Ascensão e declínio de civilizações

The Emperor of Vanished Kingdoms

Europe's pre-eminent historian says all nations eventually end—even the United Kingdom, and perhaps America.

By RAYMOND ZHONG

Oxford, England
Here's a thought. What if the euro survives the present economic crisis but the European Union—or even the United Kingdom—doesn't?
It's the kind of question that comes to mind when you talk to Norman Davies, Britain's pre-eminent historian of Europe. From where he sits, Europe's problem is one of failed governance...
And that inability, Mr. Davies says, stems from a fatal flaw in the way Europe approached the grand project of knitting its member nations into a union. "I now feel that the thing that is being proved wrong is what some people call the 'gradualist fallacy'—that . . . you drive European integration forward by economic means," he says. "And it's just wrong." ...
His latest book, "Vanished Kingdoms", is a bracing tour of Europe's cemetery of dead nation-states, fallen empires and collapsed duchies...
 "Western Europeans to a large extent are still in that comfort zone, whereas East Europeans have lived through much harder times and are much more appreciative of the degree of freedom and prosperity that they have got, that 20 years ago they didn't."
The same warning might also apply to Americans, Mr. Davies suggests. "Europe 100 years ago was bullish," he says, and there's something in the American psyche that bears uncanny resemblance to Europeans' optimism, in the years before World War I broke out in 1914, about their peaceful, prosperous future. Does pride come before the fall? "The United States is this late-19th-century, 20th-century power which has a lot of those attitudes," he says.
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