"Europe 1992!" is the latest rallying-cry of the common market countries of Western Europe. In its suitably ambiguous brevity, the phrase can mean many things at once. Certainly it is forward looking. It points ahead to a Europe that is yet to come, still to be made, that those heeding the cry must help to make. Yet it is backward-looking, too, since it calls for change: from things as they are in the twelve market countries to things as they ought to be. And there is an unmistakable sense in the sound of it that the changes for which support is being rallied have been delayed too long.
What is to be changed? The year that "Europe 1992" specifies inevitable calls to mind the approaching quincentenary of Columbus first landing on an uncharted island in the Western Hemisphere. Whether intentionally or not, the cry thus invites comparison and contrast between what Europe has been for the past five hundred years and what it may become after 1992. Europeans do not need to be pointedly reminded that, for too many generations past, especially in the less industrialized areas of the market, the only cry of real hope for millions has been "America! America!"--as if their continent belonged entirely to the past, with no real future of its own on the horizon. Now, at last, there is the promise of "Europe 1992"--a chance for the people of Europe to finally reach out and take their future back into their own hands. Momentous internal transformations, its propagandists assure us, are in process. By the end of 1992, if things work out as planned, they say, the world should indeed be witnessing the start of a new "Age of Europe," to be inaugurated by a series of "bold ventures into the unknown," the results of which may prove to be as world shaking in their impact--though not in the same way--those of the great European Age of Discovery inaugurated by Columbus voyages five hundred years ago.
Europe as a Fatherland of Middle-Sized powers
We know what eventually became of the two continents that Columbus unintentionally opened up to European conquest and development. Yet it was Europe itself, not the new Americas, that underwent truly radical internal changes in the decades immediately following 1492. For the old continent at that time finally became what it had been trying to become, without much success, all through the Middle Ages. It became, as the distinguished French diplomat Jean Laloy has aptly put it, the "fatherland of middle-sized powers," the "place where such powers were born."
The usual term for the political unit distinguished by Professor Laloy as "middle-sized" is the traditional nation state. In Europe's long history, states made up of many nations, like the Soviet Union, the Hapsburg, or Ottoman empires, have tended to be very large. At the same time states made out of fragments of a single nation, such as the divided Italian and German peoples before the 1860s, have tended to be relatively small. But Laloy speaks of Europe as the fatherland, or birthplace, of such powers. He very well knows that it was something else before it finally gave birth to such powers after a centuries-long labor in the womb of their "mother," the universal medieval church.
Laloy quotes Voltaire on how the family came to "function," as its early members approached maturity. It functioned, the master of enlightenment says, like a democratically run household in which all the members ranked as "juridically equal," because the "father"
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