Integration, It's Everywhere

The other day I had to buy some school supplies, so I headed over to the Galleria Krakowia, a giant, glass-enclosed shopping mall just outside the main square. The first thing I noticed was the number of people with laptops in the food court! I've never seen anything like that at a mall in the U.S. After about 20 minutes of fruitless searching, I finally found the Carrefour, which is a kind of European version of Target. Normally the Poles aren't very keen on one-stop shops (the main street near our apartment contains tiny storefronts for a shoe store, a lamp store, a bookstore, an electronics store, etc.), but they apparently make an exception inside mega-malls. Carrefour had an entire row of notebooks, I was pleased to see, until upon closer inspection I discovered that they all had either colorful geometric patterns or cartoon characters on the front, and were, without exception, filled with graph paper. I found the most unsuspecting offender, paid, and headed back out into the mall. On my way out, an enormous mural hung above the mall's entrance: it was a smattering of irregularly placed dots next to Polish words that I later recognized to be all of the major European cities in geographical proximity to one another, without any continental or national borders. From London to Moscow, Stockholm to Kiev, black dots on a white background, with no political barriers. I couldn't help but think of Professor Kubiak's dreams of post-Wesphalian international cooperation, and the neofunctionalist thoery "spillover" integration. From the looks of it, these theories and abstractions are well on their way to becoming reality.