Prologue

Europe is my cradle, my culture, and my home. From the bright shores of Portugal where I was born to the green fields of England, from the teeming crossroads of the Brabant to the dark wooded slopes of Franconia, through railroad and airport and autobahn, this is my land and this is my people, among whom I have lived and who have made me who I am.

The destiny of Europeans has been forged together, in steel and struggle and bloodbath, in faith and doubt and knowledge, in terror and trust and trysting. They have turned out towards the World, and then back inward towards themselves. They have turned against each other and then come together, but are still uneasy about it, all too ready to misunderstand each other, scapegoat each other, and fall back onto provincial selfishness when things do not go according to plan.

That is thus where we now stand, and this is how I place myself: on the inter-europe-express; on the lines of interconnection in European culture and political history, between here and there, between past, present, and future, between languages and ideological perspectives, between diverse memories and diverse visions; between the different dimensions of Europe that have been and that are yet to emerge.

Europe as a culture is a bit like Europe as a place: a tenuous peninsula, anchored in the large inert landmass of its past, its complex infrastructures and ideologies, and its fears, but pointing out boldly to a liquid ocean of freedom, progressive discovery, and solidarity. I am aware of how optimistic the latter sounds. But it is exactly in times of crisis, when the bounds of policy are the too-tight boundaries of imagination, that to inhale optimistically, even with short inebriating bursts of poetry, is most needed, in order to exhale solutions out of walls of the box.

This is the aim of this blog.

note: intereuropexpress is multilingual and posts may appear in several different languages