The Idea of Europe

In 1991, at Princeton University where I then taught, “The Idea of Europe” was selected as the topic of a newly established senior seminar to be offered jointly by the departments of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages and literatures. The cold war had very recently ended; the last customs barriers among the member states of the EEC, now the European Union, were about to come down; and the prospects for Europe seemed extremely promising. The EU was at that time a predominantly Western European affair, but since 1991 the Central and Eastern European states of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have been added, along with Sweden, Cyprus, and Malta; and of course the two Germanies have been reunited. During the same period, however, there have been serious outbreaks of ethnic, religious, and nationalist conflict in the southeastern part of the continent, sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and Basque separatism in Spain. There is even a violent independence movement on the island of Corsica, which from time to time requires significant deployments of French police and military. In Turkey — supposedly a candidate for full membership of the European Union in the near future — popular support for a more religiously based, Islamic society has continued to grow. Meanwhile, unrest and instability in Albania, virtual civil war in Algeria, and economic hardship in Morocco and parts of the Near East and Central Asia have led to an influx of immigrants, many