L’Europe centrale existe-t-elle encore ? Perspectives pour une politique culturelle transnationale croate

Abstract

Even after all of Europe will be supposedly integrated in the European Union, regions will not cease to exist. All kinds of diversities will be continuously legitimate, of course, to the extent they will contribute the European project to preserve, as well as to develop in the future to come. From that point of view, one has to bear in mind the South-East European paradox. Everything what makes Europe is here. This is the only part of Europe where Slavic peoples are on the Mediterranean. Only here the last migratory vawes of peoples from Asia have been integrated into European culture (Bulgarians, Hungarians). This is also the only part of Europe in which the Romanisation originating from the Late Antiquity has been preserved in areas where it lasted for a historically short period of time (Romania). Some of the oldest European ethnic communities are continuously settled down in South-East Europe (Greeks, Albanians), irrespectively of conflicting contemporary interpretations of their distinctive ancient histories. On the other side, this is probably the only European region which is marked much more by cultural discontinuities than by continuities, irrespectively to the fact that each modern nation in South-East Europe – including the Croatian one – projects itself, when it is about its historical memories, in millenial spans. Finally, this is the only part of Europe which all over its written history experienced the presence of „all“ major European powers, as well as the only one which knows today a long-lasting presence of all major European religious traditions (Western and Eastern Christianity, Islam), not to mention Jewish presence in cities like Thessaloniki, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo etc. Croatia, which is at a European crossroad, integrates all those major features.