Toward a Global European Cinema

Abstract

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europe presents a highly mutated cartography. Gone are many of such familiar political icons of the previous century as the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, and the bipolarism of socialism and capitalism, not to mention the East-West divide. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked a new era—not the eradication of the past, but a transformation inflected by a new historical asset and the outbreak of globalization. The inchoate idea of a unified “Europe,” which had led in 1957 to the regrouping of six countries bound to each other mostly by the necessities of the reconstruction after World War II, has evolved into a supranational enterprise comprising today twenty-seven member states. Since the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which established the European Union, the renewed and altered Europeanist project has in fact availed itself of institutions, legal provisions, and a new cultural politics geared toward the integration of its divided nation-states, its fractured economies, and its varied peoples. The latest addition of Bulgaria and Romania in January 2007 and the official talks begun in 2006 with Turkey toward a much-debated accession by the predominantly Muslim secular country in the EU, are moving Europe progressively to the East and to unprecedented questions about its future. Europe as geography and historical and mental construct is undergoing unforeseeable changes.