Where does that leave me? Trying, as usual, to square general truths with particular circumstances. That’s the difference between pure ethics and pol… - Tony Judt

If the Left had the wind in its sails and History on its side, then a new generation of Right-wing literati would take pride in being defiant losers, turning the genuine decadence and death-seeking solipsism of inter-war writers like Drieu la Rochelle and Ernst Jünger into a social and sartorial style—thereby anticipating the ‘young fogeys’ of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.

The longevity of Europe’s political parties derived from a remarkable continuity in the ecology of the electorate. The choice between Labour and Conservatives in Britain, or Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in West Germany, no longer reflected deep divisions over particular policies, much less profound ‘lifestyle’ preferences as they would come to be known. In most places it was an echo of longstanding, trans-generational voting habits, determined by the class, religion or locality of the voter rather than by the party’s program. Men and women voted as their parents had voted, depending on where they lived, where they worked and what they earned.

In contrast to the United States, which continued to treat ‘Islam’ and Muslims as a distant challenge, alien and hostile, best addressed by heightened security and ‘pre-emptive war’, Europe’s governments had good reason to see the matter very differently. In France especially, the crisis in the Middle East was no longer a matter of foreign policy: it had become a domestic problem. The transmigration of passions and frustrations from persecuted Arabs in Palestine to their angry, dispirited brethren in Paris should not have come as a surprise—it was, after all, another legacy of empire.