The Unravelling of Europe:

Dystopia for a post-liberal

world order
Dave Hutchinson’s ‘fractured Europe’ trilogy: Europe in
Autumn (2014); Europe at Midnight (2015); Europe in Winter
(2016)
The Fearful Imagination: Thematizing contemporary
developments& anxieties
• Pankaj Mishra - Age of Anger: A History of the Present (Jan. 2017)
• Richard Haas - A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of
the Old Word Order (Feb. 2017)
• Ivan Krastev – After Europe (April 2017)
• Edward Luce – The Retreat of Western Liberalism (June 2017)
• + a whole host of post-Brexit books such as Craig Oliver’s Unleashing
Demons (Oct. 2016) or Tim Shipman’s All Our War (Nov. 2016)

the titles of all these books suggest decline, conflict, danger, violence, the
threat of disintegration of an established order
 The post-global, fractured Europe
“IN THE LATTER years of the twentieth century, Europe had echoed with the sound of doors
opening as the borderless continent of the Schengen Agreement had, with some national
caveats, come into being.
It hadn’t lasted. The early years of the twenty-first century brought a symphony of slamming
doors. Economic collapse, paranoia about asylum seekers – and, of course, GWOT, the
ongoing Global War On Terror – had brought back passport and immigration checks of
varying stringency, depending on whose frontiers you were crossing. Then the Xian Flu had
brought back quarantine checks and national borders as a means of controlling the spread
of the disease; it had killed, depending on whose figures you believed, somewhere between
twenty and forty million people in Europe alone. It had also effectively killed Schengen and
kicked the already somewhat rickety floor out from under the EU.”
“The Union had struggled into the twenty-first century and managed to survive in some
style for a few more years of bitching and infighting and cronyism. Then it had
spontaneously begun to throw off progressively smaller and crazier nation-states, like a
sunburned holidaymaker shedding curls of skin.” (EIA loc. 456)
 The Past in the Future: Europe and its splintering polities
The big thing in Europe these days was countries, and there were more and more of them every
year. The Continent was alive with Romanov heirs and Habsburg heirs and Grimaldi heirs and Saxe-
Coburg Gotha heirs and heirs of families nobody had ever heard of who had been dispossessed
sometime back in the fifteenth century, all of them seeking to set up their own pocket nations. They
found they had to compete with thousands of microethnic groups who suddenly wanted European
homelands as well… (EIA, loc. 456)
“Europe is calving itself into progressively smaller and smaller nations.” “Quasi-national entities,”
Rudi corrected. “Polities.”[…] “Sanjaks. Margravates. Principalities. Länder. Europe sinks back into
the eighteenth century.” […] “More frontiers. More red tape. More borders. More border police.”
(EIA, loc. 257)
“THE INDEPENDENT SILESIAN State of Hindenberg – formerly the Polish cities of Opole and Wrocław
(formerly the German cities of Opeln and Breslau – formerly the Prussian towns of… etc, etc) and
the areas around them – existed as a kind of Teuton island in a Slavic sea.” (EIA 458)
“Beyond Rus – European Russia – and Sibir was a patchwork of republics and statelets and nations
and kingdoms and khanates and ’stans which had been crushed out of existence by History,
reconstituted, fragmented, reinvented, fragmented again, absorbed, reabsorbed and recreated.”
(EIW, loc. 769)
New Postsdam & its borders /vs/ the old crumbling of the Berlin
Wall

“Just over a year since its declaration of nationhood, New Potsdam’s border
arrangements were still on the ad hoc side of adequate. To Rudi’s eye it looked
theatrical and ill-thought-out, but that was the way with new polities. The first
thing they tended to do was put up defences. […] There were sections of wall
going up, here and there, around New Potsdam, but most of the border was still a
tunnel of carbon-flood light enclosing a dense spiralling hedge of razor-wire that
ran down the centre-line of streets, cutting intersections in half and brushing the
corners of buildings, broken at irregular intervals by checkpoints.” (EIA, loc. 2029)

