Described as the birthplace of democracy , ancient Greece revolved around the polis , or city-state. City-states were unique in that they were governed not by a hereditary ruler, but by a political body that represented its citizens. This idea of citizenship—of being connected to and having a voice in your community—became the basic building block of democracy.
Philosophers and politicians have used these writings to uphold and defend the democratic tradition ever since. Roman civilization had a major influence on Western concepts of law, government, and the military. At its largest, Rome controlled approximately 6. The Roman approach to conquering and controlling territory is often considered to be the basis of Western imperialism.
Imperialism is a policy that has been used throughout history, most notably by European powers and the United States. Other political institutions of Rome persist throughout Europe and former European colonies. World War I left about 16 million people dead. By the end of the war, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires collapsed and broke into a dozen separate nations. Border s between existing nations, such as Poland and Russia, were entirely redrawn.
World War II left about 43 million Europeans dead, including about 6 million who died in the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the mass murder of Jews under the Nazi regime. World War II also left more than 40 million refugee s, contributed to the independence of European colonies throughout the world, and devastate d the urban infrastructure of many European cities.
The relationship between the United States, with a free-market economy , and the Soviet Union, with a communist economy , was known as the Cold War. The Iron Curtain was an ideological boundary that divided Europe into two blocs—Western countries influenced by the United States, and Eastern countries influenced by the Soviet Union.
International economic and military organizations developed on either side of the Iron Curtain. The United States and the Soviet Union built up huge nuclear arsenal s, with many missiles aimed at targets throughout Europe.
The Iron Curtain took on the physical shape of border defenses, walls, and limited diplomacy. The nation of Germany was divided in two. In fact, the most famous symbol of the Iron Curtain was the Berlin Wall , which divided the East German city of Berlin into western and eastern-controlled parts.
The economic and political demise of the Soviet Union led to the end of the Iron Curtain in the late s. During this time, a number of anti-communist revolution s swept central and eastern Europe.
These revolutions eventually lead to the end of the Cold War, symbolized by the falling of the Berlin Wall in Contemporary Issues Europe is now broadly defined in the context of the European Union EU , an economic and political body officially created by the Maastricht Treaty in The EU works to create a unified structure for social, environmental, military, and economic policies of its member states.
Today, the European Union is composed of 27 member states, with new members mainly coming from central and eastern Europe. The financial and diplomatic success of the EU has led to its rapid growth across the continent. The euro is one of the strongest currencies in the world. The euro is the second-most popular currency behind the American dollar and is used daily by more than million people.
The EU accepts few candidates: member states must maintain a stable, democratic form of government, a free-market economy, and commitment to the rule of law. The rapid growth of the European Union, however, has caused a number of administrative and political tensions. Strict EU regulations place a heavy burden on developing countries to compete with their more developed neighbors. The global financial crisis , which began around , has caused these tensions to elevate dramatically.
The financial crisis is defined by debt and high unemployment. These countries included Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal.
This rescue package has caused tensions to rise between economically competitive countries and the indebted countries that they are helping to rescue.
Indebted countries must now deal with strict budget s and declining incomes while more financially stable countries are forcing taxpayer s to help fund the financial rescue. The status of immigrants is also a source of tension and debate in Europe. Historically, Europe has been a center of immigration. The European Union has established the Schengen Area—a zone where Europeans can travel from country to country without having to show their passports.
Some critics argue these attitudes are xenophobic. Xenophobia is an intense dislike or fear of people from other places or cultures. Two events demonstrate this debate. In , the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons featuring Islam ic subjects. The political cartoons sought to engage in the debate surrounding Muslim extremism. Many Muslim organizations, however, saw the cartoons as bigoted , racist, and insulting.
Protests developed across the Muslim world, and demonstrators set fire to Danish embassies in Lebanon, Iran, and Syria. The debate surrounding the cartoons also intensified strained relations between the Islamic world and the West. In , the French government dismantled illegal immigrant camps throughout France.
These camps were mostly populated by Roma, also called Gypsies. Roma are a people and culture native to central and eastern Europe. In the face of an economic crisis, EU citizens of poorer member countries, such as the Roma of Bulgaria and Romania, often migrate to more developed EU countries in search of work.
Developed countries, however, are also facing economic challenges. These nations do not feel an obligation to accept illegal immigrants, seeing them as both a threat and a burden. Supporters of the crackdown want to stop illegal immigration. Critics argue the move was racist. Europe is often seen as a world leader in environmentally friendly technologies and legislation. As part of an international agreement signed at the conference, all 27 member states of the European Union agreed to reduce carbon emission s by 20 percent by from levels.
In fact, many developing nations argued that the Copenhagen Accord was drafted by a small group of powerful countries and unfairly disadvantages poorer countries, many of which are expected to suffer the worst effects of climate change.
