NATO and an Enlarged European Union: The Shape of a New “European Identity”!

• NATO and an Enlarged European Union: The Shape of a New “European Identity”! 
  by Paul Rogov, http://www.globalresearch.ca/ 
  Both NATO and the European Union, respectively, have attempted to unite Europe once again, and for that matter, once and for all.  NATO, however, struggled in the summer of 1997 to decide who belonged to the “West” during the altered political economy of the 1990’s. Given that NATO, a militaristic alliance formed as a counter-force to Warsaw Pact countries—that those Warsaw Pact no longer existed, and the fact post-World War II Europe had supposedly had enough war—political-economic solidarity as exemplified by the European Union seemed inevitable.
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  Nonetheless, many claimed that the real risk for an enlarged European Union was not the chasm between old European coordinates and new European coordinates. Instead, some speculated that amid a changing set of shifting alliances across different policy issues, Europe will fail to find strategic direction. Why?  Because it would be naïve to say that the NATO vision and European Union was simply a question of who was in and who was out.
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  The fate of Europe brings to the forefront three questions that have plagued Europe for thousands of years: ‘who is European, what does it mean to be European, and most importantly, what do Europeans envision themselves to be? At the center of all such inquiry, “European subjectivity,” drenched in a multiplicity of ideological, religious, conceptual, social and economic factors, unflinchingly, ruptures into a series of political moments that are ambiguously correlative to those conditions that provoke them to exist.
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  Whereas liberal-democratic capitalism, after the fall of Berlin Wall, appears to have “won,” as Fukuyama claimed, in May 2004, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia have all joined “Europe.” But are these Eastern European, former Communist countries, also, also indirectly shaping European subjectivity, if as Rumsfeld claimed “the center of gravity” was moving East, we can only speculate what New Europe will be like and what are the strengths and weaknesses of those speculations.
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