General report on the colloquium

Abstract

Today, after two days of intensive, informative discussions, after having studied all the papers presented and after having held many rounds of consultations with the secretaries of the four Commissions, I still feel overwhelmed by the job of summing up this conference. The difficulty of summing up is not due to the volume of contributions (although I envy past rapporteurs, because they had to deal with a smaller number). My main problem, instead, has to do with the title of this conference, with the “New Europe”, and with predicting its future. Which political or economic structures are about to emerge in the East or in the West in the years ahead? Who really knows what will come next? We have to be modest in forecasting new developments in Europe, since we should remember the fact that the sweeping, but mostly peaceful revolutions of 1989 were hardly foreseen by anyone of us.