How European Union Works

First of all, I would like to thank teacher for providing us those articles and contents to read. I’ve represented NTPU to visit Europe before, especially Austria Parliament and Austria Central Bank. So, I got an insight about how organization works in EU, and the bank system of EU. However, I still cannot understand the detail about it, because it is too complicated. I always try to find something to read and figure it out, but the information on the internet is either trivial or incorrect. Fortunately, by reading those materials teacher provided, I finally get more knowledge about EU institutions.

After the reading, I was totally stunned by the degree of the cooperation they achieved. For example, there are so many countries, near 30, in the EU, i.e. each member state has its own culture, custom, language, politics position and even race. It’s so difficult to rally and set a common goal for all of the members, especially for those economic development is relative slow and weak. As it mentioned in the materials, the European Union’s aim is to promoting peace, unity, equality, freedom, solidarity and security across the European states. Nevertheless, out of all the contributions to their citizens, I think the most important value that it gives to the European states is to keep peace and sustainability among the nations. Due to the fact of the European history in the last century, the world wars were waged in Europe between countries that are now Member States of the European Union. Then, the European Union formulated policies for peace. Fifty years of peace in Europe are proof of its success. The more countries that join the European Union, the stronger the framework of peace will become. However, it also causes lots of problems which I will discuss in later paragraph. EU also promotes social justice, that is to say, to promote a non-discrimination environment, and respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity. Therefore, the critical value that EU aims successfully become a lubricant, minimizing the differences between every states and create a common interest. Without EU’s contribution among the European states, Europe wouldn’t be able to keep themselves in order in many aspect, including the relationships among the countries, economy, and human rights after the two world wars.

The most disadvantage about the increasing numbers of EU members is that there is no exit mechanism, which means that when some members become the black horse of the herd and cannot meet the standards, they can’t be expelled. For example, there is a hard debate when the debt crisis in Greece turn to a thorny issue in July. Greek voters create a dilemma that Europe cannot solve. It seemed that the best solution for Greece is to quit Euro Zone or even EU to rebuild their economy, however, it will set up a precedent to prove that EU cannot solve the problem or keep holding everyone together, which have a bad effect when similar crisis arises in the future. By the time it happened, I was in Europe and everyone was anxiously talking about it. In contrast, I was depressed that Taiwan’s mainstream medias do not put enough concern on this important international issue.

As for the comments on European Union organization structure, I am impressed by the mechanism. There are four main institutions. The European Parliament, which represents the citizens and is directly elected by them. The European Council, which consists of the Heads of State or Government of the EU Member States. The Council, which represents the governments of the EU Member States. The European Commission, which represents the interests of the EU as a whole. They check and balances the power, also establishing the clear accountability and shared responsibility. Now I know that the special part of EU is that It is not a federal state like the United States of America because its Member States remain independent sovereign nations. Nor is it a purely intergovernmental organization like the United Nations because the Member States do pool some of their sovereignty — and thus gain much greater collective strength and influence than they could have acting individually.

In conclusion, I believe that EU is somehow successful so far. It gains a lot of benefits on different aspects, which include broad political and legal benefits, economic benefits, environmental benefits, and consumer benefits. However, along with the rapid changes of globe, there will only be more challenges to face in the future. As a student and the member on earth, we have the duty to keep concerning the development, not only EU but also the rest of the world. Moreover, I wish that there will no longer have any killings or fires on the planet and people can have a blessed life altogether.

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