I
am an extreme Europeanist. I have said it many times before: In my view, a united Europe is the only reasonable political utopia that we Europeans have invented. I do not use the word "utopia" in its etymological sense: "Such a place does not exist," wrote Francisco de Quevedo, one of the greatest poets in my language. I use it in the more common sense today: a desirable, ideal project. We have invented many atrocious political utopias in Europe – paradises in theory that became hells in reality. As for reasonable political utopias, as far as I know, there is only one: that of a united Europe.
A multitude of facts support that idea, but they are so obvious that we tend to forget them. I will mention just one: Contrary to what many believe, the quintessential European sport is not football, but war. Over the past millennium, we Europeans have killed each other without granting ourselves even a single month of respite and in every way imaginable: In the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, civil wars, religious wars, ethnic wars and world wars that were, in reality, above all European wars. These wars were horrific: It is estimated that between August 1914 and May 1945, from Madrid to the Volga and from the Arctic to Sicily, around 100 million men, women and children died as a result of violence, famine, deportation and ethnic cleansing. Western Europe and western Russia became the center of death, a theater of unprecedented brutality, whether in Auschwitz or in the gulag.
