This
website is a forum for all those who
would like to invent themselves, their
communities, villages, cities, countries,
or their region: Central Europe.
Fifty Ytears After: The Strassburg Declaration of the European Parliament on 1956
On the 26th of October 2006, there was a commemoration in the Strassbourg meeting of the European Parliament on the historic significance of the Hungarian revolution in 1956.
Beyond the points of convergence, the relationship between Romanians and Hungarians is that between a fall and the parallel rise - claims the young Romanian scholar in his provocative paper on the history of Central Europe in the Middle Ages and in the early Modern Era.
(Musing over the shared Slovakian-Hungarian past)
What is it we have to give up here on the banks of the Danube? First of all the chance to lecture our neighbour on their own national history.
For the Germans who were affected in their persons, and for the Hungarians, he symbolises the destructive, murderous emotions which only extreme nationalism is able to provoke, and thus they consider him guilty. For the Czechs he remains one of the champions of the Czech national idea.
The time has come for these two nations to talk with one another rather than about one another. By replacing an unhealthy sense of uniqueness with genuine Central European co-operation they could revive a sense of initiative and further integration in the region.
Mountains
cannot be surmounted except by winding
paths.
