Introduction
Even at one minute past midnight on 1 January 1990, we already knew that this
would be a formative decade in Europe. A forty-year-old European order had just
collapsed with the Berlin Wall. Everything seemed possible. Everyone was hailing
a "new Europe." But no one knew what it would look like.
Now we know: in Western Europe, in Germany, in Central Europe, and in the
Balkans. Of course, in all these parts, the future will be full of surprises. It
always is. But at the end of the decade we can see the broad outline of the new
European order that we have already ceased to call new. Only in the vast,
ethnically checkered territory of the former Soviet Union is even the basic
direction of states such as Russia and Ukraine still hidden in the fog. And
perhaps also, at Europe's other end, that of the decreasingly United Kingdom.
... read full excerpt from History of the Present: Dispatches from Europe ebook
