In the pantheon of the Greek mythology, Europe was a
princess, daughter of a Phoenician king. One day, while she and her friends rollicked
on a beach, Zeus, the highest Greek god, saw her and, immediately, fell in love with
her.
To seduce her, Zeus took the form of a kind and peaceful bull. Europe,
confident, began to caress the bull and sat down on its loin.
That was the moment that Zeus was waiting for. Suddenly, he rose and galloped toward the sea, taking
her away with him.
The bull Zeus didn't stop swimming until arriving in Crete.
Once in the Mediterranean island, Zeus assumed again his human outward
appearance and had three children with
Europe, one of them, Minos, king from Crete and "Dux Europaeus."
 |
|
The Kidnapping of Europe - Tiziano |
There is a risk of seeing the European integration process as an isolated
process, exclusively centred in the period after World War II. This view reveals
a clear misunderstanding of the great transformations that shaped a reality
known as
Europe.
The Roman Empire constituted the first great effort to integrate an important
section of our continent and the lands surrounding the Mediterranean sea. Middle
Ages brought the idea of unification under the common banner of Christendom. The ideas of
eurocentrism and superiority of the European civilisation arose in that moment. Without the Renaissance and the Enlightenment
we cannot understand the ideas of
tolerance, freedom, respect of human rights and democracy that that constitute
the foundation of the European
construction.
There is an evident reality that we should point out: the idea of Europe cannot
be fully understood without keeping in mind the historical evolution of our continent
prior to
World War II and the recent integration process that has been realized in the European
Union.
There is a long list of
towering historical personalities, who, in quite different ways, pursued an idea of Europe:
Charlemagne, Charles V, Napoleón, Metternich... Even notorious and infamous
personages as Hitler, intended to give birth to a wicked idea of Europe.
The same thing could be said about intellectuals and
philosophers. From Rousseau to Marx, from Kant to Leibniz, there were remarkable thinkers who proposed the idea of
a European Community as a long-term desirable political
objective.