“A student of borders, Rudi remembered seeing old news footage from the days
of the Wall, when this place was one of the crossing points between West Berlin
and East Germany and spy exchanges took place here.”
 Eurovision as the metaphor for the ‘New Europe’

“There were five hundred and thirty-two entries in this Eurovision – up from
last year’s five hundred and twenty, but still a long way from the so-far-record
of six hundred and eight. In its own way, Eurovision was as good a reflector of
the current state of the Continent as many Foreign Office briefings Jim had
read during his career. Countries, polities, nations, sovereign states,
principalities, all wanted to take part – the sundered wreckage of Ukraine and
Moldova alone accounted for seventeen national entries – and one could
analyse the voting patterns of the various national juries and sometimes see
geopolitical trends developing.” (EAM loc. 4722)
The Beskid Economic Zone
The Beskid Economic Zone was not a polity as such. It was more of an
autonomous national park devoted to stripping tourists of their money.
It paid rent to the rump of the Czech Government for use of its land,
but the rent was a fraction of the megatonnes of francs, schillings,
marks, złotys, euros, sterling and dollars that cascaded into the area
every year. This part of northeastern Czechoslovakia had always been a
popular skiing destination for the population of neighbouring nations.
Even when it began issuing visas – for a small gratuity – and imposing
entry and exit taxes on top of the prices of ski-passes it remained
popular. It was a big mountainous snowy machine for making money,
and one of the wealthiest junk nations in Central Europe. (EIA loc.
1460)
 The Trans Europe Rail
“THE TRANS EUROPE RAIL Route was the last great civil engineering project of the European era, an unbroken rail link
running from Lisbon to Chukotka in the far east of Siberia, with branches connecting all the capitals of Europe. At least,
that had been the plan. When it actually came to building the link the various national authorities involved fell to years
of squabbling about finance, rolling stock, track gauges, staff uniforms. The TransEurope Rail Company became a
microcosm of the increasingly fractious European Parliament, complete with votes, vetoes, lobbying, corruption and
all the other things so beloved of democracies. […]
[Yet eventually] year by year, the Line crept across the face of Europe, at about the same time that Europe was
crumbling around it. The EU dissolved, and the Line went on. The European economy imploded, and the Line went
on. The first polities came into being, and the Line went on, the Company negotiating transit rights where it passed
through the new sovereign territories. It seemed indestructible. […] By now, nobody knew where the money to build
the Line was coming from; it arrived from a kind of braided river delta of offshore funds and companies and private
investors...
It passed through wars and border disputes and droughts and police actions, by hill and by dale and through forests
and over rivers and along the shores of lakes and under mountains. It rolled through the Xian Flu. It seemed
inexplicable, pointless.
The Company went through seventy-two chairmen and three full changes of voting members. It generated a
bureaucracy almost as large and unwieldy as that which had once administered the EU. Truly colossal sums of cash
went missing, were found, were lost again.
Then [the Company] declared itself to be sovereign territory and granted all its workers citizenship. Which may have
been the point of the exercise all along.”
 (Dis)United Kingdom – Post-Brexit Britain
Surveillance:
“He was in the most surveilled city in the most surveilled nation in Europe … a paranoid
state, one where every move of every citizen was recorded and logged and filmed and
fuck you, if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Every shop had one [camera], every bus and train and theatre and public convenience,
every street and road and alleyway. Computers with facial recognition and gait recognition
and body language recognition could do some of the job, but they were relatively simple
to fool, expensive, and times had been hard for decades. It was cheaper to get people to
watch the screens. But no nation on Earth had a security service large enough, a police
force big enough, to keep an eye on all those live feeds. So it was contracted out. To
private security firms all trying to undercut each other. […] So instead of a single all-seeing
eye London’s seemingly-impregnable surveillance map was actually a patchwork of little
territories and jurisdictions, and while they all had, by law, to make their footage available
to the forces of law and order, many of the control rooms were actually manned by
bored, underpaid, undertrained and badly-motivated immigrants.” (loc. 4182)
 Independent Scotland and border controls
“[…] when the Separation did take place twenty years ago, it happened in a hurry after a long and
fractious history, and there was a lot of bad blood on both sides. And all of a sudden, after a little
more than four hundred years, there was a border between the two countries.”
“Scottish independence had not been the simple, pain-free process envisaged by generations of SNP
politicians, and many municipal buildings – including the record offices of a number of towns – had
been torched in the Separation Riots and their documents and servers destroyed.”
“He took a train to Edinburgh – sat for an hour at the border post outside Berwick while Scottish
customs officers searched the carriages for drugs and other contraband – and wandered the city for
a couple of days, getting a feel for the place. He thought Scotland was having a bit of a rough time
these days. The tail-end of North Sea Oil which the new state had inherited had become
uneconomic to extract some years before, tourism hadn’t taken up the slack to the degree everyone
had been banking on, and the big tech firms had fled Silicon Glen for more stable parts of Europe.
The city, even its historic heart, was looking shabby and the locals looked grey and thin and
unhappy. A debate had already begun at Westminster over whether to allow Scotland to rejoin
England; the consensus seemed to be a resounding no at the moment. There were still English MPs
with long enough memories to want to punish the Scots for leaving the United Kingdom in the first
place.” (EIA loc. 4435 onwards)
 The Community
“The Community was the Whitton-Whytes’ greatest dream, a country mapped over
the top of the whole of Europe and entirely populated by Englishmen. It sounded like
the setting for an enormous Agatha Christie mystery, all county towns and vicarages
and manor houses.” 
“The Community stretched from the Iberian peninsula to a little east of Moscow… It
had cities and towns and a railway system, but Rudi didn’t recognise any of the names
of the towns and cities. It was as if Baedeker had, on a whim, invented a country, and
then simply copied it onto Continental Europe. Or rather the Whitton-Whytes and
their descendants, not being satisfied with creating their own English county, had
simply rewritten Europe and then proceeded, very quietly, to conquer it.” (EIA loc.
5690)
The Community was a topological freak, a nation existing in the same place as
Europe but only accessible through certain points on the map. Its capital, Władysław,
occupied more or less the same space as Prague, but the way Baedecker described it,
it sounded more like a mixture of Kraków, Warsaw, Paris and Geneva.” (loc. 5690)
The Community & Its Englishness
“Everyone in the Community was English. From one end of the Continent to
the other. There were only English things here. There were no other languages,
only regional dialects. No other cuisines but English. No other clothing styles
but English. No other architectural styles but English. It was awful. After a year
here I would gladly have lynched someone for a kebab. After two years, I would
have committed mass murder for a portion of sweet and sour pork. […] English
cooking was stodgy and unimaginative and under-spiced. I had not found a
single dish which employed garlic.”
“God was here, too. But it was not the many-faced God I had encountered in
Europe. It was the English God, the God of cricket and landowners and
drumhead services, stern and severe and patrician. […]
The Community was dull. It was nice and it was quiet, if you lived in the right
places, and there was full employment and nobody was starving and everybody
was happy. It was no wonder people wanted to leave.” (EAM loc. 5169)
 Brexit et al/ the Community:
“The Directorate was […] very good at its job. It had sources in every area of private and
public life, kept a watch on everything, and was prepared to move quickly – but calmly – to
nip trouble in the bud before it got out of hand. After two centuries, these factors had
combined to produce a populace which was too polite to protest or oppose, on the
whole. The Presiding Authority was stern but avuncular, and so long as it continued to give
the people what they wanted nothing was going to change. The people of the Community
were, with a few exceptions, sheep. Sheep with nuclear weapons.” (loc. 5954)

