A final European product is Dijon mustard (from Dijon), which is made by Unilever, a multinational that handles its own distribution. I know a lot of these are foods, but there are not that many non-comestibles that are from Europe, and the notebook isn't sold here, I brought it back myself. Yugoslavia: The former Yugoslavia was always a fake country, a set of ethnic regions glorped together into a nation-state, so with the fall of Communism and the breakup of the U.S.S.R., the disintegration of Yugoslavia was inevitable. Slobodan Milosevic was president of Serbia during the breakup, and exploited Serbian nationalism to create conflict during this breakup. With Slovenia, Croatia and BiH all declaring independence, and Milosevic seeking to fan the flames of conflict, the situation in Yugoslavia became a crisis. Serbian minorities in both Croatia and BiH agitated for independence or reunion with Serbian, fearing negative treatment as minorities. Macedonia also separated early in the 1990s. The conflict in BiH grew bloody, however. Ethnic Serbs waged bloody war on Bosniaks, famously sieging the city of Sarajevo. Never designed with defense in mind, Sarajevo sits in a valley surrounded by steep hills from which Serbian military positions rained bullets and shells on the city, prompting an international airlift of supplies. The conflict eventually went cold, but there are still tensions between the Serbs, who have their own region called Republika Srpska, and the Bosniaks. A few years later, the ethnic Albanian minority in Kosovo grew tired of repression under Milosevic and sought independence from Serbia. NATO waged open war with Serbia in defense on the Kosovars, leading to the arrest of Milosevic (State Department, 2013). The final step was the split of Montenegro from Serbia, which occurred on peaceful terms in the mid-2000s. Ethnic tensions in the region remain, however, particular between Serbs and other groups in the region who suffered under Milosevic's brutal regime.

Cyprus: The republic of Cyprus recently suffered a banking crisis. This came within the context of the broader financial crisis in southern Europe, but it was a little bit different in nature. The country had opened its banking sector...

Cypriot banks invested this money in other parts of Europe, and they had particularly high exposure to Greek sovereign debt, which meant a high level of exposure to the Greek debt crisis. The conditions of the rescue plan for Cyprus were particularly harsh, and ordinary Cypriot investors had their savings devalued, along with austerity measures imposed. The implications for this are significant -- the bankers and governments agreed to steal the money from ordinary people to pay for the poor risk management of the bankers. Russian investments were seemingly protected in the deal. The crisis has raised considerable concern about the legality of the solution and the human rights issues it raises, while confirming for all to see the way that bankers and governments are keen to dump the costs of their bad policies on the public when the opportunity presents itself (Cisotta, 2013).