Entra hoje em vigor o Tratado de Lisboa, cujo texto integral pode ser consultado aqui, o qual introduz algumas alterações de relevo a nível do funcionamento das instituições da União Europeia, nomeadamente:

• Criação do cargo de Presidente do Conselho Europeu (tendo sido designado -  para o primeiro mandato, de dois anos e meio – o belga Herman van Rompuy)
• Política externa, de segurança e defesa comum – gerida por um alto-representante (simultaneamente vice-presidente da Comissão Europeia – tendo sido designada a britânica Catherine Ashton)
• Reforço dos poderes do Parlamento Europeu, em particular a nível da fiscalização do princípio da subsidiariedade
• Alargamento do sistema de dupla maioria (em detrimento da unanimidade e do direito de veto, agora mais limitado, aplicável por exemplo no caso de matérias fiscais) – a partir de 2014, o Conselho passa a tomar decisões com base numa maioria de 55 % dos Estados membros (no cenário actual, pelo menos 15), e desde que representem pelo menos 65 % da população da União Europeia
• Manutenção de um Comissário Europeu por país (em lugar de um sistema rotativo)
• Limitação do número de deputados no Parlamento Europeu a um máximo de 750 (Portugal viu reduzido o seu contingente, de 24 para 22)
• Direito de Petição – Um mínimo de um milhão de cidadãos da União Europeia podem reunir-se para obrigar a Comissão Europeia a propor legislação
• Carta dos Direitos Fundamentais passa a ter cariz vinculativo.

José Manuel Barroso (Portugal) – Presidente
Joaquín Almunia (Espanha) – Vice-Presidente; Concorrência
László Andor (Hungria) - Emprego, Assuntos Sociais e Inclusão
Catherine Ashton (Reino Unido) – Vice-Presidente; Alta Representante da União para os Assuntos Externos e Segurança
Michel Barnier (França) - Mercado Interno e Serviços
Dacian Ciolos (Roménia) – Agricultura e Desenvolvimento Rural
John Dalli (Malta) -  Saúde e Política de Consumo
Maria Damanaki (Grécia) – Assuntos Marítimos e Pescas
Karel de Gucht (Bélgica) – Comércio
Štefan Fule (R. Checa) – Alargamento e Política Europeia de Vizinhança
Johannes Hahn (Áustria) – Política Regional
Connie Hedegaard (Dinamarca) – Acção Climática
Maire Geoghean-Quinn (Irlanda)  - Investigação e Inovação
Rumiana Jeleva (Bulgária) – Cooperação Internacional, Ajuda Humanitária e Resposta a Crises
Siim Kallas (Estónia) – Vice-Presidente; Transportes
Neelie Kroes (Holanda) – Vice-Presidente; Agenda Digital
Janusz Lewandowski (Polónia) – Orçamento e Programação Financeira
Cecilia Malmstrom (Suécia) – Assuntos Internos
Günter Oettinger (Alemanha) – Energia
Andris Piebalgs (Letónia) – Desenvolvimento
Janez Potocnik (Eslovénia) – Ambiente
Viviane Reding (Luxemburgo) – Vice-Presidente; Justiça, Direitos Fundamentais e Cidadania
Olli Rehn (Finlândia) – Assuntos Económicos e Monetários
Maroš Šefcovic (Eslováquia) – Vice-Presidente para as Relações Inter-Institucionais e Administração
Algirdas Šemeta (Lituânia) – Impostos e Direitos da União, Auditoria e Anti-Fraude
Antonio Tajani (Itália) – Vice-Presidente; Indústria e Empreendedorismo
Androulla Vassiliou (Chipre) - Educação, Cultura, Multilinguismo e Juventude.

(ver também artigo no Público)

CLAMOR IN THE EAST; EAST GERMANY OPENS FRONTIER TO THE WEST FOR MIGRATION OR TRAVEL; THOUSANDS CROSS

East Germany on Thursday lifted restrictions on emigration or travel to the West, and within hours tens of thousands of East and West Berliners swarmed across the infamous Berlin Wall for a boisterous celebration.

Border guards at Bornholmer Strasse crossing, Checkpoint Charlie and several other crossings abandoned all efforts to check credentials, even though the new regulations said East Germans would still need passports and permission to get across. Some guards smiled and took snapshots, assuring passers-by that they were just recording a historic event.

Politburo Announcement

The mass crossing began about two hours after Gunter Schabowski, a member of the Politburo, had announced at a press conference that permission to travel or emigrate would be granted quickly and without preconditions, and that East Germans would be allowed to cross at any crossing into West Germany or West Berlin.

”We know this need of citizens to travel or leave the country,” Mr. Schabowski said. ”Today the decision was taken that makes it possible for all citizens to leave the country through East German crossing points.”

