Claire Berlinski's book, subtitled "Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too," provides an engaging analysis of modern Europe—and a warning (ISBN 1400097681).
Reviewed by Darris McNeely
Today's conventional wisdom among those who write about global politics is that Europe is in decline and nothing more than a museum of the past. The future, they say, will be driven by Asia, particularly China and India. A recent article ended by saying, "Europe is yesterday's news; Asia is tomorrow's."
It is the position of this publication that Europe will be tomorrow's news and is not an irrelevant relic of the past. Bible prophecy shows clearly that Europe will be at the center of a religious-economic system that will rise and astound the world. Claire Berlinski has written a book that reminds us how quickly events can change.
Berlinski is a secular Jew whose grandparents fled the Holocaust. She has lived, worked and studied in Europe and thus has a good perspective of events shaping the current European mood. She writes about the terrorist threat to the continent, the anti-Semitism in France and the cultural climate of Germany. Her chapter on the German fascination with the music group Rammstein is a must read for anyone wanting to understand the potential locked within the Teutonic soul.
She writes, "Europe is peaceful, prosperous, free, and democratic, relatively speaking... Europe's achievements since the Second World War have been real and significant... The great powers of Europe are no longer cannibalizing one another. The Furor Teutonicus has for the moment subsided. No doubt, much of the darkness has been repressed. But the repressed is known for returning" (p. 5, emphasis added).
Her stories are based on travel and observation and are tied together by two themes. Here is how she states them. "The first is that Europeans are behaving now as Europeans have always behaved. Many seemingly novel developments in European politics and culture are in fact nothing new at all—they have ancient roots in Europe's past.
