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 This year again the Mediterranean is the stage for two seasonal
dramas: the one, the annual vacations that give many their main
chance to meet fellow Europeans from other countries; the other, the
washing ashore of desperate refugees from wars and poverty in the
Middle East and Africa, some already dead.
The first is a chance for pleasure, discovery and to enjoy the peace
and open borders that most cite as the main benefits of the European
Union, 70 years after the end of World War Two - even if accompanied
by national stereotype grumbles about beach-towel Lebensraum, noisy
joie de vivre and importunate seaside Romeos.
The second has triggered a poisonous round of every-man-for-himself
bickering among the EU's 28 governments and the Union institutions
in Brussels over how to deal with record numbers of migrants
arriving by sea and land and heading across Europe.
More even than that other Mediterranean summer theater that has been
the Greek volte-face on German-prescribed austerity to stay in the
euro zone, EU divisions on the migration crisis have brought on dire
warnings that populist nationalism could propel Europe back toward
its nightmarish divisions of last century.
 Amid confrontation with Russia in the east, and with Britain soon to
vote on breaking away in the west, this summer sees a bout of
soul-searching over whether the bloc can ever subsume national
rivalries to a common good. Can half a billion citizens can ever
feel "European" more than Austrian, Belgian or Croatian?
"If this is your idea of Europe, you can keep it," a furious Italian
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was quoted telling fellow EU leaders as
traditionally Europhile Italy lost patience with a lack of help.
Hungary, which tore the first rent in the Iron Curtain in the daring
summer of 1989 before the Berlin Wall fell, is building a fence on
its border with Serbia; Britain is adding fencing too, round its
Channel Tunnel beachhead at Calais. Even founder members France and
Italy have feuded on their frontier.
"MR. EUROPE"
At the eye of the storm is Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the
European Commission, the bloc's Brussels executive.
Claiming - despite scepticism from national capitals - a democratic
mandate due to being the lead center-right candidate in last
summer's elections to the European Parliament, Juncker has become a
vocal critic of governments for lacking solidarity.
"Je m'en fous!" he snapped - "I don't give a damn" - in singularly
undiplomatic French during a June summit, as equally irritated
leaders rejected his demand for mandatory quotas on member states to
take in asylum seekers from Italy and Greece.
Juncker meant that as long as they collectively reached his target
of 40,000 to be accommodated elsewhere, then quotas did not matter.
But offers are still well short of the total.
Clashes between the member states gathered in the Council on one
side of Brussels' Rue de la Loi and the Commission on the other are
a fixture of a Union where power - and money - remain overwhelmingly
controlled from national capitals but where EU officials see it as
their duty to promote closer integration.
However, the struggle has been intensified by the arrival of the
outspoken Juncker, at a time when economic malaise has left many
leaders struggling for votes against anti-EU nationalists.
No slouch himself at pushing national interests when as prime
minister he defended Luxembourg's low taxes from charges of unfair
competition, Juncker shrugs off attacks by the likes of the UK
Independence Party and French National Front on unelected Eurocrats,
and accuses former peers around the summit table of pandering to
chauvinists who want to wreck the Union.
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"Those mainly responsible for a lack of confidence in the EU are not
the Commission but national governments," he said during a tribute
in March to his role model Jacques Delors, the integrationist
Commission boss of 1985-95. "Their attitude is the opposite of the
European spirit. It's a total disaster."
ANYONE SPEAK EUROPEAN?
Juncker has appealed over governments' heads to citizens'
consciences. He has also forged alliances with an EU parliament keen
to expand its power despite wariness in member states of a body for
which over half of Europeans don't bother to vote.
He speaks of a "political not technocratic" executive, ready to make
up a "democratic deficit" in the Union's institutions.
That is a forlorn hope, some skeptics say, arguing that the EU has
outlived its usefulness to citizens who feel, to use the ancient
Greek, part of a national "demos", not a European one.
Travel round Europe this summer and national sentiment still rouses
a crowd. At a sporting festival in the mountains east of Rome, I
watched Italians, Germans, Greeks and others stand and belt out
national hymns before the contest - then sit in bemused silence for
the less familiar EU anthem, Beethoven's Ode to Joy.
The Union's blue flag may be increasingly ubiquitous, but efforts to
promote a sense of European identity face an uphill battle. Yet for
all the gloom in Brussels ahead of an autumn of looming arguments,
some also see signs of growing EU cohesion.
"Recent reports of the death of the European Union were greatly
exaggerated," Washington's Pew Research Center reported in June
after an annual survey found a recovery to 61 percent in the share
of Europeans holding a positive view of the project, after a couple
of years when it dipped close to 50 percent.
Polling for the Commission's annual Eurobarometer survey in May
showed 38 percent of people identified only with their own country
and not with Europe, down three points on a decade ago and sharply
lower than when economic crisis hit in 2010.
The British are outliers, with nearly two in three disowning being
European. But across the EU, 60 percent of people said they felt at
least part of their identity is shared with others beyond national
borders, up from 51 percent five years ago.
As they criss-cross those frontiers this summer in search of a taste
of the unfamiliar, few expect - or want - to see historic cultures
homogenized in a United States of Europe.
But nor does the majority, amid widespread sympathy for the jobless
youth of Europe or for the Syrian refugees, seem ready to retreat
entirely behind old bulwarks of mutual suspicion.
And as Dimitris Avramopoulos, the EU home affairs commissioner,
argued last week, the very reach of the migration crisis shows the
limits of national solutions. That, he said, puts pressure on
governments to agree in Brussels to collective measures - even, he
stressed, when they are not popular.
(Editing by Digby Lidstone)
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