You didn't bother to look up the author, did you? Tony one - of - our - most - dazzling - public - intellectuals Judt? Whose special expertise was modern Euro

You didn't bother to look up the author, did you? Tony one - of - our - most - dazzling - public - intellectuals Judt? Whose special expertise was modern European history? This is taken from the introduction to POSTWAR, finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize: """ p. 9 We should not idealize this [pre-1914] Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called 'the incredible, almost comical melting pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe' was perilously rent with riots, massacres, and pogroms -- but it was real, and it survived into living memory. Between 1914 and 1945, however, THAT Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking into the second half of the 20th century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after WWII Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities -- the Jews in France, for example -- represented a tiny fraction of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union -- an empire, not a country, and anyway only part-European -- stood aside from this new, serially homogeneous Europe. But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future... voluntary and involuntary migrants from failed or repressive states at Europe's expanded margins have turned London, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan, and a dozen other places into cosmopolitan world cities whether they like it or not. This presence of Europe's living 'others' -- perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the EU as currently [2005] constituted, for example, with a further eighty million awaiting admission in Bulgaria and Turkey -- has thrown into relief not just Europe's current discomfort at the prospect of ever greater variety, but also the ease with which the dead 'others' of Europe's past were cast far out of mind. Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid. """ On my trips to Europe I have seen students in Prague (none in Plzen), Arabs in Paris, some British tourists in Ljubljana. Overall I was not surprised to learn that when Poles gained the right to emigrate by acceding to the EU, the richer member nations were swept by waves of anxiety over the arrival of a slightly different kind of white person.