![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2013\/05\/waterloo.jpg\")
struck a quick blow.\u00a0\u00a0At Waterloo, he tried to keep the Prussian and Anglo-Dutch armies from uniting against him.\u00a0\u00a0Slowed by rain (imagine that!), in June 1815, his armies struck too late to prevent the Prussians from joining ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2013\/05\/waterlo.jpg\")
<\/a>with Wellington, and, according to the movie, allowed Wellington\u2019s armies to gather where they could not be destroyed by French artillery.\u00a0\u00a0In a 10 hour battle, around 170,000 troops decided the fate of Napoleonic France.<\/p>\nIn a sense, the battle underscores what we\u2019ve been learning in Brussels\u2014the difficulty of unifying Europe short of war.\u00a0\u00a0That\u2019s the message we\u2019re taking from our visits to members of the European Union civil service staff\u2014the people most committed to making \u201cEurope\u201d work.\u00a0\u00a0For example, yesterday\u2019s speaker raised a point I had not considered\u2014a simple but complex one involving the basis of legal codes.\u00a0\u00a0While the British have evolved common law (it\u2019s common to us, too), much of Europe uses the Code Napoleon.\u00a0\u00a0As I noted to the speaker, Louisiana uses the Code Napoleon in the US, which should give Europeans hope that the legal systems can actually mesh. His comment: \u201cthe EU is ahead of its time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s speaker gave a slightly different view of the origins of the European Union that helped me understand some of its functioning.\u00a0\u00a0I think he described the evolution in terms of \u201cshared sovereignty\u201d\u2014in which the members have given up authority over certain areas, and created an organizational structure to oversee laws in those areas.\u00a0\u00a0In other words, if the treaties have conceded pollution controls to a \u201cHigh Authority\u201d (as the European Commission was once known), the legislation Parliament passes on that topic is enforceable in all countries\u2014whether they voted for it or not. His comment was that it is an unprecedented \u201cexperiment.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0When he noted it has been going on for 60 years, my response was that after 60 years, the United States had not yet sorted out many of the issues that \u201cWe the People\u201d wrote a constitution to settle; I hoped it doesn\u2019t take a civil war to resolve Europe\u2019s issues.<\/p>\n
One other thing we\u2019re taking from our EU visits is the focus of the European Union on social issues\u2014and more general r&d support.\u00a0\u00a0I remember from my last trip in Eastern Europe that much of the infrastructure support for roads, for example, in the Baltic countries, came from EU support.\u00a0In addition, one of our speakers in Paris was a\u00a0\u00a0Ph.D. (from Illinois) working on a project involving DNA, that was based on a 7 billion Euro grant.\u00a0Think about an American working on pure research in Europe\u2026.<\/p>\n
If you want a business epigram on why the EU needs to continue to exist\u2014when I left London, I had not spent or exchanged all my British pounds.\u00a0\u00a0I took a 20 pound note to the exchange, worth about 31$ and got back (after fees and commission) about 15 Euro, or about 21$.\u00a0Imagine doing that every time you crossed a border!<\/p>\n
As for Brussels itself, home to NATO as well as the EU, cold wet days are not uncommon\u2014and they are ideal for spending time in museums, which we\u2019ve also done.\u00a0\u00a0My three favorites included two as impressive for the buildings as for the contents\u2014the buildings were art nouveau, and the museums helped spare the wrecking ball.\u00a0\u00a0One was a\u00a0\u00a0comic strip museum\u2014after all the adventurous Tintin came from the brush of a Belgian artist\u2014 Well, we leave Brussels for Berlin via Cologne with good memories of On to Berlin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some of us took advantage of this cool rainy afternoon to view the battlefield that marked the end of an effort to create a \u201cEuropean union\u201d\u2014the battlefield where Napoleon (if you remember the 50s song) met his Waterloo.\u00a0\u00a0I did not realize it was close to Brussels, but it\u2019s less than 10 miles outside the city; … Continue reading “Where will you meet your Waterloo?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-may-term-2013"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1213"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9444,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213\/revisions\/9444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>who has been translated in dozens of languages around the world. The second museum of note was the Musical Instruments Museum, housed in a former Art Nouveau department store.\u00a0\u00a0When I entered, I was given an audio guide; as I passed the exhibits, the instrument featured played.\u00a0\u00a0If you\u2019ve never heard a cabinet organ, you\u2019ve missed a real treat, as I would have had I not gone to the museum. The third museum is on the grand place, a medieval square I mentioned yesterday, with Gothic and Baroque homes.\u00a0\u00a0Professor Pana and I went to the \u201cHouse of the King,\u201d which was a wonderful Gothic building with period pieces, art, sculpture, and pictures of the city, some of them following Louis XIV bombardment that leveled 4000 houses.<\/p>\n<\/a>Brussels\u2014the Manneken-Pis (look that one up; it\u2019s the symbol of the city); the chocolate (world famous!), and lapin (rabbit) and moule (mussels) meals. That moule meal was facilitated by an IWU alum, George Kambouroglou, who works as a software supervisor at the EU.\u00a0\u00a0We\u2019ve been in touch with George as soon as we learned he was in Brussels, and the ’93 graduate of IWU bent over backward to make sure we had as <\/a>much information as he could find, and, even though he left with his family for the US this morning, joined us for dinner last night at Caf\u00e9 Leon to reminisce about his days as an Acacia\/physics major at IWU.<\/p>\n