Will the east meet or confront the south? [antikvár]

EDITOR'S NOTE On December 5th-6th, 1997 the Hungárián Institute of International Affairs organized a conference with support of the Strategic Task Force for Integration and the WEU Institute for Strategic Studies in Paris. The title of the conference was "Will the East Meet or Confront the South?". By posing this question, we sought to know what contacts the Central European states named by the EU as the candidates for accession in the first round (i.e. the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, Estonia and Hungary) have to the Southern shore of the Mediterranean and how they perceive their eventual participation in the Mediterranean Free Trade Area put forward by the EU. The presentations made it clear that this question is timely and necessary. Although the answers could be grouped around more than one basic aspects, it was manifest that the two regions have practically no relevant connections to each other at the moment. In the political, the economic, or the cultural fields interactions between the regions are rare and occasional. The period of rivarlry has passed, but real cooperation has not yet begun. Sometimes there is a mutual uncertainty perceived in the conceptions of one another, however, in both regions people have started to observe and accept that the other bears alsó a special significance for the EU. On the other hand, no demand has appeared in Euró-Atlantic integrations to connect the two regions; the Central and Eastern European states are practically excluded from the Barcelona process and may participate in certain events in the observer capacity at best (sometimes even this capacity is ruled out for them). The basic finding for Hungary can be summarized as follows: in the course of the Euró-Atlantic integration we have to "re-find and re-learn" the South-