“The Community is very attractive to a certain type of English person. I know Tory
politicians who are delighted that there’s a version of Europe where we conquered the
Continent.”
“They are not English.”
“No, I know. But to the media – parts of it, anyway – that’s how they look. Imagine a world
where there are no French people.” He chuckled again. “As far as some of our news
organisations are concerned, the Community is the Promised Land.” (EAM loc. 6418)
 (Dis)United Kingdom – Post-Brexit Britain
The GWOT (Global War On Terror): “The Whitehall and Charing Cross
bombings had resulted in the previous century’s Ring Of Steel being retooled
as the Maze Of Steel, a patchwork of blocked-off streets and security
checkpoints […]. [The new] Camden Town police station, a forbidding fortified
compound which would not have looked out of place in Belfast in the 1980s
[was] purpose-designed to take into account the Global War On Terror. The
brief campaign of car- and truck-bombings had forced a hurried rethink of
police security across the country. (EAM, loc. 1005)
The Xian Flu: “Fifteen years after the last deaths from the Xian Flu and people
were only just starting to reconnect with normal life. The British Isles had got
away comparatively lightly from the pandemic, but for years afterward the
country had seemed deserted, people had buttoned themselves up in their
homes, still unwilling to mix with others who might have been infected. The
economy had teetered on the brink yet again.” (EAM, loc. 1425)
Britain/Europe seen ‘from the other side’ (i.e. a visitor from the Community/ Campus)

