Toward an Understanding of Europe

Abstract

For the earnest student of Europe, this unique work brings together a basic review of essential segments of intellectual thinking. In this volume, pertinent conceptual relationships, substantial relevant particulars, and an array of specific mechanics are all intertwined and used as a focus to examine the ongoing complex European integration process. By defining important parameterizations, this text develops a paradigm probing the current-day international activities which are rapidly leading to meta-national European supra-nationality.

The most basic substantive of the integration process is the collective various peoples of Europe with their individual diversities. The origins of these collective diversities, the defining historical nationhood precedent, is herein examined, revealing the essential elements of individual identities, ethnologies, linguistic collectivities, and other antecedents imputing elements which compose the substance and stuff today coalescing into tomorrow’s future harmonized European identity. This book is unique as it traces from many different origins the elements that are merging Europe into one collective future. This book sketches a process of onward integration as a continuation of what has happened in the past. This argument is augmented with many time lines, definition martial, and historical presentation, making it easy for the reader to grasp straightforwardly the wide-ranging substance out of which a single whole is being constructed. As a cognitive dynamic, movements such as the Nordic League, European Union, and EFTA as well as many other entities have been noted-- movements each in their own way, all contributing to an overall integrated Europe. As the more prominent initiative, the European Union with its diverse and constituent parts is carefully presented, as well as its unique decision-making process which is working to focus singular interests into collective benefits.

Integration is an inevitable byproduct of continentalization, itself a sub consideration of globalization. The time and perhaps the gestalt of the end result of this activity is not known; however, with a comprehensive overview the motion is clearly identifiable, and the direction unequivocally certain. The Single House of Europe is being built of very different elements. This book defines these elements in terms of a paradigm for understanding the process of integration, the process that is rapidly forming the new Single House of Europe.

About the Author

Alan W. Ertl is a collegiate professor at the University of Maryland, European Division, Heidelberg, Germany. He has previously taught political economics at Boston University, and also served as a visiting professor at various European universities. His research deals, inter alia, with the comparative study of applied political economic national and international structures. He has written numerous articles and books, as well as The Political Economic Foundation of Democratic Capitalism, dealing with the development of contemporary applied structural thinking. Along with scholarly pursuits, Dr. Ertl has had extensive practical experience working with noted multinational corporations and organizations facilitating understanding and interdependence.