Europe's Dream Deferred

In the Gare de l'Est, one of the elegant old train stations of Paris, there are reminders of why the European Union was created. They are the plaques commemorating the dead. Today tourists coming from Germany and points east take little notice of the inscriptions that call on them to remember the thousands of French who left this station for the "torture and death camps" of Nazi Germany in World War II, and the "70,000 Jews, among them 11,000 children," who were sent to their extermination.

Then Europe's borders were lines of death. Today they barely seem to exist. The trains do not stop at the frontier. Nobody asks for the papers of the passengers onboard. Tourists, business people, commuters and students buy their tickets with the same euro currency in Paris they would use in Berlin or Rome or Madrid. Asked what those plaques might have to do with ...