Question

Analyze the EU according to various strands of Liberalism. ?( Theories of international relation)

Answer 1

Pre-1945 Europe was one of the most war-torn places on the planet, and European states devoted much of their attention to devising and using newer and more deadly tactics and technologies to crush their enemies.Power changed hands regularly and violently. When the states of Europe were not at war with one another, they were using the brutally efficient military means they had practiced on one another to subjugate states overseas, to whose relatively underdeveloped armed forces they must have seemed like unstoppable juggernauts. By the twentieth century, the three strongest stated in Western Europe were the UK, France, and Germany. Throughout the roughly 70 years before 1945, France and Germany fought three wars against each other, and the UK intervened on the French side during two of them. The latter two wars, now referred to as the First and Second World Wars, were so large in scale that they drew in states from all over the world, and so destructive that the survival of human civilization in the event of a third was in doubt.

However, all this changed suddenly after1945.Following the defeat of Germany and the liberation of France, the three states, as well as most of their smaller contemporaries, had become democratic. They were also all severely crippled by the war, with two of them suffering defeat and conquest, and one economic collapse. This, combined with the growing perceived threat of Soviet expansion in the east, and accompanying encouragement to oppose it coming from the US, put the three states in a position where war was very much not in their interests. However, the patterns of history could not be ignored, and it was considered that , assuming the relationship between the three, and most importantly between france and germany , was not dramatically altered, another war was inevitable . Several solutions were proposed to prevent this, The most obvious was to severely constrain the power of the second world war aggressor Germany, but that had been tried following the first world war, and had clearly worked.

The first move in the direction of economic, military, and political integration was the European Coal and Steel Community, formed in 1950. it stated aim was to control the market for coal and steel, two vital war materials, in such a way as to make war between two European states, but most specificaly France and Germany, impossible, It was, unsurprisingly, a french initiative. The french army, even with the occasional help of other European states, had been found wanting in all three of its wars against Germany, and i was clear that new methods would be needed to ensure french security purpose, The french seem to have concluded that relying on realpolitic and the pursuit of power was no longer working. Over the following 63 years, the organisation's mandate and membership have both expanded dramaticaly, if not always successfully, from six states into the 27 member democratic coalition that won the Nobel Prize in 2012, The EU has unified the border security and currency of most of its members, and a combined EU government administers some of the continent's collective domestic and foreign affairs.