Postwar

and Bavaria share more than just south-German Catholicism and Alpine scenery: in the course of recent decades both have been transformed into high-wage service economies dependent on technology rather than labour, outstripping in productivity and prosperity the older industrial regions further north. Like Catalonia, Italy’s Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, France’s Rhone-Alpes region and the Ile-de-France, Southern Germany and Austria— together with Switzerland, Luxembourg and parts of Belgian Flanders—constitute a common zone of European economic privilege.

Although absolute levels of poverty and economic disadvantage were still highest in the former Eastern bloc, the sharpest contrasts were now within countries rather than between them. Sicily and the Mezzogiorno, like southern Spain, were as far behind the booming north as they had been for many decades: by the late 1990s unemployment in southern Italy was running at three times the level north of Florence, while the gap in per capita GDP between north and south was actually greater than it had been in the 1950s.

In the UK, too, the gap between the wealthy regions of the south-east and the former industrial districts farther north had grown in recent years. London, to be sure, had boomed. Despite keeping its distance from the euro zone, the British capital was now the unchallenged financial center of the continent and had taken on a glitzy, high-tech energy that made other European cities seem dowdy and middle-aged. Crowded with young professionals and much more open to the ebb and flow of cosmopolitan cultures and languages than other European capitals, London at the end of the twentieth century appeared to have recovered its Swinging Sixties sheen—opportunistically embodied in the Blairites re-branding of their country as ‘Cool Britannia’.

But the gloss was paper thin. In the inflated housing market of Europe’s most overcrowded metropolis, the bus drivers, nurses, cleaners, schoolteachers, policemen and waiters who serviced the cosmopolitan new Britons could no longer afford to live near them and were constrained to find housing farther and farther away, commuting to work as best they could along the most crowded roads in Europe, or else on the country’s expensive and dilapidated rail network. Beyond the outer limits of Greater London, now extending its tentacular reach deep into the rural south-east, there was emerging a regional contrast unprecedented in recent English history.

At the end of the twentieth century, of England’s ten administrative regions only three (London, the South East, and East Anglia) reached or exceeded the national average wealth per capita. All the rest of the country was poorer, sometimes very much poorer indeed. The North East of England, once the heartland of the country’s mining and shipping industries, had a gross domestic product per head just 60 percent that of London. After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist Lander of Germany, the UK in 2000 was the largest beneficiary of European Union structural funds—which is a way of saying that parts of Britain were among the most deprived regions of the EU. The country’s modest overall employment figures, a much-advertised source of pride for Thatcherites and Blairites alike, were skewed by the disproportionate size of the thriving capital city: unemployment in the North of England remained much closer to the worst levels in continental Europe

The marked regional disparities of wealth and poverty in Britain had been exacerbated by ill-conceived public policies; but they were also a predictable consequence of the end of the industrial era. In that sense they were, so to speak, organic. In Germany, however, comparable disparities were a direct if unintended consequence of a political decision. The absorption of the eastern Lander into a unified Germany had cost the Federal Republic more than one thousand billion euros in transfers and subsidies between 1991 and 2004. But far from catching up to the West, the eastern region of Germany by the late Nineties had actually begun to fall further behind.

Private German firms had no incentive to locate in the East—in Saxony or Mecklenburg—when they could find better workers for lower wages (as well as a superior transportation infrastructure and local services) in Slovakia or Poland. Ageing populations, poor education, low purchasing power, the westward departure of skilled workers and an entrenched hostility to foreigners on the part of those left behind meant that eastern Germany was distinctly unappealing to outside investors who now had many other options. In 2004, unemployment in the former West Germany was 8.5 percent; in the east it exceeded 19 percent. In September of that year the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party won 9 percent of the vote and returned twelve deputies to the parliament of Saxony.

The gulf of mutual resentment separating Wessies from Ossies in Germany was not just about jobs and joblessness or wealth and poverty, though from the eastern perspective this was its most obvious and painful symptom. Germans, like everyone else in the new Europe, were increasingly divided by a novel set of distinctions that cut athwart conventional geographical or economic divides. To one side stood a sophisticated elite of Europeans: men and women, typically young, widely traveled and well-educated, who might have studied in two or even three different universities across the continent. Their qualifications and professions allowed them to find work anywhere across the European Union: from Copenhagen to Dublin, from Barcelona to Frankfurt. High incomes, low airfares, open frontiers and an integrated rail network (see below) favoured easy and frequent mobility. For the purposes of consumption, leisure and entertainment as well as employment this new class of Europeans traveled with confident ease across their continent—communicating, like medieval clercs wandering between Bologna, Salamanca and Oxford, in a cosmopolitan lingua franca: then Latin, now English.

On the other side of the divide were to be found those—still the overwhelming majority—who could not be part of this brave new continent or else did not (yet?) choose to join: millions of Europeans whose lack of skills, education, training, opportunity or means kept them firmly rooted where they were. These men and women, the villeins in Europe’s new medieval landscape, could not so readily benefit from the EU’s single market in goods, services and labour. Instead they remained bound to their country or their local community, constrained by unfamiliarity with distant possibilities and foreign tongues and often far more hostile to ‘Europe’ than their cosmopolitan fellow citizens.

There were two notable exceptions to this new international class distinction that was starting to blur the old national contrasts. For jobbing artisans and laborers from Eastern Europe, the new work opportunities in London or Hamburg or Barcelona blended seamlessly with older-established traditions of migrant labour and seasonal overseas employment. There had always been men (and it was mostly men) who traveled to distant countries to find work: ignorant of foreign languages, regarded with hostile suspicion by their hosts and in any case intent upon returning home with their carefully saved earnings. There was nothing uniquely European about that, and Slovak house-painters—like Turkish car-workers or Senegalese peddlers before them—were not likely to be found dining out in Brussels, vacationing in Italy or shopping in London. All the same, theirs, too, was now a distinctly European way of life.

The second exception was the British—or, rather, the notoriously Euroskeptic English. Propelled abroad by the meteorological shortcomings of their native skies and a post-Thatcher generation of budget airlines offering to ferry them anywhere in continental Europe, sometimes for less than the cost of a pub lunch, a new generation of Brits no better educated than their parents nevertheless entered the twenty-first century as some of the most widely traveled, if not exactly cosmopolitan, Europeans of them all. The irony of this juxtaposition of popular English disdain and mistrust for the institutions and ambitions of ‘Europe’ with a widespread national desire to spend their spare time and money there was not lost on Continental observers, for whom it remained a perplexing oddity.

But then the British—like the Irish—did not have to learn foreign languages. They already spoke English. Elsewhere in Europe linguistic resourcefulness (as noted above) was fast becoming the continent’s primary disjunctive identity tag, a measure of personal social standing and collective cultural power. In small countries like Denmark or the Netherlands, it had long been accepted that monolingualism in a tongue spoken by almost no-one else was a handicap the nation could no longer afford. Students at the University of Amsterdam now studied in English, while the most junior bank clerk in a provincial Danish town was expected to be able to handle with confidence a transaction conducted in English. It helped that in Denmark and the Netherlands, as in many small European countries, students and bank clerks alike would long since have become at least passively fluent from watching un-dubbed English-language programmes on television.

In Switzerland, where anyone who completed a secondary education often mastered three or even four local languages, it was nonetheless thought easier, as well as more tactful, to resort to English (no-one’s first language) when communicating with someone from another part of the country. In Belgium, too, where—as we