Which Future for Europe?

Russia.           

Europe Arena 1: “European Union: Should It Be an Union of Nations or an Union of People?”

Which Future for Europe?

For centuries Europe was an arena for great battles and terrific wars between nations. Lots of people died, were genocided or suffered because of hunger. After WW2 people all over the world realized the most important idea that should have been considered from the very beginning – the idea of living in peace and unity.

When the EU was established, it was the first living instance of that. And a very sucсessful one. Nowadays it is a union of many nations, collaborating, helping and supporting each other. Surely nothing is perfect and there are lots of imperfections and also handicaps arising in many areas: economies, labour policy and so forth. But nobody claimed it would be easy. But hold on a minute, I’m distracted a bit. What have we got in the end? I’m telling you, we’ve got the most stable and reliable union in the world with the highest life quality, cultural and moral values.

Moving on, let’s consider two variants. Firstly, if we claim it should be a union of people, then it’s no use for distinct states in Europe to exist. Really, why for? Erase the borders, shall we? We will gain only the diminishing of every nation’s personality. The whole zoo of languages, cultures will dissolve in something average and uniform. To illustrate this, there exists a function in thermodynamics, called entropy, which is a measure of chaos (higher entropy corresponds to higher chaos), obeying a fundamental law: it can not decrease with time. For the most physical processes it usually increases as time passes. By letting EU be the people’s alliance, we will let the law win. Every person will loose it’s true possible identity. Is that what we need...?

In contrast, let’s take a look at the other possibility. How about each nation having it’s own unique identity and flavour combined with collaboration and the freedom of movement? It will preserve the qualities of every nation, hence allowing the sharing of experiences and cultures to exist, which is going to lead to more deliberate and diverse society. The entropy will not increase because of our choice to be different.

And if we consider the whole world of countries, not just Europe, what will you decide? In the end it’s high time for you to choose between two variants. I’m pretty sure you shall choose the right one, my dear reader.

By Alexey K., Russia
22 years old