Hopes and fears” “

The enlargement, or if you prefer the “re-unification”, of Europe is imminent. And as happens on the eve of historic events, intellectuals are busily pointing out the positive, but also the negative factors that the transformations taking place bring with them. With regard to the enlargement of the frontiers of the EU to ten new member states, many studies by expects in various countries are already available. Without any claim to exhaustiveness, we report the contributions to the debate by three different academics. “LOOKING TO EASTERN EUROPE WITHOUT MISTRUST”. Effective analyses on the process of rapprochement of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe with the EU have been made by Monika Ewa Kaminska, a researcher in the Department of Political Studies of the University of Economics in Warsaw. “Rarely – she says – is account taken of the fact that in little over a decade these countries have undergone a process that took other EU states thirty or forty years. From 1989 to the present day many of the countries of the area have evolved from states without sovereignty and with a centrally planned economy to democracies in which the rule of law is now paramount and to a functional market economy”. In this sense the prospect of membership of the Union has accelerated change; it has also created the need for a profound transformation of the welfare and mentality of the populations. That said, however, the Polish expert notes that the “atmosphere” has changed among the Fifteen, where – she says – scepticism and mistrust towards the candidate countries have gained the upper hand in recent times: as examples she cites the closure of the frontiers to workers from Eastern Europe, the modest resources allocated to integration, and the protectionism enjoyed by the agriculture of Western Europe. Even the “pro-American” attitude of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to the war in Iraq has created perplexities. According to Kaminska “Western Europe is, with some surprise, and almost reluctantly, taking on board the fact that it now has new partners”, whose own aspirations and policies must be recognised. “THE EU IS A PROCESS, NOT A PARADIGM”. For his part the Italian expert Pasquale Ferrara, diplomat and lecturer in the history of political doctrines at the University of Naples, has long insisted on the two “crucial transitions” that await Europe: that of “quantity”, or the pressure towards enlargement, and that of “quality”, or “the development of the reasons for integration”. Faced by these challenges, “the decisive factor of our future – he explains – will be represented by the mutual implication between identity, plurality and project”. Ferrara (who cites John Paul II, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, Mounier and the “founding fathers” Schuman, De Gasperi and Adenauer) warns: “The new face of Europe will depend not on a quantitative projection of its current condition, but on the chances it has of developing around an innovative vision. Ferrara’s other key point is that domestic policies, institutional system and enlargement are strongly correlated. Therefore the transformation of Europe before our eyes cannot be reduced to a mode of action regulated by norms. It is – he suggests – more like a theatrical mode of action, an event in which the participants each play their part and mutually interact”. This is because the EU “as a political experiment, is essentially an itinerary, a process, not a paradigm”. “EUROPE IN THE SEARCH OF ITS OWN IDENTITY”. What’s still lacking in this Europe, that is overcoming historic barriers and re-uniting East and West, is a strong “image of its own identity”. So says Anne-Marie Thiesse, social historian and head of the CNRS in Paris. In 1999 she published a book called La Création des identités nationales. She has continued this research on national identities, in the effort to understand those “symbols through which nations propose to individuals a form of belonging, brotherhood and protection”. The question is clearly all the more relevant today, with the Union engaged in shifting its own frontiers eastwards to the Baltic republics and southwards to the Mediterranean islands. Anne-Marie Thiesse argues the need to define this identity, a “collective heritage, created by founding fathers, by heroes, by language, by history, by monuments and by popular traditions”. These shared values, both national and European, must be sought in art, in literature, in architecture, in collective rites, but also “in the Greco-Latin legacy”, in Celtic myths, in gothic cathedrals and in the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm…”. In this effort, due attention must also be paid to the contribution made by faiths and religions to the construction of Europe; although in this case various scholars still do not assign sufficient significance to this undeniable fact.