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  3. Late next month Europe’s political leaders will meet in Berlin to mark the 5

Late next month Europe’s political leaders will meet in Berlin to mark the 5

游客2025-01-11  5
问题     Late next month Europe’s political leaders will meet in Berlin to mark the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. Today’s European Union sprang directly from that treaty. An economic club that began with six members has grown into a far-reaching political entity that has 27 members, 500 million inhabitants and constitutes the world’s biggest economic and trading block.
    Reaching 50 ought to be a joyous occasion. Yet no celebration in Berlin can hide the fact that the EU is in something of a mid-life crisis. For most of the past decade its economic growth has been feeble and its unemployment unacceptably high. Nobody knows where to draw its boundaries. And since France and the Netherlands voted "no" in two referendums in 2005 it has been unable to agree on its own constitution. Enthusiasts hope that the Berlin reunion will lead to a revival of that plan. They are deluding themselves.
    A flood of books, articles and broadcasts is expected to mark the 50th birthday. This is not, in fact, such a book. A Dutch journalist and historian, Geert Mak, spent the last year of the 20th century travelling around the continent for his newspaper, NRC Handelsblad. His musings were gathered into a book that became a bestseller in the Netherlands in 2004. Now the publishers have had the bright idea of bringing out an English translation just before the Rome treaty anniversary.
Mr. Mak does indeed tell of the origins of the EU, notably by drawing on the words and wisdom of Max Kohnstamm, a Dutchman who worked closely with Jean Monnet, the project’s French founding father. But his book is really a broader travelling history of the whole of Europe’s 20th century. As befits a journalist with an eye for bad news, he also has much more to say on its calamitous first half than on its more successful second half.
    Mr. Mak’s travels start in the capitals that glittered so brightly in the early 1900s: Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, London. This was a time when Europe seemed unchallenged in its prosperity and leadership. But much of this was thrown away in the mud, filth and death of what the author calls the war of 1914-45. Mr. Mak tells this part of his story vividly and in great, gory detail, moving from grim fields of battle (Verdun, Stalingrad) to stirring places of revolution (Petrograd, Berlin), and on to ghastly charnel-houses of death and destruction (Auschwitz, Dresden).
    Through the book runs one powerful common strand: nationalism and the end of Europe’s multi-ethnic way of life. Mr. Mak finds a telling quote from Hitler, who declared that "the essence of Europe is not geographical but racial." The first world war did for the continent’s three great multinational empires: the Habsburg, the Russian and the Ottoman. The cataclysmic 1939-45 war destroyed much of what was left, killing along the way as many as 40 million people in Europe, including 6 million Jews.
    Mr. Mak rightly plays up the centrality of the two world wars to Europe’s 20th century. As he notes, it is not possible to appreciate the forces that play out in eastern Europe or the Balkans, say, without a comprehensive understanding of these regions’ experience in the second world war, and the cold war that followed. This is also why he devotes less space to Britain and France than to places farther east.
    It is equally impossible to grasp the origins of the European Union without dwelling on the two wars. The founders wanted above all to avoid repeating the experience of the first half of the century. Monnet and his fellows were convinced that nationalism lay at the root of Europe’s troubles. Their answer was to lay the foundation stones for a supranational state.
    Yet the tension between nationalism and supranationalism was there from the start. Charles de Gaulle, with his fierce attachment to France, was in some ways the first Eurosceptic. He was also deeply suspicious of British intentions towards the European project, because Winston Churchill once told him that he would always choose the open sea over Europe.
    Euroscepticism has increased over the past decade, and is now found even in the 12 countries that have joined the EU since Mr. Mak first wrote his book. Yet as he explains in an epilogue added in 2006, the problems of the EU run deeper than just coping with Euroscepticism. Young Europeans do not fret over the risk of another war, so that part of Monnet’s dream means nothing to them. Instead they see a remote, bureaucratic and in some ways undemocratic organisation—and not one that offers them a dream at all. No constitution will change that, something the leaders who will be gathering in Berlin would do well to realise. [br] What is the best topic for the article?
选项 A、Grim History of the EU, Calamitous WWII
B、Approaching a 50th Birthday, the ElTs Past and Present
C、A Travelling Book on EU History
D、In Europe: Travels Through the 20th Century
答案 B
解析
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