Assignment: The European Project

Assignment: The European Project

NOW FOR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT:Assignment: The European Project

Until the euro crisis cast a shadow over the single market economy, the EU was widely viewed as a great engine of economic prosperity and social progress. No less important is the political impact of the European project. Nearly every country in Europe has applied for membership in the European Union, but to gain admission, a country must demonstrate a commitment to constitutional rule, free elections, and human rights.

Putting dictators out of business is a remarkable achievement. No less remarkable is that within the twenty-eight nation EU, war is now unthinkable, a fact that has often been overlooked. The logic of integration is about perpetuating peace and promoting freedom in Europe, as well as achieving prosperity.

Japan: Between East and West

When a powerful earthquake in the Western Pacific in 2011 caused one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents and displaced more than 150,000 people living in the vicinity of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, it put Japan in the global spotlight—and not in a good way. Massive internal dislocations during the Fukushima reactor meltdown and questions surrounding the way high-level government officials handled the crisis focused international attention on Japan’s hidebound political culture, its inaccessible power elite, and the opaque inner workings of its powerful and insulated bureaucracy.

Like other Asian societies, Japan had no democratic traditions prior to 1947. In fact, as an insular island nation (see Figure 7.4), Japan’s history and culture often worked against Western democratic ideas. Yet today, Japan is one of Asia’s oldest parliamentary democracies (the other, India, came into being at the same time but under very different circumstances). To see how this remarkable transformation came about, we start by sketching Japan’s path from its feudal and imperial past to the present.*