The people of France went to the polls in 2017,
narrowly avoiding elevating President Le Pen, a year after ‘Brexit’ and Trump
had stood the world on its ear. In Brussels, the EU’s leaders consign Greece to
despair, pure colonial repression. In Scandinavia, nativist parties take the
place social democrats once staked out, post-liberal governments ride to power
as ‘illiberal democracies’ in the East, and the steady wave of migrants from
the South is taken as pretext to abandon modernity altogether. What happened to
the home of ‘the West’?
In Europe at the Gates, Guy Rundle travels
through Europe reporting, reflecting, and theorising from the deep forests of
France, the shattered northern cities of England, the eerie post-histoire of
Germany, the toytowns of Brussels, and the Venice Biennale. He asks the key
question of our era: Has the deep drive back to the ethnos come about because
Europe’s elites have pushed through an arrogant, neoliberal version of the
republic? Or does it tell us another tale, quite the opposite: that even the
most tentative attempts to create a universal republic will founder on the deep
human need for concrete cultural grounding, for something certain and
particular to belong to?
