David Curry: Amazing state of the European Union

Yorkshire Post Opinion

"David Curry: Amazing state of the European Union

By David Curry
FIFTY years ago on Sunday, a dozen years after the end of the Second World War and a bloody half-century, a remarkable piece of paper ushered in a new European political order.
The Treaty of Rome, between six states of 'old' Europe, created what is now the European Union.

To the east, from the Baltic to the Balkans, the Soviet Union, Stalin not long dead, ruled a satellite empire with crushing determination. Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which had been, for centuries, part of the cultural and political heartland of central Europe under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and eastern European countries like Poland, were run by Communist puppet regimes maintained by Soviet armies of occupation."