The fallacy that history is progress is very seductive. Past conflicts are done and dusted, tied up with a ribbon and peace reigns into the future. World War 11 was won and lost and out of the ashes of the conflict grew a united Europe. The Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall came down and Russia was no longer enemy number one. The Irish Troubles were finally put to rest with handshakes across the aisle.
We now appear on the brink of upending all that progress. Relations with Russia have reversed to their lowest ebb in decades. Brexit runs the risk of stirring up the old aggro in Ireland, with an unsolvable dilemma about keeping an open border. And Europe is creaking mightily, not just with the perfidious Albions (treacherous Brits) deciding to bale, and the Mediterranean south labouring under an economic system that favours the north, but with other fault lines appearing from the eastern European countries. Old anti-German resentments are bubbling to the surface.
Now Poland is considering asking Germany for more compensation for the destruction caused by the Nazis. Six million Poles, half of them Jews, died during World War 11 which amounted to nearly a fifth of the population; a greater proportion than any other country. In Warsaw up to 90 per cent of buildings were destroyed and the cultural heritage demolished or stolen; estimated at a total cost of $45.3 billion. Any claims were written off in 1953 but Poland was then under the Soviet thumb so can reasonably say it was a coerced agreement.
Poland is already unpopular with the EU [post 22 July 2017] over the nationalist government’s curbs on courts, media and civil society groups and its refusal to take in refugees from Syria and elsewhere. Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, and himself a former Polish PM, is now making ominous noises about Poland’s future within the EU being uncertain.
Poland’s relations with Germany, with whom they share a long border, look to be worsening considerably to the point of rupture in 2019 with tr Uranus opposing the composite Sun on the Poland 1989/Germany relationship chart; and even the two older Poland charts from 1916 and 1918 in relation to Germany have massive upheavals writ large through 2019/2020.
It may be that the passage of Pluto through Capricorn following in the steps of the late 1980s/early 1990s triple conjunction of Saturn Uranus Neptune in Capricorn, is what is bringing a kind of reversal. Certainly that was when the USSR collapsed and the satellite countries split away into what they hoped was freedom. Ireland in the early 1990s was looking for a negotiated settlement to the conflict, with a ceasefire in 1994 and an eventual agreement in 1998.
Quite why Europe is threatening to fragment isn’t as clear, astrologically speaking. Though its Capricorn Sun did take a terrible pounding from the 1990s triple conjunction and then after 2008 from tr Pluto – maybe just building up a critical mass of pressure which is shifting the tectonic plates underneath so the old cohesion is now threatening to become unsustainable.
Interesting thing, living in Europe, I quite don’t feel this threat of “collapse”. Yes, there are politicians everywhere riding on that Nationalistic agenda, but at the same time, people travel, do business, work across boarders with an ease that was unimaginable in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
So, I really don’t think there’s that much enemity between Europeans now. I see this all the time. I was a teenager and just starting to travel when Berlin Wall came down. I went to some youth camps etc. straight after, and I could still see people having certain prejudicies about people from other parts of Europe. 25 years on, it’s a completely different landscape. Still fragile, but I have faith in most people here not longing for the 20th century.