The Balkan Question : benefits and challenges of European integration through enlargement.

Since the formation of the European Project, the questions of which direction the EU should take and what objectives it should pursue in the face of considerable ongoing challenges have evolved over time. Today the Western Balkan states – the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, Albania and Bosnia-Hercegovina – pose a set of considerable challenges to the organization, and how the EU addresses the membership of these countries will stand as a critical test of the organization’s competence. As the Union turns its attention to membership consideration for these states, both their complexities and their fragilities have created among EU member states grave doubts regarding the efficacy of membership for all. The critical issues include internal ethnic hostilities, faltering economies, the strain of refugee influx, regional political strains, and Soviet and Chinese economic and political intervention. This thesis assesses both the benefits and costs of enlargement into the Balkan region for both the countries seeking membership and the European Union. This thesis argues that the Union should support enlargement only if it specifically serves the interests of the organization. The Union should promote enlargement when it strengthens measurably deeper integration policies. Successfully adding some or all of the Balkans states would significantly enhance the EU’s international standing, broaden the reach of the organization, and demonstrate the strength and sustainability of the its Common Foreign and Security Policy

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7