"I am here in a country that hardly resembles the rest of Europe," said the French philosopher Montesquieu in 1729. Europe, then known as the 'old continent', was an aggregate of great powers, which had no interest in any sort of unification. Nearly three centuries later, new na...

European Monetary Union and the UK The idea of a single currency has already been mentioned in 1957 when the European Union was founded. During the following years several discussions about a Monetary Union took place, but without any achievements. The first steps towards the EMU were only made in...

1 Introduction In the last decades the environmental status of our earth has been in the news frequently. The greenhouse impact, the depletion of natural resources, the diminishing biodiversity and the unprecedented rate of species extinction all point out that the status is not as healthy as it sh...

One should probably start an argument on the issue of the Group of 21 proposals with a statement from Oxfam International's 2002 report Rigged Rules and Double Standards: "the problem is not that international trade is inherently opposed to the needs and interests of the poor, but that the...

Is Europe likely to catch up with the US? The European Union has gone through a number of different stages of economic integration since the late 1950s. Having started as a Free Trade Area the process of globalisation increased the need of further integration and led to a rapid development in the...

Peter Ludlow, Director of the Center for European Policy Studies once said "We are all Germans.... The whole EEC is obtaining German virtue- low inflation, a strong currency and a good mix of growth and social welfare" (Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars 201). Although the European Union has c...

The eastward EU enlargement: effects, expectations and dangers Since May 1, 2004, ten countries in the Central and Eastern European region join the EU as new member states. Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovak Republic and Slovenia comprise these ten ...