Abstract
In her essay on three Central European thinkers from the Communist period who thought about Europe, Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine puts forward the main dilemma that the European unification process faces today and for which Central Europe may be able to provide a solution:
Either Europe remains obstinate in following a path that is purely institutional, driven by economics and accounting, and destined to become at best a huge market dominated by the ideology of ‘growth for the sake of growth.’ This is the path whereby its meaning is ruled by its objectives … Or we understand that there is urgency in inverting the perspective and inaugurating a sort of Copernican revolution in our approach to Central Europe … If the other Europe could appear in the 1980s as the place where the European spirit was threatened with annihilation, it appears today, through its greatest thinkers, as the place of its possible recovery.1
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Notes
Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Esprits d’Europe. Autour de Czeslaw Milosz, Jan Patočka, Istvân Bibó (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 2005). pp. 32–3.
Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
See for example Heather Grabbe, The EU’s Transformative Power. Europeanization Through Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
Willem Maas, Creating European Citizens (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2007)
Milada Anna Vachudovâ, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
Michael Artis, Anindya Banerjee and Massismiliano Marcellino, eds, The Central and East European Countries and the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier, eds, The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005);
Jouquim Roy and Roberto Domínguez, eds, Towards the Completion of Europe. Analysis and Perspectives of the New European Union Enlargement (Coral Gables, FL: Jean Monnet/University of Miami, 2006);
James Wesley Scott, ed., EU Enlargement, Region Building and Shifting Borders of Inclusion and Exclusion (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006).
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© 2007 Stanislav J. Kirschbaum
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Kirschbaum, S.J. (2007). Conclusion. In: Kirschbaum, S.J. (eds) Central European History and the European Union. Studies in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230579538_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230579538_15
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