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Oddly enough, the most visionary formulation of what we Europeans have tried to achieve on our own continent comes from an American president who deplored the “vision thing”. “Let Europe be whole and free,” declared George H. W. Bush in the German city of Mainz in May 1989 (1). He described “growing political freedom in the east, a Berlin without barriers, a cleaner environment, [and] a less militarised Europe” as “the foundation of our larger vision : a Europe that is free and at peace with itself.”
So the goal is threefold : whole, free, and at peace. How has Europe done against those benchmarks in the more than thirty years since 1989? Is the vision coming closer or receding? What would it take for Europe to advance further toward it ?
Europe’s Post-Wall Era
Europe’s post-Wall era is a tale of two halves. Painting with a broad brush, we can characterise the period from 1989 to 2007 as one of extraordinary progress. Political freedom spread across Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Germany was united. Soviet troops withdrew. New democracies joined the European Union and NATO.
In 1989 what was then still called the European Community had just twelve members and NATO had sixteen. By 2007 the EU had twenty seven members and NATO twenty-six.
There had never been a time when so many European countries were sovereign, democratic, legally equal members of the same security, political, and economic communities. As a European citizen, you could fly from one end of the continent almost to the other without needing to show a passport. Many of the countries along the way shared a single currency, the euro. Here was an unprecedentedly large, single European space enjoying an unprecedented level of peace and freedom.
To be sure, this was also a period that saw five wars in the former Yugoslavia, including …
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