ABSTRACT
This year we celebrate the European Union's fiftieth anniversary, which coincides with the lastphase of its eastward expansion, with the admittance of Bulgaria and Romania. 1 This is a firm point in the historical process that has significantly repaired the fracture created during the cold war between the two parts of the European Continent. I think that, in general, it is appropriate to substitute the word “reintegration” for “expansion,” because the intention was to reincorporate into the European community (in the philological sense of the word) a series of countries that had been artificially separated from the West only after World War II. Curiously, a recent historical fact projected its shadow onto the past, inducing the idea that this separation was unavoidable and dated back to an ancient time, thus canceling the memory of the period between the two world wars when a geographical, cultural, and even political continuum, rooted in a common secular background, extended from the Baltic to the Balkans.
