The reality
of "the American Dream" is a frequent
debating point. Some deny it ever existed except as a slogan, while
others instead assert that the concept,
which had an indispensable formative function
over several generations, has
been surpassed by more concrete
realities. A sizeable section of American Public opinion is, as yet, firmly convinced that the American Dream has
always existed, continues to exist today and has bright prospects for the future.
Has a
"European Dream" ever existed, and if so,
is it still redeemable, or is it lapsing into the old European Nationalist nightmare?
Learned
historians have explained why, after the fall of Rome, the succeeding imperial ventures in Europe
had a divisive, and not a unifying
effect, and how, from an essential, if fragile unity, Nation States came to be formed and thrived on
rivalries and wars. Over a millennium, many Emperors,
from Charlemagne to Napoleon, ended up enhancing, sometimes even creating, nationalist attitudes which reached their
most ruinous effect in the World Wars of
the twentieth century.
And yet for
Europeans of my generation, a "European
Dream" did begin to take shape, inspired by
a handful of ageing statesmen
(Adenauer, De Gasperi, Schumann, Monnet, Spaak and others) who really appeared
to interpret the profoundest wishes of the people they represented and to work
towards the weakening of those nationalist impulses which had led to
such disasters. When the Treaty of Rome
was signed in 1957 among the six founding
members of what was then called the "European Common Market" (France,
Even some
years later, when the "Six" became "Nine", with the addition of the United
Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark, and later
still, when the almost mystic number of twelve was reached, the meetings among
the member states, either in Brussels or in the presiding country's capital,
had an air of serious, meaningful informality about them, with officials, often
on first name terms, meeting around a
table and openly discussing the principal problems.
By
contrast, the gigantic workings of
today's "European Union" seem to have lost the original spirit and principles and at
times come close to rekindling
those very nationalist feelings
which we so purposefully, at times, perhaps, a bit naively struggled to
weaken and ultimately eliminate.
Three essential
questions remain on the table. Firstly, has the fundamental vision of the
founders been betrayed? If so what went wrong, and when did things begin to
unravel? And, thirdly, is there a way back, or is
The term
"betrayed" appears perhaps too strong, and
unfair to those leaders who, in the past years, have attempted to bring
forward the ideals which were at the
base of the
As to the
second query, it has to be said that a
rapidly shrinking minority will still insist that, in reality, nothing ever
"went wrong", and that the E.U. is bravely and efficiently coping with a world
economic crisis the origins of which lie outside the Union itself. Public
opinion, however, even in the most traditionally "Europhile" countries (e.g.
the Netherlands or Italy) appears to disagree and has developed feelings of antipathy towards the "faceless bureaucrats" who seem to be in
charge of the collective destinies of
European citizens. .
Even among
those ready to accept the concept that, indeed, things have been
going wrong, the moment and the motive for the apparent
unravelling of a well-fashioned skein remain objects of acute controversy. Some
blame the apparently abnormal growth of
bureaucratic regulations, while others decry
the creation of a common currency without the guarantees normally associated
with monetary policy.
On the
basis of nearly half a century of
professional involvement in the workings of the E.U., my own view --
controversial but by no means unique -- lays the blame for the present crisis on
the hurried, poorly planned post Cold War expansion of the Union, to its
present, virtually uncontrollable size of 27 member States..
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