Even the most hardened miserabilist will find plenty to deepen his or her gloom in “The Dream of Europe”, the latest investigation by Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist and historian
It all started out so well. “The Dream of Europe” opens where the author’s previous mega-volume, “In Europe”, left off, at the end of the last century. Mr Mak flits from city to city, recounting what New Year’s Eve felt like in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Kirkenes in northern Norway, Vasarosbec in southern Hungary. It was a time of vast optimism after a century of unimaginable upheaval. The 1990s had been a golden and, in retrospect, deceptive decade.
The progression of disasters is familiar: the attacks of September 11th 2001 and the terrorist reactions it triggered in Europe; the global financial crisis, followed by Europe’s own euro-zone crisis; the migration crisis of 2014-15; the Brexit crisis; the covid-19 crisis; populism of right and left; American isolationism. Digressive, itinerant and philosophical, Mr Mak’s style might not suit everyone and it certainly makes for a doorstopper, but it is mostly compelling and readable.
The other broad thread that runs through the book is sympathy. Not just for the desperate migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, or the legions of unemployed in southern Europe. Mr Mak shows a real understanding of people whom you might expect him to dislike: those who voted for Brexit, for example, or Russians who mourn their vanished glory. He understands what drives people to suspicion of outsiders, or to take refuge in a past that can only be recovered in the false dreams of demagogues.
There are irritations. In the course of his chapter on Brexit, Mr Mak recounts just how much the people of Wigan hate George Orwell, who went there in 1936 with a pre-formed agenda and duly saw awfulness everywhere. Yet he seems unable to see how much he suffers from the same affliction. He writes of the “devastation” of Wigan Globalisation is always a curse, never producing benefits.
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