No Comment is free (Guardian) uma lição de história: A Viennese mirror. Quais são os ensinamentos que a história do Império Austro-Húngaro pode ensinar à UE? Dá para reflectir! A coluna começa assim:
"If a European Union bureaucrat
could travel to fin de
siècle Vienna, he or she
would be surprised by
how closely the Hapsburg
Empire resembled
today's EU. Like the EU,
Austria-Hungary was an experiment in
supranational
engineering, comprising
51 million inhabitants, 11
nationalities, and 14
languages. Presiding over
this microcosm of Europe
was a double-throned
Emperor-King and twin
parliaments representing the
largely independent Austrian
and Hungarian
halves of the realm.
The Hapsburg
Empire acted as a stabilising force for its
peoples and for Europe. To its
scattered ethnic groups, it performed the
twin roles of referee and bouncer,
pacifying indigenous rivalries and
protecting pint-sized nations from predatory
states. It also filled a
geopolitical vacuum at the heart of the continent,
placing a check on
Germany and Russia.
So long as it
performed these functions, Austria was viewed as a "European
necessity" - a
balancer of nationalities and of nations for which there was
no conceivable
substitute. But, by the early 1900s, the empire faced two
problems that cast
doubt on its ability to fulfill these missions ..."
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