A Grand Illusion?

“Tony Judt’s elegant essay is a good place to begin discussion of these two large postwar questions: What is Europe? And where is it going?” —Michael Mandelbaum, Johns Hopkins University

“I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcome desirable, quite another to suppose it is possible. It is my contention that a truly united Europe is sufficiently unlikely for it to be unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it. I am thus, I suppose, a Euro-pessimist.” —Tony Judt

First published in 1996, A Grand Illusion? was a prescient, skeptical and passionately argued reflection on the state of Europe. In it, Tony Judt addressed the questions facing the Continent as the new millennium neared: What are the real prospects for an enlarged European Union and how large is too large? Which nations should “belong” to Europe, when, and by what criteria? What defines “Europe” and how should we think about its future? If the myth of “Europe” is too abstract to attract deep popular loyalty and may even prevent us from finding solutions to concrete problems, he argued, we have everything to gain from examining it critically. This masterly analysis forms a focus for debate and documents that has ongoing relevance today.

“One of the most prescient texts on the European Union . . . [Tony Judt] maps out everything we are witnessing today from the slow erosion of the welfare state to the return of nationalisms.” —Rachel Donadio, contributing writer for The Atlantic