Amid doubt on EU's future, some seek common past
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-07-06 20:51

AGES OF UNITY

"It's clear this is an activist museum, not a propaganda museum but one that aims to help advance this great idea," said Benoit Remiche, the association's secretary-general.

The challenge is to show how national identities forged in blood have been transformed into a common identity through shared values and mutual economic interest.

"It won't be easy to translate this concept in such a way that the relationship between diversity and unity comes to the fore," historian Ute Frevert wrote in the weekly Die Zeit.

Gone are traditional periods such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution.

The "scientific scenario" repaints history with a broad brush into three ages of unification -- the age of Christendom, the Enlightenment and post-war European integration -- and two periods of division -- the wars of religion and wars of ideology.

The non-profit association was founded in 1997 and has organized debates, conferences and temporary exhibitions since 1999 to test and refine its reinterpretation of the past.

Greater emphasis has been given as a result of these debates to the Greek and Roman cultural roots of Europe, and to the importance of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity in shaping southeastern Europe.

But the basic thesis remains that despite centuries of war and barbarism, Europe was twice unified, first through faith and the spread of Christianity with its monasteries and universities, then through the spread of liberal, secular humanism from the 18th century.

The first period of unity, to be illustrated by a giant stained-glass map of Christian Europe, was brought to an end by the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion that tore Europe asunder for 100 years from the mid-16th century.

The second period of unification spans the Enlightenment philosophers, the Industrial Revolution, the pioneers of science and the great universal exhibitions of the 19th century.

It ends abruptly with the descent into World War One and the rise of communism and fascism.

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