Crocodile Club
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Crocodile Club
The Crocodile Club was an informal group of members of the European Parliament (MEP) that favoured greater European integration, to the extent of a European federation, and greater powers to the European Parliament. The group was founded on 9 July 1980, a year after the Parliament's first direct elections, by nine cross-party MEPs including Altiero Spinelli. The meeting was held at the "Au Crocodile" restaurant (10 rue de l'Outre, Strasbourg) giving the club its name. The club was formally constituted in September of that year, and in those two months the membership of the club had grown to sixty. Within a year it grew to one hundred and eighty, almost half the members of the Parliament.The myth of Europa - The Ventotene manifesto
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Member Of The European Parliament
A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) is a person who has been elected to serve as a popular representative in the European Parliament. When the European Parliament (then known as the Common Assembly of the ECSC) first met in 1952, its members were directly appointed by the governments of member states from among those already sitting in their own national parliaments. Since 1979, however, MEPs have been elected by direct universal suffrage. Earlier European organizations that were a precursor to the European Union did not have MEPs. Each member state establishes its own method for electing MEPs – and in some states this has changed over time – but the system chosen must be a form of proportional representation. Some member states elect their MEPs to represent a single national constituency; other states apportion seats to sub-national regions for election. They are sometimes referred to as delegates. They may also be known as observers when a new country is seekin ...
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European Integration
European integration is the process of industrial, economic integration, economic, political, legal, social integration, social, and cultural Regional integration, integration of states wholly or partially in Europe or nearby. European integration has primarily come about through the European Union and its policies. History In antiquity, the Roman Empire brought about integration of multiple European and Mediterranean territories. The numerous subsequent claims of succession of the Roman Empire, even the iterations of the Classical Empire and its ancient peoples, have occasionally been reinterpreted in the light of post-1950 European integration as providing inspiration and historical precedents. Of those in importance would have to include the Holy Roman Empire, the Hanseatic League, the Peace of Westphalia, the First French Empire, Napoleonic Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Unification of Unification of Germany, Germany, Unification of Italy, Italy, and Yugoslavia, The B ...
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United States Of Europe
The United States of Europe (USE), the European State, the European Federation and Federal Europe, is the hypothetical scenario of the European integration leading to formation of a sovereign superstate (similar to the United States of America), organised as a federation of the member countries of the European Union (EU), as contemplated by political scientists, politicians, geographers, historians, futurologists and fiction writers. At present, while the EU is not a federation, various academic observers regard it as having some of the characteristics of a federal system. in History Various versions of the concept have developed over the centuries, many of which are mutually incompatible (inclusion or exclusion of the United Kingdom, secular or religious union, etc.). Such proposals include those from Bohemian King George of Poděbrady in 1464; Duc de Sully of France in the seventeenth century; and the plan of William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, for the e ...
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European Parliament
The European Parliament (EP) is one of the legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it adopts European legislation, following a proposal by the European Commission. The Parliament is composed of 705 members (MEPs). It represents the second-largest democratic electorate in the world (after the Parliament of India), with an electorate of 375 million eligible voters in 2009. Since 1979, the Parliament has been directly elected every five years by the citizens of the European Union through universal suffrage. Voter turnout in parliamentary elections decreased each time after 1979 until 2019, when voter turnout increased by eight percentage points, and rose above 50% for the first time since 1994. The voting age is 18 in all EU member states except for Malta and Austria, where it is 16, and Greece, where it is 17. Although the E ...
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1979 European Parliament Election
The 1979 European Parliament election was a series of parliamentary elections held across all 9 (at the time) European Community member states. They were the first European elections to be held, allowing citizens to elect 410 MEPs to the European Parliament, and also the first international election in history. Seats in the Parliament had been allocated to the states according to population, and in some cases were divided into constituencies, but members sat according to political groups. Background The Treaty of Rome which established the Communities specified that the European Parliament must be elected by universal suffrage using a common voting system. The Council of the European Union was responsible for setting up the elections but it had procrastinated. As a stop-gap measure, members were appointed to the Parliament by the member states from their own national parliaments, as they had done since the Common Assembly. The Parliament was unhappy with this and threatened to t ...
