesn't need to be n°1 everywhere to get the opportunity of travelling.

Although the EU has no major competences in the field of health care, Article 35 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union affirms that "A high level of human health protection shall be ensured in the definition and implementation of all Union policies and activities".

All EU and many other European countries offer their citizens a free European Health Insurance Card which, on a reciprocal basis, provides insurance for emergency medical treatment insurance when visiting other participating European countries.

I will now talk about the major cutural European projects. It would have made the lecture a lot longer if I decided to talk about every led-by-an-european-country organization like the Commonwealth of Nations or La Francophonie, so here are some "pure" European projects.

The vast majority of media in the European Union are national-oriented. However, some Europe-wide media focusing on European affairs have emerged since the early 1990s, such as Euronews, EUobserver, EURACTIV or Politico Europe.

http://i.imgur.com/mLZKnyc.png

ARTE is a public Franco-German TV that promotes the friendship and the history of the two countries. There's a programme called Karambolage which teaches a lot about French & German trivia, and if you understand either French or German I highly recommand you to check it out (it's available on YouTube).

http://i.imgur.com/OFyy4Ql.jpg

The most famous European sport competition is the UEFA Champion's League, a soccer tournament with the top soccer clubs of each countries to determine the best of them all. Soccer is really an important part of the EUropean culture.

The European Capital of Culture programme selects one or more cities in every year to assist the cultural development of that city. 53 EU cities have been part of this initiative up to 2016.

Another world famous contest is the Eurovision Song contest, which not only includes European countries but also friend countries like Ukraine, Israel and Australia. It is the most widely followed non-sport-related event.

Now, let's go on with the history part. Hopefully, the history of the Union is relatively short and recent, but let's go a bit back in time to get some context.

As everybody knows, World War II (1939-1945) devastated the European continent, mostly due to nationalism, and a union of the country was seen as the only antidote to it. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the UK, was in favor of a Federal system called "United States of Europe", but only for the continental part of it, then excluding the UK. The idea of a federal union of all the european countries still exists in the 21st century.

Though, what's considered to be the first step of the EU is the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. As the name implies, it aimed at helping a few countries, especially with the US on one side and USSR on another becoming superpowers.

In 1957 is created the ancestor of the European Union: the European Economic Community. Its "founding fathers" are Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg and West Germany (Germany was then divided between the Western democracy and the Eastern communist dictatorship, as a result of WW2 and the cold war).

These 6 countries signed the Treaty of Rome, and created another pact called Euratom for co-operation in developing nuclear energy. Some tensions began to show in the 1960s with France seeking to limit supranational power; however that was really nothing too problematic and it led to a treaty.

This treaty, called Merger Tready, combined the executive bodies of the three aforementioned alliances (European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the European Economic Community (EEC)) into a single institutional structure.

The first external countries to join the Communities were Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom, all in 1973. Norway had negotiated to join at the same time, but Norwegian voters rejected membership in a referendum. In 1979 the first direct elections to the European Parliament were held: each country sends a certain number of representatives depending on their number of inhabitants.

http://i.imgur.com/vBof2yQ.png

Greece joined in 1981, followed by Portugal and Spain in 1986. There were 12 members back then, when the European flag was adopted with 12 stars, generally assumed to be one for each member. The blue background represents the West while the number and position of the stars represent completeness and unity, respectively.

In 1985, the Schengen Agreement paved the way for the creation of open borders without passport controls between most member states and some non-member states. Today, some countries that do not belong to the EU like Switzerland are part of Schengen.

Things got complicated in 1990, following the fall of the Easter Bloc; the former East Germany, which joined the Communities as part of a reunified Germany, needed a lot more work.

The European Union was formally established when the Maastricht Treaty —whose main architects were Helmut Kohl (Chancellor of Germany) and François Mitterrand (President of France)— came into force on 1 November 1993. The treaty also gave the name European Community to the EEC, even if it was referred as such before the treaty. In 1995, Austria, Finland, and Sweden joined the EU.

http://i.imgur.com/1TNcLyb.png

That treaty led to the implementation of a supranational currency, the euro (€), that replaced the national currencies in 12 member states in 2002; seven countries have since joined. The euro currency became the second largest reserve currency in the world: not only is it usable in all of the EU, but also on the other continents, like it is in Zimbabwe (Africa) or in the continents like South America where some European countries have territories.

http://i.imgur.com/gy9TYx8.png

The dark blue part is the Eurozone, the light blue part is for all the other countries that are members of the EU.

In 2004, the EU saw its biggest enlargement to date when Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the Union.

As you can notice, most of these countries belonged to the former communist Eastern Bloc. They were a lot less developped than the other European countries, and it enlarged the euroscepticism movement (anti-EU political parties).

In 2007, Bulgaria and Romania became EU members.

http://i.imgur.com/EielX1q.jpg

On 1 December 2009, the Lisbon Treaty entered into force and reformed many aspects of the EU. In particular, it changed the legal structure of the European Union, merging the EU three pillars system into a single legal entity provisioned with a legal personality, created a permanent President of the European Council, and strengthened the position of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

This treaty was forcibly adopted without a direct vote, and contained the European Constitution which had been rejected through the votes four years earlier in some countries like France. This, also, strenghtened the eurosceptical movement.

In 2013, Croatia became the 28th EU member, and, as you all know, the UK organized a referendum on its membership in the EU, with 51.9% of participants voting to leave. They will officially be gone on March 29th, 2019.

http://i.imgur.com/pQmUnOZ.jpg

The EU received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, for having "contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy, and human rights in Europe."

Today, the European Union is one of the most powerful entities, described as an emerging superpower (like Brasil, Russia or India). It is the richest entity of Earth, before the United States. It is represented in both G7 and G20, but also in the United Nations, giving the European countries a stronger voice than ever before.

Its future is unsure. If the fact that United Kingdom leaves the union can or can not be a good thing for the UK, it will be a bad thing for the European Union, losing nothing less than the 5th world power, and its second power.

Furthermore, it is a message to be aware of. People are doubting about the union. People are not trusting anymore what has literally pacified the whole continent, made international relations easier and removed centuries of war.

With the example of the UK leaving, the europsceptical movement is giving this message: "it is possible to do something else", and the eurosceptical vote is strenghtened in a lot of country, mostly represented by the nationalist far right: almost 50% of the votes in the Presidental Elections of Austria in 2016, more than 10 million votes in France during the second round of the 2017 presidential election.

The European Union must be reformed, and quickly, before other countries leave: while the EU itself is a world superpower, very few of its countries can, alone, influence the world when compared to giants like the US or China.