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3/13/06

Great European faultline now challenges EU

Irish Independent:

"Great European faultline now challenges EU
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The Balkans remain a major political problem which may be too much for Brussels to handle

FROM the north of Finland all the way down to the Adriatic runs the great European faultline.

It follows, with remarkable accuracy, the divisions between the western and eastern Roman empires and between the Latin and Orthodox churches.

For a while it marked in its southern stretches the furthest western limit of Muslim-Ottoman influence. It is at present the eastern boundary of the European Union.

Before it reaches the Adriatic it loses its clarity. Now we are in the Balkans, where west and east, Catholic and Orthodox, Christian and Muslim meet. Meet, and fight. To prevent or stop the fighting was once the responsibility of the Ottoman empire. But for centuries that empire decayed and diminished. To prop it up was one of the foremost preoccupations of the great powers. They created the Serb-dominated 'Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes', which became the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and which enjoyed a measure of freedom and prosperity from the end of World War II until the death of the fairly benign dictator Marshal Josip Broz Tito in 1980."

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