The End of Europe
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- tank0
they are the best man!!!!!
i love porugal.
my mom even lives there now.neear coimbra
- Anarchitect0
the families of 2 dutch friends of mine also moved to Coimbra. [!?]
WTF is with u benelux people and Coimbra?!
- tank0
haha.
idd
- Fariska0
Thank you discipler but my "go-against-the-flow " is actually the American majority which so happens to be fact based.
Republican
(Jul 4 05, 10:33)Please guys, go on!! You are the best way to end a hard day:
provoke a huge -32 theets - smile
- Republican20
i disagree tank. i think europe is on the decline and so do the european economists. the unemployment rate is "tank"ing fast.
- Republican20
As long as Europe has this asshole as a leader http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world… Europe will forever be struggling to beat America.
- Republican20
Yes, and I do mean...
" Europes Leader "
- eggo0
some "people" should read more news.
international ones especially.
- pascii0
who wants to beat america? hello? *shakes head
see, the whole world is going down the drain, no matter in which country we are born. 2000yrs weren't enough to become smart
- pascii0
and btw., it is not that europa has one leader.
- Republican20
"who wants to beat America?" pascii are you honestly under the impression that this world and its countries are not competing? wow.
- brtman0
Shut up. Already. Damn.
This is not what NT is about.
- eggo0
" FREEDOM FRIES"
- Republican20
Shut up. Already. Damn.
This is not what NT is about.
brtman
(Jul 4 05, 16:58)
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the irony is deafening! what happened to all the Bush threads you never complained about you hypocrite.
- Hym0
The members of the European Union aren't out to beat anything, EU isn't experiencing apocalypse, EU's future didn't depend on a constitution. I agree that we aren't the Utopian garden of eden with honest and freedom loving politics that your United States is but that's because your leaders have a special relation with God.
Republican, you have earned the honour to be a proud member of my ignore list.
Kisses to all who does the same.
- Republican20
...and Hym falls victim of selective intake.
- European0
Attempts to unify the disparate nations of Europe precede the modern nation-states and have occurred repeatedly throughout the history of Continental Europe since the collapse of the Mediterranean-centred Roman Empire. Europe's heterogeneous collection of languages and cultures made attempts based on dynastic rights, or enforced through military occupation of unwilling nations, unstable and doomed to failure.
The Frankish empire of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire united large areas under a loose administration for hundreds of years.
Once Arabs had conquered ancient centres of Christianity in Syria and Egypt during the 8th century, the concept of "Christendom" became essentially a concept of a unified Europe, but always more of an ideal than an actuality. The Great Schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism rendered the idea of "Christendom" moot. After the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the first proposal for peaceful methods of unifying Europe against a common enemy emerged. George of Podebrady, a Hussite king of Bohemia proposed the creation of a union of Christian nations against the Turks in 1464.
In 1569, the Union of Lublin transformed the Polish-Lithuanian personal union into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multi-national federation and elective monarchy, which lasted until the partitions of Poland in 1795.
In 1728, Abbot Charles de Saint-Pierre proposed the creation of a European league of 18 sovereign states, with common treasury, no borders and an economic union.
After the American Revolution of 1776 the vision of a United States of Europe similar to the United States of America was shared by some prominent Europeans, notably the Marquis de Lafayette and Tadeusz Ko?ciuszko.
Some suggestion of a European union can be found in Immanuel Kant's 1795 proposal for an "eternal peace congress."
In the 1800s, customs union under Napoleon Bonaparte's Continental system was promulgated in November 1806 as an embargo of British goods in the interests of French hegemony. It demonstrated the workability and also the flaws of a supranational economic system for Europe.
In the conservative reaction after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the German Confederation (German "Deutscher Bund") was established as a loose association of thirty-eight German states formed by the Congress of Vienna. Napoleon had swept away the Holy Roman Empire and simplified the map of Germany. The German Confederation was an association of independent, equal sovereign nation states. In 1834, the Zollverein (German, "customs union") was formed among the states of the Confederation, in order to create better trade flow and reduce internal competition.
Italian writer and politician Giuseppe Mazzini called for the creation of a federation of European republics in 1843. This set the stage for perhaps, the best known early proposal for peaceful unification, through cooperation and equality of membership, made by the pacifist Victor Hugo in 1847. Hugo spoke in favour of the idea at a peace congress organised by Mazzini, but was laughed out of the hall. However, he returned to his idea again in 1851.
Following the catastrophe of the First World War, some thinkers and visionaries again began to float the idea of a politically unified Europe. In 1923, the Austrian Count Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-Europa movement and hosted the First Paneuropean Congress, held in Vienna in 1926.
In 1929, Aristide Briand, French prime minister, gave a speech in the presence of the League of Nations Assembly in which he proposed the idea of a federation of European nations based on solidarity and in the pursuit of economic prosperity and political and social co-operation. Many eminent economists, among them John Maynard Keynes, supported this view. At the League's request Briand presented a Memorandum on the organisation of a system of European Federal Union in 1930.
In 1931 the French politician Edouard Herriot published the book The United States of Europe.
The Great Depression, the rise of fascism and subsequently World War II prevented this inter war movement gaining further support.
In 1940, following Germany's military successes in World War II and Nazi planning for the creation of a thousand year Reich, a European confederation was proposed by German economists and industrialists. They argued for a "European economic community", with a customs union and fixed internal exchange rates. In 1943, the German ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Cecil von Renthe-Fink eventually proposed the creation of a European confederacy, which would have had a single currency, a central bank in Berlin, a regional principle, a labour policy and economic and trading agreements. The proposed countries to be included were Germany, Italy, France, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Greece and Spain. Such a German-led Europe, it was hoped, would serve as a strong alternative to the Communist Soviet Union and also be a counterweight to British dominance of world trade. The later Foreign Minister Arthur Seyss-Inquart said: "The new Europe of solidarity and co-operation among all its people will find rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic boundaries are removed", while the Vichy French Minister Jacques Benoist-Mechin said that France had to "abandon nationalism and take place in the European community with honour."
These pan-European illusions from the early 1940s were never realised, not least because neither Hitler, nor many of his leading hierarchs such as Goebbels, had the slightest intention to compromise absolute German hegemony through the creation of a European confederation. An integrated Europe based on Nazi conquest and lacking a democratic structure could not have been a true predecessor of the European Union.
In 1943, Jean Monnet a member of the National Liberation Committee of the Free French government in exile in Algiers, and regarded by many as the future architect of European unity, is recorded as declaring to the committee:- "There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty... The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples the necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must constitute themselves into a federation..."
- European0
you see? i can copy and paste as well. just to look smart like you repubican!
- Republican20
hey European... stfu. you are why everyone thinks of Europeans as self righteous pompous assholes.
- ********0
ohhh dear...