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Altiero Spinelli
Altiero Spinelli (31 August 1907 – 23 May 1986) was an Italian politician, political theorist and European federalist, referred to as one of the founding fathers of the European Union. A communist and militant anti-fascist in his youth, he spent 10 years imprisoned by the Fascist regime. Having grown disillusioned with Stalinism, he broke with the Italian Communist Party in 1937. Interned in Ventotene during World War II he, along with fellow democratic socialists, drafted the ''Manifesto for a free and united Europe'' (most commonly known as the Ventotene Manifesto) in 1941, considered a precursor of the European integration process. He had a leading role in the foundation of the European federalist movement, and had strong influence on the first few decades of post-World War II European integration. Later, he helped to re-launch the integration process in the 1980s. By the time of his death, he had been a member of the European Commission for six years, a member of the Europ ...
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Au Crocodile
is a restaurant in Strasbourg, France, serving French cuisine, holding a Michelin star in 2023. History The restaurant was named after a stuffed crocodile that a local general brought back from overseas whilst on Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt and Syria, and which is hung over the foyer. In 1921, the prominent French gastronomic journalist Curnonsky (nicknamed the "Prince of Gastronomy") wrote about Au Crocodile, and the stuffed crocodile in the foyer. Émile Jung and his wife Monique took over the restaurant in 1971 and, in 1989, it was awarded three Michelin stars. In 2002, it lost one of them. Jung said, "No words can ease the pain that eats at our hearts and that has killed our spirits". Some of Jung's colleagues took out a full-page advertisement to show their support. In 2023 the restaurant held one star. The restaurant has been used as a site for discussing international relations: in May 2010 the Prime Minister of Albania Sali Berisha and his opposition leader ...
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European Community
The European Economic Community (EEC) was a regional organization created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957,Today the largely rewritten treaty continues in force as the ''Treaty on the functioning of the European Union'', as renamed by the Lisbon Treaty. aiming to foster economic integration among its member states. It was subsequently renamed the European Community (EC) upon becoming integrated into the first pillar of the newly formed European Union in 1993. In the popular language, however, the singular ''European Community'' was sometimes inaccuratelly used in the wider sense of the plural '' European Communities'', in spite of the latter designation covering all the three constituent entities of the first pillar. In 2009, the EC formally ceased to exist and its institutions were directly absorbed by the EU. This made the Union the formal successor institution of the Community. The Community's initial aim was to bring about economic integration, including a common market and ...
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Single European Act
The Single European Act (SEA) was the first major revision of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. The Act set the European Community an objective of establishing a single market by 31 December 1992, and a forerunner of the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) it helped codify European Political Co-operation. The amending treaty was signed at Luxembourg City on 17 February 1986 and at The Hague on 28 February 1986. It came into effect on 1 July 1987, under the Delors Commission. A core element of the SEA was to create a single market within the European Community by 1992, when – it was hoped – the necessary legislative reforms would have been completed. The belief was that in removing non-tariff barriers to cross-border intra-Community trade and investment such measures would provide the twelve Member States a broad economic stimulus. To facilitate their removal, the SEA reformed the Community legislative process both by introducing the cooperation procedure and b ...
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Maastricht Treaty
The Treaty on European Union, commonly known as the Maastricht Treaty, is the foundation treaty of the European Union (EU). Concluded in 1992 between the then-twelve member states of the European Communities, it announced "a new stage in the process of European integration" chiefly in provisions for a shared European citizenship, for the eventual introduction of a single currency, and (with less precision) for common foreign and security policies. Although these were widely seen to presage a "federal Europe", the focus of constitutional debate shifted to the later 2007 Treaty of Lisbon. In the wake of the Eurozone debt crisis unfolding from 2009, the most enduring reference to the Maastricht Treaty has been to the rules of compliance – the "Maastricht criteria" – for the currency union. Against the background of the end of the Cold War and the re-unification of Germany, and in anticipation of accelerated globalisation, the treaty negotiated tensions between member sta ...
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European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been described as a '' sui generis'' political entity (without precedent or comparison) combining the characteristics of both a federation and a confederation. Containing 5.8per cent of the world population in 2020, the EU generated a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of around trillion in 2021, constituting approximately 18per cent of global nominal GDP. Additionally, all EU states but Bulgaria have a very high Human Development Index according to the United Nations Development Programme. Its cornerstone, the Customs Union, paved the way to establishing an internal single market based on standardised legal framework and legislation that applies in all member states in those matters, and only those matters, where the states have agreed to act ...
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