Abstract

How can the European Union comprehend and receive millions of persons without losing its identity? An identity that, moreover, is itself multiple, expansive, clustered. The European Community has recently been enriched by twelve new members – ten eastern and central European and two Mediterranean states. This enlargement, on the one hand, will serve to heal a historical wound, closing the rift that divided the soil of Europe with the so-called “Iron Curtain”; on the other, it will open even more intense relations with the Mediterranean. With its 470 million citizens and its extension from the Arctic Circle to Malta and from the Azores to Cyprus, the European Union now represents an economic and, potentially, a political power of the first order, also in virtue of its effort to strengthen within its borders that “meek” regime which is democracy, entering into more active relations with other parts of the world and shouldering responsibility for global crises and difficulties