Europe Overview

Europe Overview

Terms in the EU

Inches ? Commission ? And what are fractions anyway? We shed light on the confusion of terms.

MPs

MEPs are politicians who were elected to the European Parliament for a certain period of time. Members of the European Parliament are elected by all adults in the EU member states. As in Germany, children are not allowed to vote in the EU.

Continents

There are 5 continents on our earth. These are called Africa, America, Asia, Australia and Europe.

Europe

Europe is the name of a beautiful princess from an ancient Greek saga. She was the Greek evening goddess. The legend tells that Zeus fell madly in love with her because she was so beautiful. He turned into the most beautiful bull ever in the world and kidnapped her to Crete.

And because he loved Europe so much, he named the part of the world where they lived until the end of their lives after their name. That is why our continent is called Europe. Everyone has to decide for themselves whether it is the most beautiful of all continents.

Fractions

When a group of parties with the same goals always work together, this group is called a faction.

There are many similar parties from different EU member countries in the European Parliament. The same parties were brought together in political groups. Many small parties could lead to arguments and therefore no decisions can be made in parliament. Fractions prevent this. The parties in a group usually agree very quickly in a dispute and then have an opinion on the other groups, which they then try to enforce.

Commission

Commission comes from the verb “commit”. That means something like “instruct”. You could translate the commission as “commission”. So there are people on a commission who have been commissioned to carry out an important task. At the European Commission, the members are politicians from different countries.

Commissioner

A member of a commission is referred to as a commissioner.

Houses of Parliament

A parliament is the place where elected representatives meet to prepare, discuss, and pass laws.

Phairman

President comes from the Latin word “praesidere”. That means something like “chairing”. So a president is the “chairman”. So he’s the boss in the group. He is the spokesman for all members of the Commission and represents them in important matters vis-à-vis the other EU systems.

Directive or regulation

The European Union does not have the right to pass laws that automatically apply in all member countries. The EU is allowed to do something else: it adopts guidelines or regulations. Guidelines and regulations can be understood as commands that have to be executed. A directive mandates to change this and that or to introduce something new in the EU. In order for the directive to apply in all member countries, it must convert the member countries into a new law within a certain period of time.

A regulation, on the other hand, applies immediately in the member countries and is stronger than all normal laws in the country. By joining the EU, each country has committed to comply with all EU directives and regulations.

Inch

This is additional money that you have to pay when you transport products in or through a country. In the past, when all goods were transported by horse, customs had to be paid to use the paths. Customs no longer has this purpose today.

Nowadays, different customs are paid on the different products, even if they are transported on the same roads. The states determine the amount of the duty. In doing so, they pay attention, for example, to whether the same products, which can only be produced at a high price in their own country, do not come cheap from abroad. A high tariff on these foreign products makes the product more expensive by the state than it actually is. People will then buy the products from their own country because it looks like these products are cheaper than the foreign ones.

Countries that are in the EU do not charge customs for products that come from another member state.

Europe – language

The languages of Europe are, with few exceptions, the Indo-European language set. They are geographically distributed with Romanian languages in the west and south, in addition to Romanian in the Balkans, Baltic and Slavic languages in the east and Germanic in the north and west.

Of the less prevalent Indo-European languages are the Celtic in western Ireland and Scotland as well as in Wales and Brittany, and Greek and Albanian in the southeast. In addition, especially in Central Europe, Yiddish is spoken by Jews and Romani by Gypsies (Roma).

The non-Indo-European languages in Europe are, according to Countryaah.com, Sami, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, all belonging to the Finnish-Ugric language family, Basque, which is an isolated language, the Semitic language Maltese and Turkish in the European part of Turkey and spread in the Balkans.

