"The past is never dead," William Faulkner observed. "It's not even past." The extraordinary history of Europe has made us what we are for good or ill. And to mark its latest page, the most dramatic expansion yet of the European Union this weekend, The Irish Times today publishes a cartographic supplement that reflects not only the new shape of the Union of 25, but, through historical maps, snapshots of the human tidal waves that have swept the continent in the last two millennia.
In the spirit of the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai - who replied to a question about the consequences of the French revolution with the words "it is too early to tell" - readers should take the long view of the history of the continent, more at war than peace, the subject of external incursions from Visigoths to Ottomans, and of countless internally generated wars. While European culture, inventiveness, and learning, some saved for posterity by the great scholars of Islam, has been matchless, so too has the continent's genius for killing, culminating in the industrial efficiency of the Holocaust. At times its peoples have been the hapless playthings of kings and, at others, the agents of history themselves. Its borders and allegiances have changed like the seasons, and the colours on its maps, like those of kaleidoscopes.
The geometry of the new EU of 454 million people also says much about it - the Union now has a surface area of four million square kilometres, three times that of the original six member-states - yet still less than half the area of the US. And its topographical centre of gravity ("centroid") has moved north and east, through six enlargements, hundreds of kilometres from the small town of Gervais Les Bains in southern France's Haute Savoie to Hohenseden near Magdeburg in Saxony-Anhalt, barely a dozen years ago part of the GDR.
Perched out on the Union's remotest western periphery, we have long had a tendency to consign Vienna and Prague to "eastern" Europe, yet even with the distorting prism of EU-centrism - the view that the EU is "Europe" - they must be seen for what they are, capitals of central Europe. And again the question is raised - what of our European neighbours yet further to the east? They are part of our history, as this supplement eloquently illustrates, yet we have little inclination to regard them as part of ourselves, and specifically as legitimate candidates for the EU club.
The supplement begs key questions. What is Europe? Where are its boundaries? Is it more than a geographical space bordered by the Urals, the Bosphorus, and Atlantic? What are the ties that bind?