ABSTRACT
Writing of Italy, Spotts and Wieser remind us that Galileo is said to have murmured, after recanting his proposition that the earth is not stationary but rotates around the sun, ‘Eppur si muove’—‘But it does move!’ (Spotts and Wieser 1987:287). There have been a lot of confessions of faith, and recantations, in connection with the European Community/Union. At the start of this book, we suggested that it is a strange creature, whose ‘laws of motion’ were hard to discern and describe. Nevertheless, it seems that it does move. This chapter does not attempt, written as it is at the start of the 1996 IGC, to ‘second-guess’ the outcome of the Conference. Rather, it seeks to highlight some of the ways in which the period under review continues to illustrate the centrality of the ‘four battles’ and their interactions, which have been the main focus of this book.
