In defence of the EU

Eastern Europe is the graveyard of empires. Rome failed on the Danube, Napoleon on the Dnieper. The epic struggle between the empires of Austria, Russia and Turkey in the first world war ended with the destruction of all three and the fragmentation of eastern Europe, giving rise to the word ‘Balkanisation’. Driving through the Balkans today, I am continually reminded that history has no full stops. Every empire leaves its ghosts to haunt its successors.

Vienna, like London, is an imperial city without an empire. The ethnic antagonisms of the Balkans, which provoked the first world war, survived to divide Yugoslavia in the second and then destroy it in the 1990s. The region still wears the robes of the past. On monumental gateways, distance tables carved in stone still show the route to the old imperial capital. In Ljubljana, the mansions of the Austrian nobility and grand public buildings are instantly recognisable from the days when it was the Habsburg city of Laibach. More than a thousand mosques built by the Ottoman Turks survive in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Along the Adriatic coast, the lion of St Mark smiles down at us from castles, city gates and town halls built by the predatory empire of Venice. Even the short-lived communist despotisms have left their calling card in the shape of brutal concrete office blocks and bleak housing developments which look as if they will last forever. Empires leave behind them an enigmatic Cheshire Cat smile. They rarely vanish into the sand like the kingdoms of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’.

In intensely Catholic Croatia, the vast majority of cohabiting couples do actually get married. The divorce rate is rising, but is still low. Marriage is not just celebrated, it is a public affair. The boozing begins in the early afternoon, when the groom’s guests gather in their glad rags at his home and the bride’s at hers.