The Stone Raft by José Saramago

The Prime Minister addressed the Portuguese and said, Citizens of Portugal, during recent days and most noticeably during the last twenty-four hours, our country has been subjected to pressures, which without exaggeration I consider unacceptable, from nearly all those European countries that have suffered, as we know, severe disruptions of the public order, but through no fault of ours, with vast numbers of demonstrators pouring into the streets with great enthusiasm, anxious to show their solidarity with the nations and peoples of the peninsula. These developments have exposed the serious internal contradiction in the debates among the governments of Europe, to which we no longer belong. Confronted with the profound social and cultural developments in these countries, they see in this historic adventure on which we find ourselves launched the promise of a happier future or, to put it in a nutshell, the hope of regenerating humanity.

But instead of supporting us and showing their true humanity and genuine awareness of European culture, those governments decided to make us the scapegoats for their internal problems, with their absurd demands that we arrest the drifting peninsula, although it would have been more fitting and accurate to speak of navigating. Their attitude is all the more deplorable since everyone knows that with each passing hour we move an additional seven hundred and fifty meters away from what are at present the western shores of Europe, and those very European governments that in the past never showed any desire to have us with them are now trying to force us into doing what they don't really want and, moreover, know is beyond our powers. Unquestionably a place of history and culture, Europe in these troubled times has shown itself in the end to be lacking in common sense.