The overall population of Europe is set to drop from roughly million to million by The proportion of people older than 65 will grow from 16 percent to 28 percent.
The European equivalent is rather different, starting from the middle — along an axis running roughly from Turin to Oslo — and working out to less-prosperous regions on the eastern and western peripheries.
Some of the worst life expectancies are concentrated in the prosperous United Kingdom. Alcohol taxation prices vary widely across Europe, with the general rule that the Nordic states and the UK levy the highest rates. Wine in particular gets a very generous tax treatment, with a huge number of European states apparently viewing it as not having any kind of health hazard worth discouraging at all.
This map based on data shows the share of the population in each country that is over the age of Demographic aging is occurring in almost all countries around the world, but it is particularly extreme in a handful of European countries and it is an economic challenge for countries that have built the most comprehensive welfare states. Not only is a larger elder population a burden in terms of pension programs Social Security and equivalent but older people tend to have greater health care needs.
The fact that Europe has a continentally integrated labor market but not an integrated welfare state may exacerbate these issues. To the extent that Italy needs to levy high taxes on its working-age population to take care of older Italians, that merely makes it more attractive for young Italians to move to Copenhagen or Amsterdam — leaving Italy with an even higher share of senior citizens than it had before.
Football or soccer is popular across the European continent, but attendance at games varies considerably between countries. As this map of attendance rates shows, the absolute most football-mad people on the continent are the Scots, followed pretty closely by the English and the Dutch.
Soccer is relatively unpopular in central and eastern Europe, where you see more hockey fans. It is also interesting that soccer is less popular in France than in any of the western European countries that surround it. Not coincidentally, the French national league is also considered weaker than its competitors in Germany, Italy, and Spain.
There is nothing new about Muslims living in Europe, but the present-day locus of Islam in western Europe derives much more from recent immigration trends than from the influx of Muslims into Spain and the Balkans centuries ago. Albania, Bosnia, and Kosovo in the far southeast are majority Muslim as part of that historic presence, but further west the largest Muslim population is in France.
In Germany, by contrast, Muslims are largely the descendents of Turkish guest workers who moved there during the economic boom of the s, while Swedish immigration is influenced more heavily by the granting of refugee status to people facing problems in their homeland. The Netherlands is home to many immigrants from Indonesia, a former colonial possession of the Dutch.
The Czechs and the Estonians, however, take the prize for irreligion with fewer than one fifth of the population professing a belief in god. Russia and the European Union are locked into an intimate economic relationship by the web of gas pipelines depicted in this map by Samuel Bailey.
On the one hand, without the gas that flows through these pipelines many European countries — including Germany and Italy — would be bereft of energy resources. As events in Ukraine and elsewhere drive tensions between Moscow and Brussels, both sides remain locked into this energy trade by the basic geographical reality that gas can only flow where the pipelines go.
But this is changing. The Union now possesses an External Action Service — a kind of diplomatic corps — and an array of EU foreign missions around the world. The places currently served by full-service EU missions denoted in dark green are an interesting blend. You have many countries in sub-Saharan Africa where many individual EU members would likely not spend the money on an embassy of their own.
Meanwhile, light green indicates countries where there is an accredited European Commission mission as well as diplomatic missions from individual European nations.
Together, these cover virtually every country on earth. European Union member states retain the right to conduct military operations unilaterally, but in practice only France and the UK tend to actually do this. Other nations are much more likely to send troops abroad under the aegis of a larger NATO — or, increasingly, EU — mission. This map highlights all the countries that have experienced an official EU military intervention over the past 15 years.
It includes a lot of peacekeeping operations in Africa, participation in postwar reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, monitoring the newfound independence of East Timor, and a variety of operations aimed at stabilizing the European periphery.
Fairly remarkably, almost every country on the planet was formally or informally incorporated into a European colonial empire at one point or another. Some of these territories — like the United States or Australia — were settled by European immigration subsequent to colonization. In most places, a colonial government was simply installed. But the real hub of the Germany economy is a lesser-known but more interesting urban phenomenon — the polycentric metropolitan area known as Rhine-Ruhr, stretching from Dusseldorf and Cologne in the north to Bonn in the south.
The orange, red, and purple lines are faster than anything we have in the USA. In a typically European fashion, these crucial links cross several national boundaries. The formerly communist countries, meanwhile, are essentially American in their neglect of high-speed rail. This is every European airport that moves more than , annual passengers, with the size of the dot scaled to the volume of air traffic.
The map was made using data from , which was a terrible year in general for aviation thanks to the great recession, so total volumes are likely bigger today. The plan calls for the creation of four new Metro lines — one of them a suburban loop that will make all trips between peripheral destinations much faster — as well as the extension of the existing Metro lines 11 and 14, transforming them into major axes throughout the Paris area. An awesome map of the last time each European country was occupied.
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