| abstract
| - The European Commonwealth was political union between the countries of Europe, before the Great War. Founded in the years following World War II (1939–1945), the goal of the union was to prevent the rise of another devastating conflict, through diplomacy, cooperation, and a downplaying of nationalist sentiment. The commonwealth was hit hard by the energy crisis in the 21st century, and found itself entangled in a bloody war with the middle-east. When the oil reserves went dry, the European Commonwealth collapsed into nothing more than feuding nation-states, fighting for the remaining resources. European soldiers were still fighting when the bombs fell on October 23, 2077.
- The European Commonwealth is the Fallout universe's equivalent of the real-world European Union, which has integrated into a single state-like entity throughout Europe; this was probably a federal union. It is, however, unknown which European states were members. In 2052, Europe was heavily dependent on oil imports from the petroleum-rich states of the Middle East and responded with military action to rapidly rising oil prices that were damaging its economy, starting the terrible global conflicts that later historians simply lumped together as the Resource Wars. The outcome of the conflict suggests that the European Commonwealth possessed a unified military. It is unknown whether the Commonwealth took steps to ensure its survival like the United States did. When the European Commonwealth-Middle East War came to an end in 2060, the Commonwealth began to dissolve as many countries withdrew from the state. A long civil war followed, lasting for an unknown period of time.
- Europe is a parliamentary democracy with an executive chosen directly from the legislature. The parliament holds sovereignty as the single central governing entity within the Commonwealth, making it the single most influential point of national governance and policy. The prime minister is selected from the leader of the largest party or coalition of parties within the parliament, meaning that the powers of the executive derive from the parliament itself. The European government is a federal-like government in which the national government always holds the power to overrule the indivisible members of the union. As defined in the nation's constitution, the national government holds all powers of government, and those powers not explicitly derived from the national government are then given to the regions. Therefore, the Commonwealth is considered to be a unitary state with a semi-federal system in place under a parliamentary republic in which the national legislature is supreme. Europe has a long, complex history stretching as far back as to the first human arrivals between 45,000 and 25,000 BCE during the paleolithic age. Through thousands of years of development, the period of classical antiquity arose with the Ancient Greek city-states. From Ancient Greece came the modern concepts of philosophy, democracy, mathematics, and many more fundamental features of contemporary European society which were spread by the conquests of Alexander the Great. The Roman Empire, whose roots came from the dictator Julius Caesar, and was expanded to encompass the entire Roman Republic by Caesar Augustus, was one of the first major unifying governments of Europe, at its peak extending over most of southern, western, and southeastern Europe. Due to a split by west and east around the year 300 CE and continuous attacks by Germanic peoples from the 4th to 5th century, Western Rome fell by 476, leading to the beginning of the Middle Ages. Although Christianity had been introduced under the Empire, the most pious period of European history was after the fall of the western portion of the Empire in this period. Germanic dominance over the former Western Rome would see the Franks develop a hegemony of power over the other peoples of Western Europe, culminating in the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire around 800 by Charlemagne. It is around this time that the British Isles, the last place dominated by Celtic peoples, were subject to waves of settlement by Germanic Anglo-Saxons, eventually forming England by 927, and Hungary emerged as an independent kingdom. The Viking Age was at its zenith of power in the early 11th century under Cnut the Great, a period which saw the migrations of many peoples across Europe, such as the Normans. The Crusades saw religious piety and zeal invade the Middle East to establish crusader states with the support of the Catholic Church, paving the way to the Renaissance by reforming knowledge bonds between Ancient Roman and Greek works that had been lost in the Middle Ages with Europeans. While dynastic powers in Europe came under political and economic pressure from the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death, a rebirth of ancient Greek and Roman knowledge from Florence came about in the early 14th century which was spread throughout Europe by the printing press. The Renaissance challenged existing views of science and theology as supported by the Catholic Church, and saw the development of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution along with the influences of humanism and individualism on culture and society. The Age of Discovery, jump started by the Reconquista of Spain and Portugal, established oceanic trading links across the world and saw the first beginnings of colonial empires, producing the Columbian Exchange. A combination of New World resources coupled with the Industrial Revolution of Great Britain would lead to the development of economics based on manufacturing rather than agriculture. The American Revolution and the French Revolution would see the establishment of the first republics as idealized in the French-centered Enlightenment, leading to the Napoleonic Wars and the spread of the ideals of nationalism, liberalism, and republicanism across Europe under Napoleon Bonaparte. A massive expansion of the Industrial Revolution lead to the creation of competition between the nation-states of Europe and the development of socialism, communism, and trade unions among its peoples. A series of wars and revolutionary movements throughout the 19th century saw the creation of nation-states such as Germany and Italy, and the development of centralized powers resulted in the Scramble for Africa at the peak of the Age of Imperialism. The intense nationalism and the militaristic tendencies of these large colonial European empires would lead to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Following an German and Austo-Hungarian defeat in 1918, Germany was placed into massive debt and economic disaster and Austria-Hungary was dismantled into smaller nation-states. The massive German economic disaster, coupled with the effects of the Great Depression would see the rise of fascism and authoritarianism through the collapse of many democratic states, leading to the rise of Benito Mussolini and Fascist Italy in 1922 and Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in 1933, which would eventually lead to the Second World War. Following Allied victory in 1945, Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain, split between support for the United States and the Soviet Union. It was from the non-communist Western Europe that the European Economic Community was founded as the precursor to the European Commonwealth. The economies of Italy and West Germany recovered in the postwar economic boom, and the first notions of Pan-Europeanism began to spread across the ECC. Under the leadership of Johannes Sieg, the European Commonwealth was established by the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, West Germany, Italy, and Austria in the 1983 Treaty of Brussels. Following the fall of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself in 1991, Europe was depolarized and the Commonwealth was expanded to include many former non-communist countries and certain non-aligned countries in the 1992 Treaty of Vienna. Upon the adoption of the Zagreb Agreement in 1995, the Commonwealth was expanded to include Slovenia and Croatia, reaching its contemporary boundaries. The European Commonwealth is a free market, post-industrial, and post-material economy focused on the ideas of pragmatic laissez faire. Europe is a heavily developed country which was the root of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, and as a result, is one of the oldest free markets in the world. Under a series of policies recognizing that markets should exist in a self regulating state and that certain institutions would be better off in the hands of state management, Europe is sometimes considered to be a synthesis of socialism and capitalism, while most Europeans attribute this to staying true to the values of economist Adam Smith. Extremely diverse and highly productive, the economy of Europe is based upon a wide variety of goods, practices, and services which had survived some level of outsourcing and globalisation. Policies aimed at continuing both primary and secondary economic sectors and a cultural value of self reliance have seen the survival of many agricultural and industrial practices that lead to lower profits, albeit are better for the people as a whole. As moral implications have triumphed profit motives, Europe is considered to be a state in which post-materialism has developed. While Europeans as a whole are much less commercially-driven than most other capitalist countries, innovation and education remain high, with many international standards of education being set in Europe itself. The Commonwealth is considered to be economically, politically, and socially free. Europe is a founding member of the United Nations, the UN Security Council, the G8, the G20, the IMF, the OCED, the WTO, the OSCE, and the Council of Europe.
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