Guardian Series on the EU....Good Stuff!

As The Guardian writes, "The European Union is grappling with its deepest crisis in 60 years, a malaise that goes beyond the euro debacle and the enormous tide of debt swamping the continent. The union seems exhausted. Expansion has ground to a halt. Sluggish EU economies are being eclipsed by rivals in Asia and Latin America. "Brussels" has become a dirty word, no longer only in Britain...

"At this critical juncture, six leading newspapers from the largest EU countries have come together in a joint project to build up a more nuanced picture of the EU and explore what Europe does well and what not so well.

"We begin by investigating the benefits the EU has brought to 500 million people and later today examine the national leaders labouring to steer it out of its current difficulties. Tomorrow we look at euroscepticism and national stereotyping. At the end of the week, you can take our "How European are you" test and see how you and other European readers rank."

The series' home page at The Guardian is at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/europa

The College Board's article on the Challenges of EU enlargement is linked here (thanks to apgov.org)

Challenges of EU Enlargement

The Pint: A battle EU supporters couldn't win

A classic blurb re-run to teach about the European Union and its struggles when its bureaucratic rules, backed up by legislation from the European Parliament, challenge national sovereignty, sparks fly. What's a sovereign nation to do?In this, the latest example involving the EU and its members, the EU bureaucrats, using their wide range of discretion, seem to have backed down.

The defenders of pints, miles, and pounds (as weight, not money) are not entirely satisfied. By the way, those of us not in the UK (or the Republic o Ireland) might not understand that the pint is the most important of these traditional measures.

EU gives up on 'metric Britain'

The European Union is set to confirm it has abandoned what became one of its most unpopular policies among many British people."It is proposing to allow the UK to continue using pounds, miles and pints as units of measurement indefinitely..."Under the plans which have now been scrapped, even displaying the price of fruit and vegetables in pounds and ounces would have become grounds for a criminal prosecution."The decision to back down was made by Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen... 'I want to bring to an end a bitter, bitter battle that has lasted for decades and which in my view is completely pointless.



Bono: EU definition lies eight miles away

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1601932,00.html

(Sustainable development in Africa may be one the topic choices for our final exam project. Following the lead of my favorite rock star when he read the founding document of the EU, the Treaty of Rome, 2007, we will consider the EU's role in Africa here in this re-run post.)

In saying the West’s (particularly Europe’s) greatest depends on how it deals with Africa, Bono wrote in an essay in Time Magazine:

“Fast-forward 50 years. An Irish rock star reads the treaty with the enthusiasm a child has for cold peas but does uncover what I think technocrats might call poetry. Not much of it--just a turn of phrase here and there. Like Article 177, which summons the signatories to foster "the sustainable economic and social development of the developing countries and more particularly the most disadvantaged among them" and calls for a "campaign against poverty in the developing countries." Not exactly Thomas Jefferson but a glimpse of the kind of vision that might bind us.

Over the next 50 years, we might need a little more poetry. Europe is a thought that has to become a feeling--one based on the belief that Europe stands only if injustice falls and that we find our feet only when our neighbors stand with us in freedom and equality. Our humanity is diminished when we have no mission bigger than ourselves. And one way to define who we are might be to spend more time looking across the eight miles of Mediterranean Sea that separates Europe from Africa.

There's an Irish word, meitheal. It means that the people of the village help one another out most when the work is the hardest. Most Europeans are like that. As individual nations, we may argue over the garden fence, but when a neighbor's house goes up in flames, we pull together and put out the fire. History suggests it sometimes takes an emergency for us to draw closer. Looking inward won't cut it. As a professional navel gazer, I recommend against that form of therapy for anything other than songwriting. We discover who we are in service to one another, not the self.

Today many rooms in our neighbor's house, Africa, are in flames. From the genocide in Darfur to the deathbeds in Kigali, with six AIDS patients stacked onto one cot, from the child dying of malaria to the village without clean water, conditions in Africa are an affront to every value we Europeans have ever seen fit to put on paper. We see in Somalia and Sudan what happens if more militant forces fill the void and stir dissent within what is, for the most part, a pro-Western and moderate Muslim population. (Nearly half of Africa's people are devotees of Islam.) So whether as a moral or strategic imperative, it's folly to let this fire rage.”

The entire text of Bono’s essay is linked at the top. You, of course, can refer back to http://www.data.org/ for more information. The ONE Campaign is an example of a grassroots (really netroots) linkage institution.

As a group, the EU countries have committed 0.7% of GDP to help the poorest of the poor. So far, as the saying goes the check is, well, in the mail. At the end of the essay, the songwriter pens, “What will define Europe in this new era…..Part of the answer lines eight miles away.”

If only it could become a hit.