The Idea of Europe

Abstract

In 1991, at Princeton University where I then taught, "The Idea of Europe" was selected as the topic of a newly established senior seminar to be offered jointly by the departments of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages and literatures. The cold war had very recently ended; the last customs barriers among the member states of the EEC, now the European Union, were about to come down; and the prospects for Europe seemed extremely promising. The EU was at that time a predominantly Western European affair, but since 1991 the Central and Eastern European states