(ANSA) - TRIESTE, 26 NOV - "Europe is an immense cemetery, especially along the Franco-German border", said today the historian Tommaso Piffer, professor of contemporary European history at the University of Udine, pointing at the bodies that still resurface along the former borderline. Piffer spoke during a videoconference promoted by IRSE, the Regional Institute of European Studies in Pordenone, focusing on "From totalitarianism to European integration".

The First World War is one of the three great clashes between France and Germany, and that led, according to Piffer "to the birth first of the Economic Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and then of the European Economic Community (EEC)," and a balance between Paris and Berlin "which brought bring over 60 years of peace and prosperity In Europe".

"That was the first stage of the European integration - Piffer explained - which benefited from the desire to pursue national interests on the part of the member states, which saw in the European plan an anchor of stability that the continent had been missing for too long".

Then a second stage continued until the 90s and saw the European Parliament's birth, the entry between 1981 and 1986, of Greece, Spain, and Portugal. And then, the fall of communism and the Soviet bloc and the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the "Iron Curtain." A third stage went from 1992, the Maastricht Treaty year, to 2004, when ten ex-communist countries joined the EU.

During these years, Europe saw the conflict and the conflict in Yugoslavia and the dissolution of the former Republic, which led to a split in the European foreign policy, with France that is more pro-Serbia and Yugoslavia and Germany that is pro-Slovenia and Croatia, and a strong presence of the US". (ANSA).