Will the European Union Survive

Will the European Union Survive?

The geographic, political, and cultural dynamics of Europe are some of the most interesting in the entire world. So many different cultural groups are clumped together in a small area. For example, within a night’s train ride you can go across several countries- all of which speak a different language and have completely different customs. Though the Roman Empire did unite a lot of Europe to similar ideologies over 2,000 years ago, many different nations arose from the breakup before the first century AD and each held on to distinct cultural differences.

For hundreds of years Europe was the economic power of the world-with European colonies basically influencing the entire world. One of these powers, Great Britain proclaimed “The sun never sets in the British Empire.” Even our own nation can claim most of our ideology to this “Western Civilization”. When a majority of these European nations decided to unite and form a political and economic partnership, it was thought that this could create a superpower that would rival that of the United States. Most of these nations had had very high standards of living, some of them even greater than the United States. Thoughts were that if all of these nations could unify, they could pool their economic wealth to again become the major in world policy.

One of the major implications of the European Union (EU) was the establishment of one unifying currency, the Euro. This currency was supposed to help unify several European nations and provide common ground between them to break down trading barriers. For the longest time the value of the Euro was strong, especially when compared to the inflated U.S. dollar. Before each European currency alone could not compete with the dollar, but now combined it provided a formidable opponent. The European Union now believed that it had the firepower necessary to challenge the dollar as the global currency unit.

Though in theory the...