Conclusion

Stanislav J. Kirschbaum

pp. 237-247

in: Stanislav J. Kirschbaum (ed), Central European history and the European union, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

Either Europe remains obstinate in following a path that is purely institutional, driven by economics and accounting, and destined to become at best a huge market dominated by the ideology of ‘growth for the sake of growth.’ This is the path whereby its meaning is ruled by its objectives … Or we understand that there is urgency in inverting the perspective and inaugurating a sort of Copernican revolution in our approach to Central Europe … If the other Europe could appear in the 1980s as the place where the European spirit was threatened with annihilation, it appears today, through its greatest thinkers, as the place of its possible recovery.1