Friend or foreigner.

Friend or Foreigner. For centuries we Europeans have considered our fellow European neighbours to be truly foreign: sometimes foreign-exotic, but more often foreign-peculiar. In the French language the same word (étranger) denotes both a foreigner and a... More

Friend or Foreigner. For centuries we Europeans have considered our fellow European neighbours to be truly foreign: sometimes foreign-exotic, but more often foreign-peculiar. In the French language the same word (étranger) denotes both a foreigner and a stranger. We have waged vicious and futile wars against each other. We have been separated by natural and imaginary borders, language, religion, culture, climate (I almost added food and dress codes to this list but the Americans gave us Gap and McDonald’s which have been wonderful at homogenising our habits–ironic it had to come from another continent). But after royally massacring each other in two major wars in the 20th century, into which we were kind enough to invite the rest of the world, it was decided that enough was enough. And so we set up the Steel and Coal community, then the E. E. C. and now the E. U. with the very noble idea of gathering Europeans (the desirable ones that is, we can’t be doing with Serbs, Russians Less