Setting Out: Europe — A Winter’s Tale …

Abstract

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, there was a place called ‘Europe’, which some of us may still remember. Like other parts of the world, it had its share of problems, but most people were, nonetheless, happy enough there, while many from elsewhere have long been eager to move to Europe, even as we are told that there may not be, nor ever have been, such a place at all. Until not so long ago, it seemed to be a fairly obvious matter where and what this Europe was. The Danes saw it as the area between their province of Sønderjylland and the Dolomite mountains in northern Italy;¹ to the English it was the intriguingly barbarian frontier beyond the homeland of their Norman colonisers; for the Russians it was a kind of cultural alter ego. The French and Germans would expect Europe to be a place where, at long last, they might live together in peace. And some incurable romantics regarded Kakania, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, as the prototype for a multicultural ‘Europe’. While it may have meant rather different things to different people, there was at least a consensus that it did exist somewhere. But that consensus evaporated in the final decades of the twentieth century.