Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

cried the Ossies as the Berlin Wall came down; ‘So are we’ the
Wessies replied, or so the anecdote goes). Western European societies
were sensitive to fears that the end of separation between
the two political camps marked by barbed wire between East and
West at the borders and in people’s minds might give rise to
population migrations on a scale comparable to those of the early
Middle Ages and result in a loss of prosperity. The joy of being together
again was not shared. At midnight on 1 May 2004, fifteen
years after this historic change, in Warsaw’s main square, thousands
of Poles watched with tears in their eyes as the European flag
was hoisted alongside the Polish flag. On that day, there was widespread
joy in all eight post-Communist countries joining the European
Union, but there was little joy in the original EU countries.
Back to the problem of words: the term ‘enlargement’ belonged to
technical discourse, which did not generate any emotion outside
the EU’s ruling elites. In the East, there was delight at joining a community
of countries that defined themselves by their attachment to
freedom, the feeling of a common historic destiny and a shared plan
for the future; moreover this membership expressed the will of the
people (national referendums often confirmed this will). These people
did not see themselves as the passive beneficiaries of the ‘enlargement’
of a common market or of the shifting of the Pillars of
Hercules, but the active promoters of European unity. The entry of
new countries into the European Union, in 2004 and 2007, is therefore
an act of European unification, not an enlargement of the area
of operation of European law. It is an event that is historic in its
scope. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, a new
European order was formed that broke with the legacy of that war
and definitively put an end to it. The construction of the single market,
the introduction of the single currency and the accession of
the former ‘people’s democracies’, are the decisive stages of European
integration.
The horizon of political analysis is by nature a brief stretch of time,
and is therefore short term, but the ‘European Union’s enlargement
to the east’ poses the question of the long term, to use the terminology
of the ‘Annales’ school. Beyond the political divisions
introduced by the decisions made at Yalta, we also need to see the
trends in European development over many centuries that have
differentiated the western part of Europe from the eastern part.
33 Bronisław Geremek