The news from today with respect to EU have taken many by surprise. We usually expect people to win the Nobel prize and not organizations. The rationale behind this win is tied to the original Treaty of Paris, the informal founding treaty of the European Union. The Treaty of Paris was originally a free trade agreement between Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux states. Six decades later, the European Union is an entirely different organization, comprising more member states than originally thought, a common currency that was also not envisioned until the ’90s and arguably the largest bureaucracy in the world. Nevertheless, the origins of the European Union lie in a free trade agreement and only later Europe was designed as a supranational body and it is in the free trade agreement and the spread of democracy that the Nobel Committee justified their choice today.

Many analysts though see this prize as a psychological and strategic move to help Europe from falling apart. Both the EU and the Eurozone crises have affected the European countries much worse than the 2007 housing crisis has affected the US.

 

We have many questions concerning Europe on the market. While we do not have questions regarding Nobel winners per se, we would like to see how do you think this Nobel prize will affect the outcomes of our questions regarding Greece, Croatia, Macedonia, UK, Italy, Spain, a.s.o. How will this prize play out into the questions that are targeted to forecast possible EU or Eurozone exits.

Will we still have one EU as in the figure on the left or will we have the countries going separate ways, as in the figure on the right?