Exploring a key aspect of European integration, this clear and thoughtful book considers the remarkable experiment with common rights and citizenship in the EU. Governments around the world traditionally distinguish insiders (citizens) from outsiders (foreigners). Yet over the past half-century, an extensive set of supranational rights has been created in Europe that removes member governments' authority to privilege their own citizens, a hallmark of sovereignty. The culmination of supranational rights, European citizenship not only provides individuals with choices about where to live and work but also forces governments to respect those choices. Explaining this innovation--why states cede their sovereignty and eradicate or redefine the boundaries of the political community by including "foreigners"--Willem Maas analyzes the development of European citizenship within the larger context of the evolution of rights. Imagining more than simply a free trade market, the goal of building a "broader and deeper community among peoples" with a "destiny henceforward shared"--creating European citizens--has informed European integration since its origins. The author argues that its success or failure will not only determine the future of Europe but will also provide lessons for political integration elsewhere.
Countdown to Freedom" is the story of a young Dutch boy from the big port city of Rotterdam, Holland who experienced first-hand the invasion of his country by the Nazis in 1940, the wanton bombing of the city by the German Luftwaffe, numerous bombings by the Allied Air forces, persecution of the Jewish population, reprisal killings, the gradual loss of all freedoms, the taking of thousands of slave laborers, the terrible 'hunger winter' of 1944/1945 when thousands of people starved to death and the dropping of food by B-17's and Lancasters to the starving population toward the end of the war. Throughout the war the desire to be free became an obsession. But not all was gloom and doom. There were funny moments and the population never lost its sense of humor. The family enjoyed some good times and laughed but those moments were always experienced under the oppressive Nazi cloak. Symbols of freedom were the contrails of thousands of bombers that would fly over Rotterdam on their way to targets in Germany and the lone Spitfire that one time swooped down low, rocked its wings several times, waved at us and then sped away. But it is not just Freedom for its own sake rather what in the end the cost of that freedom was. That is the story and the message the author would like to get across.
Countdown to Freedom" is the story of a young Dutch boy from the big port city of Rotterdam, Holland who experienced first-hand the invasion of his country by the Nazis in 1940, the wanton bombing of the city by the German Luftwaffe, numerous bombings by the Allied Air forces, persecution of the Jewish population, reprisal killings, the gradual loss of all freedoms, the taking of thousands of slave laborers, the terrible 'hunger winter' of 1944/1945 when thousands of people starved to death and the dropping of food by B-17's and Lancasters to the starving population toward the end of the war. Throughout the war the desire to be free became an obsession. But not all was gloom and doom. There were funny moments and the population never lost its sense of humor. The family enjoyed some good times and laughed but those moments were always experienced under the oppressive Nazi cloak. Symbols of freedom were the contrails of thousands of bombers that would fly over Rotterdam on their way to targets in Germany and the lone Spitfire that one time swooped down low, rocked its wings several times, waved at us and then sped away. But it is not just Freedom for its own sake rather what in the end the cost of that freedom was. That is the story and the message the author would like to get across.
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