![]() ![]() To the other journalists present, this had all become normal. There were the same arguments about how to prevent the nations of the EU from arguing so much. There were the same kinds of conflicting rumors spreading through the throngs of journalists. There were the same competing briefings by national spokesmen. Map of Europe drawn by Walter Trier in 1914.Īnd yet the ambience of EU summitry was stiflingly, and reassuringly, the same. ![]() There were television crews in T-shirts and baseball hats from countries that had been part of the Soviet Union in 1988: Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. There were offices guarded by the national flags of countries that had been separated from the EU by minefields and barbed wire in 1988: Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. ![]() There were briefing rooms for the national delegations of countries that had not existed nineteen years before, such as Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic. Germany was now one country, not two, represented by a tough little woman with a beautiful smile. The twelve EU member states had become twenty-seven. ![]() Returning to my old hunting grounds in Brussels after nearly two decades, I was confronted with a bewildering New Europe. He woke after a twentyyear nap in the Catskill Mountains to find that the thirteen British colonies had become the United States. Wandering through the bowels of the new Council of Ministers building in Brussels, I felt suddenly like that great Dutch-American Rip Van Winkle. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a European Union summit meeting for the first time in nineteen years. ![]()
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