(The New York Times – edição de 10.11.1989)

A ler, também no New York Times:

• The Berlin Wall: 20 years later
• A Division Through Time (infografia do “antes” e “depois” do Muro)
• Chasing the Story on a Night That Changed All
• The View From the Wall (painel de fotos enviadas por leitores)

E, ainda, uma compilação de artigos publicados em diversos media a nível internacional (que fui agregando na minha conta no delicious).

De forma a facilitar a sua consulta, os 10 artigos hoje publicados no Memória Virtual, evocando esta data crucial da História, encontram-se reunidos aqui.

Gorbachev: The Unlikely Patron of Change

The 1980s came to an end in what seemed like a magic act, performed on a world-historical stage. Trapdoors flew open, and whole regimes vanished. The shell of an old world cracked, its black iron fragments dropping away, and something new, alive, exploded into the air in a flurry of white wings.

Revolution took on a sort of electronic lightness of being. A crowd of half a million Czechoslovaks in Wenceslas Square would powder into electrons, stream into space at the speed of light, bounce off a satellite and shoot down to recombine in millions of television images around the planet.

The transformation had a giddy, hallucinatory quality, its surprises tumbling out night after night. The wall that divided Berlin and sealed an international order crumbled into souvenirs. The cold war, which seemed for so long part of the permanent order of things, was peacefully deconstructing before the world’s eyes. After years of numb changelessness, the communist world has come alive with an energy and turmoil that have taken on a bracing, potentially anarchic life of their own. Not even Stalinist Rumania was immune.

The magician who set loose these forces is a career party functionary, faithful communist, charismatic politician, international celebrity and impresario of calculated disorder named Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.

(Time – edição datada de 01.01.1990)

Life in The Golden Ghetto

As the East German regime collapses before its anti-Communist opponents, it is yielding up enough evidence of corruption to provide yet another cause of bitter popular resentment against the discredited hierarchy. The allegations of illegal nest feathering have shocked and outraged ordinary citizens, party members and nonmembers alike. Disgrace knows no limits for Erich Honecker, less than two months ago the most powerful man in East Germany: last week the former party chief and eight of his erstwhile top lieutenants were formally charged by the state prosecutor’s office with “enriching themselves through abuse of office.” Seven of the ex-Politburo members were packed off to jail pending trial. Illness spared the other two, including Honecker, from suffering the same fate — at least for the time being.

(Time – edição datada de 18.12.1989 – publicada a 12.12.1989)

East-West: Turning Visions Into Reality

By the time George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Malta, there was no longer any pretense that this was to be a meeting where they simply sat back and talked. How do you put your feet up when the deck beneath you is trembling and the winds are howling, in Marsaxlokk Bay and throughout the tattered Soviet empire? This first Bush-Gorbachev summit, which the American President initially proposed as a way to restart the becalmed U.S.-Soviet relationship, was now also the first to take place in the uncertain new world ushered in by the upheavals shaking Eastern Europe. And if this meeting was to be a step in shaping the future, there could be no more appropriate setting than at sea, even a sea as wild as the one last weekend around Malta. In a world that seemed to be dissolving, where better to meet than in a place with no boundary lines, no familiar landmarks — and no firm footing?

(Time – edição datada de 11.12.1989 – publicada a 05.12.1989)

What happened in Berlin last week was a combination of the fall of the Bastille and a New Year’s Eve blowout, of revolution and celebration. At the stroke of midnight on Nov. 9, a date that not only Germans would remember, thousands who had gathered on both sides of the Wall let out a roar and started going through it, as well as up and over. West Berliners pulled East Berliners to the top of the barrier along which in years past many an East German had been shot while trying to escape; at times the Wall almost disappeared beneath waves of humanity. They tooted trumpets and danced on the top. They brought out hammers and chisels and whacked away at the hated symbol of imprisonment, knocking loose chunks of concrete and waving them triumphantly before television cameras. They spilled out into the streets of West Berlin for a champagne-spraying, horn-honking bash that continued well past dawn, into the following day and then another dawn. As the daily BZ would headline: BERLIN IS BERLIN AGAIN.

(Time – edição datada de 20.11.1989 – publicada a 14.11.1989)

Freedom!

For 28 years it had stood as the symbol of the division of Europe and the world, of Communist suppression, of the xenophobia of a regime that had to lock its people in lest they be tempted by another, freer life — the Berlin Wall, that hideous, 28-mile-long scar through the heart of a once proud European capital, not to mention the soul of a people. And then — poof! — it was gone. Not physically, at least yet, but gone as an effective barrier between East and West, opened in one unthinkable, stunning stroke to people it had kept apart for more than a generation. It was one of those rare times when the tectonic plates of history shift beneath men’s feet, and nothing after is quite the same.

(Time – edição datada de 20.11.1989 – publicada a 14.11.1989)