LONDON: What is Europe's future: integration or disintegration? I was invited to address this question at the Central European University in Budapest last month before an audience of 60 newspaper editors from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Naturally, I objected to phrasing. Are integration and disintegration the only alternatives for Europe? There are plenty of other false dichotomies: centralisation or decentralisation; uniformity or diversity; rigidity or flexibility. Or, more dramatically: imperial oppression or national liberation.
A shocked murmur went round the audience with these words. East Europeans have been fighting for generations for national liberation -- not only from the USSR, but from the Nazis, Hapsburgs, Ottomans, Kaisers, Tsars, Mongols and the other European empire-builders going back to Charlemagne. Of course, the European Union is infinitely more benign than any of these earlier efforts to unite Europe. It is liberal, prosperous, more or less democratic, and peaceful. But does this imply that people who struggled for centuries for the right to call themselves Hungarians, Latvians or Poles will suddenly think themselves Europeans? Is this true even of the French and Germans?
No. France, Italy and Spain, to say nothing of the Scandinavian countries and Britain fight ruthlessly in the European Union for their national interests. The Brussels bureaucracy is riddled with national quotas and politicians return from Brussels speaking of victories or defeats like generals returning from a never-ending war. Even in Germany, where pan-European idealism is universal, the EU is popular because it seems a natural extension of the new Germany's benevolent ideals: an orderly, regulated, federal system of social partnership modeled on the postwar German state.
LONDON: What is Europe's future: integration or disintegration? I was invited to address this question at the Central European University in Budapest last month before an audience of 60 newspaper editors from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Naturally, I objected to phrasing. Are integration and disintegration the only alternatives for Europe? There are plenty of other false dichotomies: centralisation or decentralisation; uniformity or diversity; rigidity or flexibility. Or, more dramatically: imperial oppression or national liberation.
A shocked murmur went round the audience with these words. East Europeans have been fighting for generations for national liberation -- not only from the USSR, but from the Nazis, Hapsburgs, Ottomans, Kaisers, Tsars, Mongols and the other European empire-builders going back to Charlemagne. Of course, the European Union is infinitely more benign than any of these earlier efforts to unite Europe. It is liberal, prosperous, more or less democratic, and peaceful. But does this imply that people who struggled for centuries for the right to call themselves Hungarians, Latvians or Poles will suddenly think themselves Europeans? Is this true even of the French and Germans?
No. France, Italy and Spain, to say nothing of the Scandinavian countries and Britain fight ruthlessly in the European Union for their national interests. The Brussels bureaucracy is riddled with national quotas and politicians return from Brussels speaking of victories or defeats like generals returning from a never-ending war. Even in Germany, where pan-European idealism is universal, the EU is popular because it seems a natural extension of the new Germany's benevolent ideals: an orderly, regulated, federal system of social partnership modeled on the postwar German state.