Still on the margins?

A history of Lithuania by Claudio Carpini (published by Città Nuova) was recently presented at the Book Fair in Turin. Lithuania was in fact the guest country at the book fair. It’s a country that is seeking greater consideration of its own identity, as explained by IRENA VAISVILAITE , adviser to the President of the Republic on cultural affairs. She complained of the European Union’s lack of attention to the tradition and history of her country. “We feel ourselves Europeans, but at the same time we are split in two, because even if we are a member country of the EU we don’t feel that our culture and our traditions are considered an integral part of Europe today”. It’s an identity centred on Europe, but in the view of Irena Vaisvilaite is not considered by the other countries of the European Union. “Those who arrive in Lithuania for the first time – she declares – are amazed to find European architecture”. DESPITE SO MUCH SUFFERING. During the presentation of the new history of Lithuania at the book fair, Vaisvilaite traced the main stages in the history of her country, from conversion to Catholicism in the thirteenth century to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the yearned-for independence in 1990 (Lithuania has been a parliamentary republic since 1991). But it’s an independence that has not yet permitted Lithuania to be fully considered a European country, pointed out Vaisvilaite, telling how, during her visit to Italy in the 1990s, she had encountered a lot of prejudice about her country: there was a common persuasion that still associated it with a “red blob on the map, an outpost of the Soviet Union. We were not treated as Europeans, but only recognized as Soviets”. Still today, she confessed, Lithuanians feel themselves consigned to the margins of Europe, in spite of the two centuries of suffering she has behind her in the struggle to maintain her own national identity founded on language, faith (Catholic majority, but nine different confessions exist) and her own past. RECOVERING HER OWN HISTORY. Commenting on future EU enlargement, Vaisvilaite claims the precedence of Ukraine and Belarus over Turkey. “For us – she said – it would be very important if the frontiers of Europe were also to incorporate these two countries with which we share a common past. Europe ought to consider these two countries as an integral part in cultural terms and not just regard them from an economic viewpoint”. In this persuasion, in particular, Lithuania has a partner in Poland. Together they are trying to raise the awareness of European politicians. Three years after Lithuania’s entry into the EU (2004), Vaisvilaite reported that still today the country is paying the social consequences of this choice: “We were asked to respect the economic parameters, and rightly so, but this has meant that the country has had to slash its health and social budget. It’s right to respect the rules, but the evaluation ought not to be linked solely to economic factors; the levels of social benefits and healthcare offered to citizens are also important”. For the future she hopes in “a Europe that is not just an economic fact, but also an entity of cultural and spiritual values”. She has no hesitation in saying that identity can only be based on mutual understanding: “Europe too ought to re-appropriate her own history which also comprises some countries in Eastern Europe”. But this recovery can only occur “through dialogue, exchange and recognition of a common past”. BREATHING WITH TWO LUNGS. The Italian historian FRANCO CARDINI , editor of the series in which the new history of Lithuania is published, recalled what John Paul II, who knew Lithuania very well, had always maintained: namely, that an enlargement of Europe to the limits of what had formerly been the Soviet Union, and is now the Confederation of Independent States, would finally allow Europe to breathe with both lungs. “Now that the European archipelago has reached a deadlock after the failure to launch the Constitutional Treaty – underlined the historian – it is increasingly indispensable to gain a better understanding of the various national components of what could become one day a great continental Union”. Cardini is convinced that there will never be a united Europe if its various components are not understood: “for the time being we can only speak of a ‘Euro-land’, but not yet of Europe”. He underlined that “integration does not mean standardization or centralization”. He suggested that education is the necessary means to achieve real European integration: “at the present time we are in year zero”. “But young people in Europe are increasingly travelling about – he concluded -; they are getting to know each other better, and this will perhaps remedy the false starts and the painful impasse after the first half century of united Europe, from the Treaties of Rome in 1957 to the present day. We will hear Lithuania increasingly being spoken of in future”.