Newspaper Article

A Unified Europe? Don't Count On It

Niall Ferguson. Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Jesus College, Oxford University, is the author of "The House of Rothschild" and "Virtual History." Bob Wiemer is off

1999

Overview

WHEN TRYING to imagine an ideal map of Europe in 1857, the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini imagined 11 nation states. By coincidence, 11 European states at the end of the 20th Century have succeeded in creating a monetary union. However, the \"Euroland\" to which American bankers now habitually refer bears little relation to Mazzini's blueprint. In 1872, when Mazzini died, the map of Europe was dominated by four multinational empires-the British, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman (Turkey)-and five nation states, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Germany. Of these nine entities, two were moribund: Turkey and Spain. Sweden had been a power two centuries before but was no longer. Then there were the smaller states: Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, plus a few statelets like Luxembourg. Change in the last years of Mazzini's life was most rapid in the Balkans, where Romania and Bulgaria were bidding to join Greece and Serbia as independent states.

• Publisher: Newsday LLC
• Subject: Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805-72)