No, the world is far from being a happy place. Forget about the wars that rage in countries out of Europe. Forget the terrible regimes that torture and murder as a matter of course. Forget the countries that threaten world peace by their incorrigible warmongering and the continual rattling of sabres by the waxing and waning superpowers.

... we are not immune to the backlashes of the convulsions that from time to time shake Europe to its foundations- Kenneth Zammit Tabona

Forget all that and let us concentrate on poor, beleaguered Europe the harassed governments of which are facing the setting of impossible goals, the imposition of ridiculous demands and the implementation of contradictory policies; not in the future but in the here and now.

The Caesarean imperial dream has once again been shattered. There can be no such thing as European unity. Ever since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, European rulers have dreamt of reviving Pax Romana. The popes, Charlemagne and his descendants tried it in 800AD by establishing the Holy Roman Empire, which somehow survived up to the time when Napoleon declared it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Napoleon himself was yet another in a succession of political giants to attempt realising the Roman imperial dream as were Hitler, Mussolini and Franco too. In fact, if one looks closely at the lessons of history it will not be difficult to perceive that the fly in the ointment has always been the continual struggle for supremacy between the Franks and the Teutons.

Whether it was François I being defeated by Charles V at Pavia or Louis XIV’s ruinous War of the Spanish Succession, the nub of the matter has always been whether Europe will be ruled from Paris or from wherever the Habsburg court happened to be. Despite the fortuitous marriages and inheritances of the Habsburgs, the Spanish and the Austrian Empires disintegrated in the end as political and economic tsunamis made the tenuous ties between diverse countries like Spain and The Netherlands or what used to be Bohemia quite impossible.

The European Union was born in the backlash of the last cataclysm that flagellated Europe and the world in the 1940s. Hitler’s legacy was the EU. Hitler was a consequence of the ridiculously harsh and impossibly cruel indemnities imposed on Germany after WWI and his rise to power was made easy because of the terrible hardships that had to be endured by the Germans as a consequence. Hence, WWII was unavoidable. Ergo, the EU was initially formed to eradicate any chance of such a tragedy ever happening to us again and on this front, yes, the EU has been eminently successful. There have been no wars waged in Western Europe since WWII. The year 1989, though, changed everything.

There are, I am sure, many of you who do not remember the Iron Curtain. This was no exaggerated name for, believe you me, we knew nothing back then about what went on in countries like Bulgaria, Macedonia or Poland before the curtain came crashing down with the dissolution of the USSR.

We were then in for a shock when, almost immediately, countries like the one we used to call Yugoslavia cracked up in terrible ethnic civil wars that shocked the world. A couple of decades later many of these countries are now part of the EU. The greater Europe was never envisaged in the 1940s when the EU was established as in those days the Soviet bloc was impenetrable, inscrutable and downright terrifying.

I was brought up thinking that Russians and all communists were bogeymen. You may well laugh. Think of Don Camillo and Peppone and you have it all in a nutshell. Who reads Guareschi today?

The fear of communism infiltrating Europe created the Cold War and, as a child of the 1950s, I am a product of that Cold War, of espionage and struggles between the KGB and the CIA, which were dramatised in our Missions Impossible, James Bonds, Men from UNCLE and a plethora of TV dramas that, oddly enough, were not at all far from the truth of the times we were living in.

Lest we forget, the communists of the Eastern bloc were always the bad guys. Our own history was coloured by this horror of communism. The famous interdett was a Guareschian move on a national scale, which still colours Maltese politics to this day. So even in tiny Malta we are not immune to the backlashes of the convulsions that from time to time shake Europe to its foundations.

So where do we go from here?

Doubts about how well the entente cordiale between François Hollande and Angela Merkel will work have been cast and actually have engendered the drawing up of contingency plans about what to do if the single currency collapses. Thinking the unthinkable you may say, yet, we have seen it all before and, therefore, why should we be any different, especially if the lessons of history are the ones that theoretically are so assiduously learned but invariably ignored!

Where will all this leave Malta? I shudder to think.

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