ODDLY PRO-POLE AND PRO-POPE?:

In EU's new states, a return to nationalism (Richard Bernstein, July 25, 2006, The New York Times)

One villager, Wieslaw Cygan, who teaches in a technical college, is one of the 48 people here who voted for the League for Polish Families, a political party once deemed to occupy the Polish rightist fringe that is now part of the governing coalition.

"I would like to see a new political party," Cygan said in his tidy home, sparsely decorated with the kind of religious and landscape paintings in fashion across much of Central and Eastern Europe. "I call it a People's Democratic Christian Conservative Party that would be Catholic and patriotic," he said.

The labels that Cygan attaches to his dream party suggest the struggle for identity that is going on in deeply Catholic and rural Poland and in some ways rippling across other formerly Communist countries in Europe. Now that they are firmly embedded in the European Union and the Western alliance, they seem to feel an urge to reassert older, more traditional parts of themselves.

Indeed, nearly 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and two years after Poland and other former Soviet bloc states joined the European Union, it is a surprising time in Europe. On the very heels of what could certainly be deemed a historic achievement, the defeat of Communist dictatorship and the merging of Eastern and Western Europe into a 25-member club of peaceful, secure and solidly democratic countries, Europe is in a strange and sour mood.

What's strange and sour about opposing secularism and transnationalism?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 25, 2006 12:36 PM