Postwar

378

Invoking slightly different criteria to make a similar point, the Cambridge political theorist John Dunn divides the workforces of wealthy countries into ‘those who can individually take very good care of themselves on the market…, those who can hold their own only because they belong to surviving units of collective action with a threat advantage out of all proportion to the value of individual members’ labour, and those who are already going under, because no one would chose to pay much for their labour’. Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason. Making Sense of Politics (London, 2000), p. 333.

379

Gorz, as befitted a man of his time and politics, assumed that this new class would in turn fuel a new generation of radical social movements. To date there is little evidence of this.

380

In 1992 alone, the Federal Republic opened its doors to nearly a quarter of a million Yugoslav refugees. Britain admitted 4,000; France just 1,000.

381

At the end of the twentieth century there were an estimated 5 million Gypsies in Europe: some 50,000 in Poland, 60,000 in Albania, half a million in Hungary, perhaps 600,000 each in Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic and at least 2 million in Romania. The prejudice and abuse to which they were exposed was common to every country in which the Gypsies lived (not to mention places like Britain to which they were forbidden entry).

382

The Dansk Folkeparti originated in a breakaway from the Danish Progress Party, itself a product of the anti- tax movements of the early 1970s (see Chapter 14) but considered by a new generation of radicals to be too ‘soft’ on the EU and insufficiently anti-immigrant.

383

In Switzerland, where anti-immigrant prejudice was especially widespread in the German-speaking cantons, the racism was not always buried: one election poster showed an array of dark-skinned faces over the caption ‘The Swiss are becoming Negroes’.

384

With one exception: Edith Cresson—a former French Socialist Prime Minister turned EU Commissioner— contributed to the discrediting of the whole Commission when it was revealed in 1999 that she had used her power in Brussels to invent a well-paid consultancy for her former dentist.

385

Even taking into account the Yugoslav wars of the Nineties, the number of war-related deaths in Europe in the second half of the century was less than one million.

386

Raymond Aron (born in 1905) shared some of Zweig’s wistful memories, if not his despair: ‘Ever since, under a July sun, bourgeois Europe entered the century of wars, men have lost control of their history’.

387

Many Poles, it should be noted, also insist upon their country’s place at the centre of Europe—a revealing confusion.

388

Much the same is true of Albanian Kosovars. Liberated by NATO from Serbian oppression, they aspire to independent statehood less from nationalistic ambition than as a surety against the risk of being left in Serbia—and out of Europe.

389

Anna Reid, Borderland. A Journey through the history of Ukraine (2000), p. 20. Hence the place of ‘Europe’ in the language and hopes of the Ukrainian revolution of December 2004.

390

See Tony Judt, ‘Romania: Bottom of the Heap’, New York Review, November 1st