Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Saturday, March 12, 2011

What, no NATO

While the European Union is the most visible of the organizations linking countries on the continent, there are many others. This Venn diagram offers a look at the overlapping and exclusions of many of the economic groups. What's missing are things like NATO, the OSCE, and Interpol.

Students could learn a good deal while trying to sort out the various organizations, their goals, and powers and while hypothesizing about how those military and police organizations fit into the plan. There is a good explanation that accompanies the diagram.

United Diagrams of Europe

Does this image qualify as a map? Strictly speaking, no. The relationships between the objects in this diagram are logical, not spatial. But then again, all the objects shown here are of a geographical nature. That makes this diagram some kind of map, if not a proper one, then at least a strange one. And that’s exactly how this blog likes them.

This diagram is a particularly instructive map, too: it neatly visualises the gaps and overlaps between all kinds of supranational institutions in Europe – differences which for the most part are too subtle for any but the most attentive observer.

All will be aware of the ‘Europe’ that is a less than homogenous conglomerate of nation states, with an unwieldy Brussels bureaucracy at its centre. This European Union, which consists of 27 member states, is merely the most visible of several European unions, all committed to different versions of the same goal: European integration…