Erkki Bahovski on the idea of a common history book for the EU

German Minister of Education Annette Schavan has proposed the publication of a pan-European history textbook. Erkki Bahovski considers this to be a good but unrealistic idea. "The biggest problem is that old and new Europe have such different views of the Second World War. Western European history books maintain that the invasion of Normandy represented the turning point, but they overlook the fact that many more people were fighting on the Eastern Front at the time - and that there were many more victims there. ... Then there's the question of who's going to write the book. As long as there are such great differences of opinion it's likely to remain a dream that all 27 member states will approve a book. And the differences are not just between individual states; our own Russian minority has an entirely different view of history to the Estonians. And what about the Basques, Catalonians or the Hungarians who live outside Hungary?"

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