Goodbye, Europe.

• Author: Wheatcroft, Geoffrey

There are times--and the present moment is very much one of them--when certain great poems, minatory and ominous, force their way into the mind. It might be Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," or Auden's "The Fall of Rome," not to mention Kipling's "Recessional" and "The White Man's Burden." Published in 1898, the latter's subtitle, more interesting than its lurid title, is "The United States and The Philippine Islands," but might just as well be "The United States and the Middle East" more than a century later, with its warning about "The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard."

And of course, "The Second Coming." In that extraordinary, oracular work, W.B. Yeats was not making a trite political statement. Although the lines

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; were in part inspired by Ireland, where a brutal terrorist campaign was being waged (dignified as a "War of Independence"), about which Yeats, the sentimental nationalist who also identified with the Protestant Ascendancy, had such mixed feelings, they were not meant to be a guide to everyday politics. Yet the words "the centre cannot hold" and "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity," written in 1919, seemed all the more forceful with every year over the next decades of totalitarianism, total war and total murder. So they do again today.

We have witnessed the explosion of the Levant and the implosion of Europe, the rise of demagogues on both the Left and, more notably, on the Right, on both sides of the Atlantic. The internal atrophy of democratic politics in the United States is another question, although one that Americans appear reluctant to address. Anyone can deride Donald Trump's vulgarity, but those who do so are less inclined to ask what possible reason there is why Hillary Clinton should be president, or whether the Americans can really lecture benighted Mahometan savages about the benefits of democracy when little more than one American citizen in three bothered to vote at the last midterm elections in 2014 (one in five in Mississippi and Utah). And in any case, whoever votes, the United States is blessed, as Mark Twain was the first to observe, with the best Congress money can buy.

But we Europeans should hesitate before sneering in turn. Constitutional representative government is always a fragile plant, which needs to be carefully tended and nurtured, and doesn't always flourish of its own accord. What has happened in these recent years is not just the near collapse of the European Union, but the demonstration of its complete inadequacy to deal with present dangers, from the self-inflicted and unresolvable crisis of a single currency which was never what English law calls "fit for purpose," to the awful problem of mass immigration from mostly Muslim countries in western Asia and north Africa--a problem both for Europe and for the countries the migrants leave.

Beyond that is the acute threat within Europe to political stability. That stability was based on an unwritten agreement, what was sometimes a far too cozy and smug consensus between ostensibly moderate parties, "center-right" and "centerleft." It's this consensus that is now being severely challenged from the outside left and outside right by parties and politicians called "extremist" or, much more revealingly, "populist."

This is true in the Eastern European countries that have only been free of dictatorship and Soviet imperialism for a quarter-century, and have belonged to the European Union for little more than ten years. They have shown alarming signs of sliding back into authoritarianism, nativism, racism and corruption. But then maybe the hopes held for their immediate evolution into a liberal democracy most of them had never known was always illusory, particularly in Hungary and Poland, the latter of which...