ABSTRACT
The European Union’s ‘founding fathers’ never intended their brainchild to remain an exclusively Western European club. In a speech delivered on 15 January 1959 the West German Foreign Minister, Heinrich von Brentano, declared that ‘just as the European economic communities we have created are not intended to be restrictive, nor would a European political community be. It would be open to any European country prepared to accept the necessary political conditions in the interests of all’ (Brentano 1964:161). On 9 December 1989, amid the excitement and optimism generated by the revolutions in East Central Europe, the European Council affirmed that the European Community and its member states were ‘fully conscious of the common responsibility that devolves upon them in this decisive phase in the history of Europe’. Conversely, the first postcommunist governments of Eastern Europe attached great importance to the so-called ‘return to Europe’, a slogan that embodied a whole web of aspirations: to fast-track entry into the European Union; to the rapid adoption of Western-style laws, institutions and market systems (which some people thought would soon result in Western-style living standards); to freer travel and migration; to major cultural, economic and geopolitical reorientations; and to international acceptance as ‘normal’ countries. All European states are now greatly influenced by their relationship to the European Union and, with the notable exceptions of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Serbia, Norway and Switzerland, almost all are either members or prospective candidates for membership. It is significant (indeed, reassuring) that in Eastern Europe, in contrast to Russia, few political parties have made major electoral gains by adopting a cool attitude towards the West. (Meciar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia has been an exception to the rule.) Identification with Europe runs much deeper in Eastern Europe than it does among the more ambivalent Russians. Thus Bosnian Moslems get justifiably angry when the West tries to bracket them with the Moslems of the Middle East, instead of fully accepting them as Europeans who just happen to adhere to a Moslem faith which shares its Middle Eastern origins with Christianity and Judaism. Moreover, in spite of the fact that western Europe openly sided with the Croats, Slovenes and Bosnian Moslems against the Serbs during the 1991-95 Yugoslav conflict, in the end even Serbia sought to ingratiate itself with the West.
