Independance.

Those of you who remember Europe in the 40s and 50s, before the Common Market came into being, remember a world of austerity of rationing of limited aspirations. It was also a time when people knew their foundations and the tribe they belong to.
The boarder post was a place of uncertainty where ones own conviction, as to who you were and your civic rights were laid bare by a man in a foreign uniform who had the power to allow or not allow further progress. The sense of exposure which lay between the two boarder positions, your own behind you, the new in front, a feeling that society stopped and the norms of community were held in abeyance as you walked across the no-mans-land.
Nowhere was this more so than at the divide between East and West Germany. I wasn't there but the palpable tension has often been portrayed on film of people making the crossing from an authoritarian world of hardship, to the up-market extravaganza that was on show on the Kurfuerstendamm.
Travel was an exciting experience as you moved from one country to another, not only the language difficulties but the culture expressed its self in numerous ways. These people on the pavement and in the cars swishing by were German,French, Italian, Greek from Holland or Spain and we celebrated our difference.
Today we are Europeans polyglot of the above, a bureaucratic concept dreamt up in the mind of a group of political administrators who had the vision of a Federal Europe tied together like the USA with a central administration.
The choice today as you approach a boarder crossing is simple you don't even know your crossing from one to another. Everything is bland, from the shape of a banana to the currency note you tender when buying one. The shops are the same. selling largely the same type of produce with the same bureaucratic markings. Kelvin Klein in one country is the marker in another and as you shop or wander around in this contrived environment you could be forgiven for wondering why you left home in the first place.
Oh the good old days when a Guilder signified you were away, when the French Frank, the Peseta or a Deutsch Mark told you that the whole process of doing virtually everything was different in the country you were in. because history had evolved a national signature which was independent.
Today we are so "interdependent" we might as well all be one and the same thing !!!