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This article is a preview from the Winter 2017 edition of New Humanist.

The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age by James Kirchick

What with one thing and another, these may seem inauspicious times for an American to be lecturing Europeans about the wilful and decadent abandonment of liberal democratic ideas and institutions forged by centuries of intellectual heat and philosophical light, and so forth.

James Kirchick gets a pass on this front, however, thanks to a terrific essay he wrote for The Tablet shortly before the election of Donald Trump. Entitled “Who Goes Trump?”, it was an invigorating dismissal of the hand-wringing that attended Trump’s ascent, which insisted that it must be the consequence of the marginalisation of the ordinary, ­decent schlub. Kirchick’s thesis basically boiled down to: no, Trump’s legions are voting for this terrible and stupid man because they’re terrible and stupid people.

Kirchick brings a similarly brisk tone to bear upon ­Europe’s myriad – as he sees it – malaises. The End Of Europe narrows these down, chapter by chapter, to seven constituents of the continent – Russia, Hungary, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Greece and Ukraine – and the European Union as an entity. Each of these sections serves as a concise primer of its subject’s recent history, and a refreshingly nonsense-free diagnosis of its woes. Russia actively chooses to disdain the option of becoming a ­decent and constructive diplomatic partner; Germany has become pathologically, if probably forgivably, wary of taking sides; Greece will not improve until it ceases blaming everybody but itself for its current predicament; the UK may have sabotaged Europe, as it once conquered half the planet, in a fit of absence of mind.

The most sobering and trenchant chapters are those contemplating France and Ukraine. Kirchick sees both as canaries spluttering in the coal mine, if for different reasons. He picks France as the worst exemplar of a continent-wide reluctance to take anti-Semitism as seriously as it might other bigotries, although he also cites the refusal or inability of Britain’s Labour party to extricate itself from this particular moral swamp to remind us that this is not a French peculiarity.

Ukraine he sees as “the new West Berlin”, a frontier that Europe fails to defend at its own ultimate peril. “­Unless,” he says, “the West’s desire to safeguard the international system on which Europe’s existence as a democratic ­community depends is stronger than Russia’s desire to ­replace that system with one where might makes right, the rules-based liberal order will collapse.”

For all the above foreboding, the title of The End Of ­Europe is ultimately an eye-catching hyperbole – Kirchick is not one of those excitable American blowhards who earn a living by insisting that the admission of immigrants and refugees from anywhere east of Minsk will inevitably result in Ottoman phalanxes once again laying siege to Vienna. The “end” he fears is not some literal apocalypse, nor even the disintegration of the European Union as a political construct, though he does believe that the latter is a possibility. It is the end, rather, of what the world in the post-World War II decades has grown accustomed to thinking about Europe – a redoubt of order, prosperity, peace and civil, consensual problem-solving.

It must, of course, be hoped that Kirchick is proved risibly wrong – but the reason why The End Of Europe is such a bracing read is that its author clearly hopes so, too.