Country Population growth (percent) Mortality / death rate (per 1000 residents) Nativity / birth rate (per 1000 residents)
Albania -0.1 (2017) 7.4 (2016) 11.8 (2016)
Andorra -0.4 (2017) 4.3 (2016) 8.8 (2016)
Armenia 0.2 (2017) 9.7 (2016) 13.5 (2016)
Azerbaijan 1.1 (2017) 5.8 (2016) 16.3 (2016)
Belgium 0.4 (2017) 9.5 (2016) 10.8 (2016)
Bosnia and Herzegovina -0.3 (2017) 11.0 (2016) 9.2 (2016)
Bulgaria -0.7 (2017) 15.1 (2016) 9.1 (2016)
Cyprus 0.8 (2017) 6.9 (2016) 10.8 (2016)
Denmark 0.7 (2017) 9.2 (2016) 10.8 (2016)
Estonia 0.0 (2017) 11.7 (2016) 10.7 (2016)
Finland 0.3 (2017) 9.8 (2016) 9.6 (2016)
France 0.4 (2017) 8.8 (2016) 11.7 (2016)
Georgia -0.1 (2017) 13.2 (2016) 13.5 (2016)
Greece -0.1 (2017) 11.0 (2016) 8.6 (2016)
Ireland 1.2 (2017) 6.4 (2016) 13.5 (2016)
Iceland 1.7 (2017) 6.9 (2016) 12.0 (2016)
Italy -0.1 (2017) 10.1 (2016) 7.8 (2016)
Kosovo 0.8 (2017) 7.0 (2016) 16.8 (2016)
Croatia -1.2 (2017) 12.3 (2016) 9.0 (2016)
Latvia -1.0 (2017) 14.6 (2016) 11.2 (2016)
Liechtenstein 0.7 (2017) 7.2 (2016) 10.0 (2016)
Lithuania -1.4 (2017) 14.3 (2016) 10.7 (2016)
Luxembourg 3.0 (2017) 6.8 (2016) 10.4 (2016)
Northern Macedonia 0.1 (2017) 9.8 (2016) 11.3 (2016)
Malta 2.2 (2017) 7.6 (2016) 10.2 (2016)
Moldova -0.1 (2017) 11.5 (2016) 10.3 (2016)
Monaco 0.5 (2017) 7.9 (2016) 7.8 (2016)
Montenegro 0.0 (2017) 9.9 (2016) 11.4 (2016)
Netherlands 0.6 (2017) 8.7 (2016) 10.1 (2016)
Norway 0.9 (2017) 7.8 (2016) 11.2 (2016)
Poland 0.0 (2017) 10.2 (2016) 10.1 (2016)
Portugal -0.3 (2017) 10.7 (2016) 8.4 (2016)
Romania -0.6 (2017) 13.0 (2016) 9.6 (2016)
Russia 0.1 (2017) 12.9 (2016) 12.9 (2016)
San Marino 0.6 (2017) 7.6 (2016) 7.9 (2016)
Switzerland 1.1 (2017) 7.8 (2016) 10.5 (2016)
Serbia -0.5 (2017) 14.3 (2016) 9.2 (2016)
Slovakia 0.2 (2017) 9.6 (2016) 10.6 (2016)
Slovenia 0.1 (2017) 9.5 (2016) 9.9 (2016)
Spain 0.2 (2017) 8.8 (2016) 8.7 (2016)
UK 0.6 (2017) 9.1 (2016) 11.8 (2016)
Sweden 1.4 (2017) 9.2 (2016) 11.8 (2016)
Czech Republic 0.2 (2017) 10.2 (2016) 10.7 (2016)
Turkey 1.5 (2018) 5.8 (2016) 16.2 (2016)
Germany 0.4 (2017) 11.2 (2016) 9.3 (2016)
Ukraine -0.4 (2017) 14.7 (2016) 10.3 (2016)
Hungary -0.3 (2017) 13.0 (2016) 9.7 (2016)
Vatican City State
Belarus 0.1 (2017) 12.6 (2016) 12.4 (2016)
Austria 0.8 (2017) 9.2 (2016) 10.0 (2016)

In the European parts of the former Soviet Union, in addition to the Indo -European languages, several non-Indo-European languages, such as Samoyed and Caucasian, are spoken in Russian and Ukrainian.

The current distribution of Indo-European languages, which originally spread to Europe in prehistoric times, broadly reflects the conditions and events of historical times: the spread of the Roman Empire and Germanic and Slavic migrations in the early Middle Ages.

The Finnish-Ugric speaking people immigrated partly in prehistoric times (Sami, Finns and Esters) and partly in 800-900-T. by the Hungarian expansion from the area around Ural. The Altaic language Turkish spread from 1400-t. up over the Balkans from Asia Minor.

Basque is thought to constitute a remnant of the original language area from before Indo-European immigration. Many of the original languages, for example, Etruscan and Iberian, survived up to classical times, pictorial even to 700-800-t.

Recent immigrations have brought large groups of Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Urdu-speaking population groups to most major cities in Western Europe. Linguistic integration between peoples is sought from an official point of view, both within the Council of Europe and the EU.

Europe Overview