As Europe goes by
image: Greek reporter How can we forget the days when we, as Western Europeans in our early twenties, lived in a state of constant celebration of Europe and all it stood for? I remember the exhilarating news: the live transmission of the fall of the dictator Ceausescu in Romania; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War… Watching Germans cheering in unity was intensely moving, and the subsequent formation of the European Union fit the zeitgeist perfectly. It’s a common mistake to think that people are driven solely by self-interest. Nations can be, it’s true, but in general individuals are ultimately driven by less concrete values: existential fears, religion, values to which they adhere, or love, or, in the case of those that are part of their defining identities, values for which they may kill and destroy, or – on the contrary – build and heal (Scott Atran did wonderful work on this topic). In the 1990s, we certa...
