POLAND AND THE FUTURE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION.
"The enlargement of the European Union this century should be seen as a major event in the spiritual realm rather than just an inevitability in the economic realm. As Norman Davies rightly emphasised there is a long history of misunderstanding, neglect, sense of superiority and ignorance of Western Europe towards East and Central Europe. As a result of the Cold War, “the East” was something like a black hole to most in the West. Worse than the hostile image of Eastern Europe was the well-established convention of ignoring Eastern Europe completely writes Norman Davies. Few of us in the Western part of Europe understood the profound significance of the spirit of 1989; because few of us really understand how different the Eastern experience with totalitarianism has been from our Western experience. The majority of the new member states were squeezed between the two ideologies of evil for most of their national life in the twentieth century. In all these countries, people have great difficulty to deal with the moral heritage of these ideologies and the superficial and materialist view on economic progress brought in from the West. […]
If the European Union continues to give priority to the process of economic integration, it is heading nowhere according to Norman Davies. It is a nice irony, he writes, that the peoples of the new member states may well have a more rounded vision of the Europe to which they wished to return than the often arrogant West Europeans who reluctantly let them in." (From pages 66/67 in my book “European Unification into the Twenty First Century, March 2012).
On the title page of my Epilogue, I quoted the following sentence from the speech of Radek Sikorski, Foreign Minister of Poland given in Berlin on 28 November 2011:
"If we are not willing to risk a partial dismantling of the EU, then the choice becomes as stark as can be in the lives of federations: deeper integration, or collapse."
The full text of his speech can be found attached to this item. Indeed, his vision of Europe is “more rounded” than the vision of his host.