Postwar

2001.

391

As the common language of many tens of millions of people in the Americas, from Santiago to San Francisco, the international standing of Spanish was nevertheless secure. The same was true of Portuguese, at least in its quite distinctive Brazilian form.

392

With the exception of Romania, where the situation was reversed and French had by far the broader constituency.

393

The exception in this case is Bulgaria, where Russia and its language had always found a more sympathetic reception.

394

Respectively the French, German and Italian flagship expresses.

395

In June 2004 the present author received the following greeting from a correspondent in the foreign ministry in Zagreb: ‘Things here good. Croatia got EU membership invitation. This will change many mental maps’.

396

Hungarians in twenty-first-century Romania, Slovakia and Serbia were another, smaller post-imperial minority: once dominant, now vulnerable. In the Vojvodina region of northern Serbia, Hungarians who had lived there for centuries were periodically assaulted and their properties vandalized by Serb youths. The response of the authorities in Belgrade, who appeared to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the catastrophe of the Nineties, was depressingly predictable: the attacks were not ‘serious’ and in any case, ‘they’ started it.

397

Quite the opposite. In a series of measures in the spring and summer of 2004 the authorities significantly curtailed both the rights of the press and the already restricted opportunities for public protest. Russia’s brief window of freedom—actually disarray and the absence of constraint rather than genuine constitutionally protected liberty—was fast closing. In 2004, Russian observers estimated that KGB-TRAINED officials occupied one in four of civilian administrative posts in the country.

398

Including the domestic political calculations of Greek politicians, who for many years used their vote in Brussels to hinder and block any movement on Turkey’s candidacy.

399

In addition they were wont to see as ‘European’ an idealized free-market, contrasting it with the graft and cronyism of Turkey’s own economy.

400

The Christian Democratic Union in Germany was officially opposed to Turkey joining the EU.

401

Democratic Spain did indeed develop an official ‘heritage’ industry, fostered by its Patrimonio Nacional, but the latter took care to emphasize the country’s distant Golden Age rather than its recent history.

402

In T .R. Reid, The United States of Europe. The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (NY, 2004), p. 131.

403

Britain was not unique. In one week in September 2004 the Spanish national lottery, El Gordo, took in 5,920,293 euros.