After the Wall: Why Europe Still Feels Divided
Some European Soul-Searching in Poland
When I set off from England to Poland on Monday, I was in an exceptionally good mood. For once, I hadn’t tortured myself with a brutally early flight. It was late afternoon when we were cruising at high altitude, crossing Europe west to east.
The seat next to mine remained free, and so I stretched out, still happily slurping bad coffee and looking out the window at the lights of the Polish capital when the captain cheerfully announced: “It’s a beautifully clear evening in Warsaw. Bit nippy though.” That turned out to be classic British understatement. The outside temperature had already dropped to -13 degrees, and it wasn’t done yet.
That suited me just fine. I didn’t really have to go anywhere. I was booked in to stay on the campus of the College of Europe in Natolin on the southern outskirts of Warsaw. I had a large, warm apartment all to myself, stocked with plenty of tea. I was free to enjoy the winter wonderland that the Polish landscape had been turned into in small doses, as and when I fancied a stroll through the large estate of the former Royal hunting palace of Natolin.
The College of Europe is an interesting institution. The original campus in Bruges, Belgium, was founded in 1949 with the explicit aim of fostering “a spirit of solidarity and mutual understanding between all the nations of Western Europe and to provide elite training to individuals who will uphold these values.”
Well, here we are 77 years later. An East German had been invited to lecture the next “elite of young executives for Europe” on an Eastern European campus of the College of Europe. History had enfolded East Germans like me, Poles like my hosts and millions of other “newcomers” into the European project. But has the project embraced us in turn? That’s what I’d come here to discuss.
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