European unification into the twenty first century

"Towards the end of the year 2011 and after numerous European summits convened to solve the Euro-economic crisis, one may wonder how long the European Union is going to survive? In its history of more than sixty years, there were more moments in which even the most optimistic 'European' no longer believed in its success, or in which the political leaders declared a shaky compromise to be a historic decision. European unification went through so many crisis that we can properly call it a 'system in permanent crisis'. The story of European Unification started in 1950 when two sworn enemies - France and Germany - decided to seek reconciliation and European federal unity. What began as a process of reconciliation between two sworn enemies became a peaceful enlargement of the European Union to twenty seven member states. The division of Europe between a Soviet dominated East and a Euro-Atlantic West is no more. The Schuman Plan's sense of purpose at the origin of the European Communities is lost and replaced by a European Union dominated by the intergovernmental European Council and economic values, in which the Germans lack the solidarity and the French the political vision to turn the Euro-crisis into true progress towards unity. Against the background of Europe's long and turbulent history, this book may also help to understand why it is so difficult to overcome nationalism and to practice the virtue of solidarity, so central to the Christian source of Europe as a civilization. The history of European unification presented in this volume is a story of a fragile European conscience: in law and language, in virtues and values, in politics and economics, in rights and wrongs and in memory and forgetting"--P. [4] of cover.