What you might need to know

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This video includes AI-generated content produced under human supervision. Script by Dr Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan.

This video discusses the concept of shared sovereignty in the European Union. When we discuss the European Union, we often talk about its parts rather than the Union itself. So we hope to give you a few ideas to discuss what the European Union is and how belonging to it means sharing sovereignty, i.e. sharing your decision-making power. To explain this to the children, we draw a parallel with a club and we make a smoothie.

First, let’s just recap what the EU is:
The European Union is an economic and political project. It was created to protect peace among countries, mainly France and Germany, that had been at the heart of two world wars in less than 50 years.

The European Union is made up of large but also many small countries. These countries got into the EU club to reach a consensus when they make decisions on how to improve the quality of the air we breathe or the food we eat.

Therefore it can be very difficult to make decisions. In 1951, it was easier for six countries to agree. Nowadays with 27, it takes more time. There are two institutions that pass EU laws: the European Parliament which is directly elected by the nearly 500 million citizens of the EU every 5 years and the Council of the EU where national ministers sit. The European Parliament and the Council of the EU need to agree for an EU law to be passed.

In this lesson, we get the children to think about what it means to be part of a club. They are usually part of clubs themselves so they have lots to say about the good and the bad things about being in a club. We draw parallels with Ireland belonging to the EU club.

To engage the children in understanding what a Union is versus an aggregation of individual countries, we get them to make a smoothie. Each fruit represents a country. They’re all delicious by themselves but when they come together, they make something new, the EU!

You can think that a smoothie is the perfect representation for an EU crushing national identities and sovereignties. But actually, it really highlights how interwoven countries in the club are. It also emphasises how interdependent the countries are when they make decisions in the EU.

As mentioned above, every country that signs up to a European treaty agrees to sharing its sovereignty, i.e. its power to make decisions, in the areas that the treaty deals with. For example, Ireland has agreed to share its sovereignty when it comes to air pollution but not on taxation.

The EU can not be compared to a fruit salad as Brexit has shown. Otherwise, if the UK was grapes, you’d pick the grapes out very easily. And we know that disentangling the UK from the EU was anything but easy!

The EU is a smoothie where you can still see individual countries (the smoothie is blue because of the blueberries, it’s liquid because of the milk, the banana can be tasted very strongly) but to take a fruit out, you will need some chemistry process of disaggregation, like Brexit has showed!

To carry out the activity of the smoothie, make sure to have a European flag on the blender visible by the children and that each container with fruit has a flag from the country associated with the fruit. It really helps the children to draw the parallels. Enjoy!