BYEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Will Europe become a real superpower or will it be satisfied of being only a big market? In the wave of the European enlargement the answer will soon be clear.
Here we are at the great appointment of 2004. Europe is almost unified from the Atlantic Ocean to the Carp aces. The news, the hopes and fears that go along with the enlargement from 15 to 25 state members are many. I would like to point out the importance of the greatest news of this event. The first entry in the European Union, the original essence of which was Latin and German, of four important components of the Slavic world: Poland, the Czech republic, Slovakia and Slovenia.
These countries have so many affinities with each-other, according to their cultural roots. They have been accustomed to cohabitate in large supernatural agglomerates. The polish, who themselves founded a commonwealth extending from Lithuania to the Black Sea and afterwards lived separated between the Czarist Empire and the Habsburg’s one. The catholic universalism, combined with the Austro-Hungarian transnational customs, had to impose to polish, Slovaks, Slovenians and Checks (divided into Catholics, Protestants and Hussites) to cohabit and integrate themselves within a political and economic context over passing the ethnical and customs fences of the nation-state.
Scipio Slataper asserted that Austria-Hungary was the second Slavic empire after the Russian Empire. But there was a substantial difference between them: the multiethnic tolerance that made
Vienna, according to Otto Von Bismarck, “a Balkanic capital rather than a German capital”. That was a sort of tolerance that only the great European Empires, from August to Cecco Beppe, were able to grant to the national and religious minorities. The imperial Austria, a part from Trieste and Budapest, included magnificent Slavic cities, such as Prague, Krakow, Bratislava, Lubjana and Zagreb. In each of them, a part from German, lingua franca of those countries, the national languages were also written, spoken and used for conspiring activity against Austrians.
The Polish intellectuals, submitted to the Russian censure, could freely express themselves and long for the rebirth of their nation, whether they lived in the Habsburg Krakow or in Varsawia. In Prague, Check mother-tongue writers and German mother – tongue Hebrew writers worked on their books, which were to be reckoned among the masterpieces of the European literature. In Zagreb, Bishops and poets, founders of the Illyric renaissance movement, outlined the first draft of the idealized union between Croatians, Serbs, Slovenians. It was precisely this draft that lead, after the First World War, to the monarchic and turbulent Jugoslavia.
We now ask ourselves: Will the cosmopolitan cultural patrimony, the imperial ADN, the innate linguistic talent, the antique pan-European roots of these new Slavic member countries – the latter remained intact notwithstanding the continuous efforts of the Communist Regime to abolish them - contribute to make the French-German marked Europe more European? Will they contribute to extirpate from the occidental chromosomes of the so-called Carolingian European, the rites, the prejudices, the inhibitions, the pride and the egoism of its single State-Nations? In other words: will the transfusion of Easten European countries’ fresh blood into the veins of a tired and anemic Europe, unable to become aware of its role in the word, revitalize the Continent and help it find a way to solve the diatribes on Iraq, on America, on Euro?
The new entries are afraid of being treated, by the 15 members, as the poor parents of a second-class part of Europe? They’re afraid of being invited to share the leftovers of a crepuscular banquet. They’re beginning to see prohibitions and parameters, laces and strings, narrow doors with regard to commodities and persons movement, limitations with regard to immigration and the work market. They are catching sight of a very diffuse and accentuated anti-Americanism in France, in Germany and now in Spain as well. All this represents a very negative signal for these countries that still fear the Russian influence and consider America and Nato as guarantees of their military security.
The European enlargement towards East puts us in front of two different possibilities. A status quo in a stagnating grey area of free exchange, or the construction of a super-national entity with more than 454 million inhabitants can lean on America and be equal with it, and at the same time, be equal with Russia and not trust it at all.