HOMELANDS

Longtime British journalist, author, and world traveler Garton Ash ponders the meaning of being European.

The author opens with the memory of being an exchange student in a French household at the time of the Apollo landing. “I won’t say that France seemed as far away as the moon,” he writes, “but it was everything the English have traditionally packed into the word ‘foreign.’ ” Indeed, he writes, not so many years ago most Europeans would never have gone to another nation “unless it was to do military service during a war.” The advent of inexpensive travel, mass communication, and postwar prosperity made it more possible to range broadly, reinforcing the sense that the nation-states of old were less meaningful than regional identity. As Garton Ash notes, even in Franco’s last years, Spain was overrun by tourists, one for every Spaniard, reflecting a process by which Germans, Britons, and Italians became European via “a personal, direct experience.” By the late 1980s, when communism was crumbling, many European nations were coming to the realization that monocultural societies were giving way to multicultural societies through the arrival of newcomers—some from places such as the old Soviet Union, some from former African and Caribbean colonies, and some from other prosperous European countries simply seeking a change of scenery. Ironically, Garton Ash notes, this led to increasing ethnic separation at the same time, a process that “would continue, brutally, in what would soon be known as former Yugoslavia.” Now, he writes, the prospect of a united Europe faces what appears to be a quickening disintegration. There’s Brexit, for instance, and then there are the attacks on Hebdo, the arrival of increasing numbers of immigrants fleeing war and hardship in war-ravaged countries, the rise of nationalism and populism—and, of course, the revival of fascism and militarism in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Is Europe a real entity or a mere wishful-thinking construct? This closely observed book explores both possibilities.