Regardless of where you live, the European Union not only affects your life, but may also transform it. By learning how Europe works, a new world will open up to you and discover new jobs you never heard of. The European Union has a large, yet often unnoticed, impact on many aspects of everybody’s life. We will analyze what the EU is doing for YOU regardless of where you live. We will also look at what YOU can do for and in Europe. Whether you are traveling, eating, working, doing business, shopping, surfing the Internet or breathing, all these activities are largely shaped by the EU. As a result no global citizen, business leader, lawmaker, lobbyist or student can effectively operate in Europe or in the world without a solid understanding of this unique laboratory of integration. While the EU is often depicted as a monstrous bureaucratic creature, condemned to irrelevance by the emerging economies, in 50 years it accomplished what other countries took centuries to realize. The EU remains the most accomplished experiment of economic, social and political integration in human history. Given its inherent complexities, this Course aims at empowering you on what Europe can offer and will enable you to discover jobs and opportunities you were not aware of. Indeed, throughout the whole course, participants will be confronted with real-life examples of EU action. EU affairs professionals will share their personal EU experiences and tell us about their EU jobs. You will also be able to interact with the instructor and other participants, share your opinions, question the instructor’s assumptions and hence shape the course’s content.
The EU Member States
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来自 HEC Paris 的课程
了解欧洲：欧洲的重要性以及它对于您的价值
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从本节课中
Who is the European Union?
Putting a face on the EU. Who is it? Who are its main actors? By whom is it composed? You will identify who decides in Europe and learn how to interact with its main actors.
与讲师见面
Alberto AlemannoJean Monnet Professor of EU Law and Risk Regulation
[MUSIC]
After discussing and learning about the EU institution actors, it is now
time to turn to those who actually decided to launch the European game.
The European member states.
As you must know by now, 28 sovereign states
have, over the years, joined the European Union.
At the moment of their accession, member states transfer
some of their original powers and competences to the union.
As a result, an increasing number of decisions binding
those states are no longer adopted at the national level,
by national parliaments, but at the
European level among the European institutions.
The European Union has not always been made of 28 member states.
These have rather joined the EU
venture progressively in several enlargement steps.
As you know very well, everything started
in 1952 when six countries got the ball rolling.
Do you remember which were these countries?
Yes, I'm sure you do.
Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
Basically, the Benelux countries.
Plus France, Germany and Italy. That's the way I remember.
They cooperated for more than 20 years
and given the appeal of this well-functioning partnership
three further countries decided to join in
1973, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark.
The 70's and 80's saw the end
of dictatorships in Greece, Portugal and Spain.
Countries who decided when turning to democracy to enter the European Union.
This occurred in 1981 for Greece and in 1986 for Portugal and Spain.
The European Union at 12, rather than at six, was quite different from the
initial six-member union, and in light of
the numerous achievements, the European Union attracted
a new set of well-off countries who, until then, belonged to a competing, yet
looser forms of integration, the so-called European
Free Trade Area, that still exists today.
Its remaining members today are
Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Lichtenstein as you
can see from the flags in this line.
This organization is linked to the
European Union with, via the European
Economic Area, the EEA, which however, has not been signed up to by Switzerland.
The EEA extend the European internal market to the EFTA
countries, the four countries I mentioned previously, except from Switzerland.
By aligning their policy
to the EU, these EFTA countries are de facto members of the European Union.
1995 marked the fourth enlargement with Sweden,
Finland and Austria acceding as new member states.
The following enlargement was made possible by the fall of authoritarian
Communist regimes that disappeared in Central and Eastern Europe after 19,
1989.
And the, and the fall of course of
the Berlin Wall which some how epitomized such regime change.
But anyway do you know which events were
responsible for the end of Communism in, in Europe?
The disappearing of the Soviet Union and the recreation of independent Baltic
States, the disappearing of Yugoslavia and
the creation of distinct Balkan States ;the
breakup of Czechoslovakia into Czech Republic and
Slovakia; the reunification of East and
West Germany, and finally, the division of Cyprus into two ent, to two entities.
Well, all options are correct except for the last one.
Which relates to Cyprus which, of
course occurred according to different historical circumstances.
East Germany merging into Germany,
who joined the EU.
And at that time, the countries in
the region also turned to the European integration process.
Their desire materialized in 2004 when eight countries from central
and eastern Europe were able to join the EU: the
Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia,
Slovenia and Hungary, plus the two Mediterranean islands of Malta and Cyprus.
Shortly after in 2007, two other former Communist countries, Bulgaria
and Romania, joined the pact by making a European Union of 27 countries.
A further accession occurred in 2013, when Croatia joined the European Union.
This is the second country of the former Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia to enter the EU after its collapse in 1992,
and the Balkan Wars that followed, until the end of the 20th century.
Other remaining states of this region are expected to join quite soon.
Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo.
Turkey as you may know, acquired its candidate status already some
years ago back in 1999, but negotiations have stalled in recent years.
Iceland has also been a candidate
country and this candidacy has been triggered by the so called economic
crisis and the financial difficulties Iceland faced back in 2008.
Division has always been a specificity of Europe.
No other place in the world has a comparable
number of states in such a small geographical area.
The European project respects these
differences among sovereign states, this unique
diversity, while at the same time ensuring
that they never again evolve into wars of the continent.
This is why the phrase unity and diversity or united in
diversity has been chosen as the motto of the European Union.
That you can, for fun, compare to the US motto, e pluribus unum.
But states remain sovereign and independent
and national democracies still have the final
say on their relationship with the European Union.
Therefore, should a country decide it doesn't intend to cooperate anymore
with other European countries it can leave the Union any time.
Moreover, if some new independent states appear like, maybe
Scotland or some say Catalonia, in Spain, they will
immediately be out of the union and would need
to apply to join the union as new member states.
Now that I briefly showed to you who
are these member states, let me quickly tell you
what they do within the European games, which
are the kind of moves they can engage into?
Well in a nutshell, the member states are in charge
of implementing the policies, and
regulations elaborated by the European institutions.
Therefore, a same policy, the very same policy may sometimes
be implemented differently in each member state depending on a
number of variables such as, different political ideologies or the
capacity of the competence of the member state's administration and infrastructure.
For instance the common agricultural policy
which represents a significant portion of
the European budget is very differently implemented at, at the national level.
Notably member states can choose to
distribute subsidies directly to farmers or
to regional entities attributing them money
according to the criteria they choose.
For instance the past levels of farmers production, the
size of the lands, the implementation of environmentally friendly practices.
So forth and so on.
