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Oddly sufficient, essentially the most visionary formulation of what we Europeans have tried to attain on our personal continent comes from an American president who deplored the “imaginative and prescient factor”. “Let Europe be complete and free,” declared George H. W. Bush within the German metropolis of Mainz in Could 1989 (1). He described “rising political freedom within the east, a Berlin with out limitations, a cleaner atmosphere, [and] a much less militarised Europe” as “the muse of our bigger imaginative and prescient : a Europe that’s free and at peace with itself.”
So the purpose is threefold : complete, free, and at peace. How has Europe achieved towards these benchmarks within the greater than thirty years since 1989? Is the imaginative and prescient coming nearer or receding? What wouldn’t it take for Europe to advance additional towards it ?
Europe’s Publish-Wall Period
Europe’s post-Wall period is a story of two halves. Portray with a broad brush, we are able to characterise the interval from 1989 to 2007 as one in every of extraordinary progress. Political freedom unfold throughout Central, Japanese, and Southeastern Europe. Germany was united. Soviet troops withdrew. New democracies joined the European Union and NATO.
In 1989 what was then nonetheless known as the European Group had simply twelve members and NATO had sixteen. By 2007 the EU had twenty seven members and NATO twenty-six.
There had by no means been a time when so many European international locations had been sovereign, democratic, legally equal members of the identical safety, political, and financial communities. As a European citizen, you can fly from one finish of the continent nearly to the opposite without having to indicate a passport. Most of the international locations alongside the way in which shared a single foreign money, the euro. Right here was an unprecedentedly massive, single European area having fun with an unprecedented degree of peace and freedom.
To make sure, this was additionally a interval that noticed 5 wars within the former Yugoslavia, together with …
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