“It was called Nottingham and there were more people here than on the entire Campus. More people
than in my universe. They were loud and rude and careless and oddly-dressed and they had strange
accents, but they spoke recognisable English. The roads were full of... vehicles. Large and small, in
many colours, noisy and apparently self-propelled.
[…] Everyone looked sleek and well-fed, often to the point of being fat. Many of them had very dark
skin. I tried not to stare.” (loc. 2535)
“Nottingham was in England, and England had once been part of the United Kingdom. Scotland and
Wales had declared independence about twenty years ago, and there was a small civil war going on in
the West, where a county named Cornwall was trying to do the same. England was part of an island
off the northern coast of Europe. Europe was too big to try to learn about all in one go.”
“England – Britain, Europe, the whole world – had gone through a terrible time. A series of economic
collapses had come one after the other in the early years of the century, and then the flu had gone
through the population like a scythe. Countries had fractured, and then fractured again. A railway line
that crossed the Continent had declared itself a sovereign nation.”
“Here, you needed money to do pretty much anything. On the Campus, our Faculties had provided
everything, but here, if you wanted a meal or clothing or a bicycle, you had to buy it. You did jobs for
money, but there were no jobs, hadn’t been for years.” (loc. 2658)
 Britain/Europe – ambiguous relationship

“Baines had provided me with a course on the history of Europe, but there was
a lot of it and my understanding of some things remained sketchy. I still wasn’t
sure whether England was in Europe or not; I had the impression that the
English would have quite liked to be in Europe so long as they were running it,
but weren’t particularly bothered otherwise.” (EAM loc. 4054)

“England is a constant pain in the arse; always whining, European only when it
suits them.” (EIW loc. 1962)
 LONDON

“This was not, he felt right away, a European city. You could visit Paris or
Brussels or Madrid, even St Petersburg, and know you were in Europe. London
was different. London was... he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Even standing
there watching the everyday workers and tourists go by, he heard snatches of
conversation in half a dozen languages. London was certainly cosmopolitan.
More than that, it was an immigrant city. First, waves of conquerors. The
Romans. The Normans. Then waves of migrants from... well, from everywhere.
Jews, Huguenots, Somalis, Bangladeshis, West Indians... the list went on and on.
Rudi had even found, in one of Mr Bauer’s books, a mad story about a group of
exiles from fallen Troy who were supposed to have sailed up the Thames at
some point in the far and misty past to found the city.” (loc. 3993)
 Generic parody
“There were Coureur films, Coureur novels, Coureur soaps, Coureur comics, all of varying degrees
of awfulness. What none of them mentioned, with their tales of unending derring-do, was the
sheer crashing boredom of Coureur life. In the soaps there was a new Situation every week,
whereas a Coureur might in fact go for months without a sniff of action. […]
In the series, the Coureurs spent an hour rescuing beautiful female scientists from polities
populated by characters with sinister Latino or Slavic accents, and usually wound up in bed with
the beautiful female scientists, who were properly grateful for their deliverance from actors with
dodgy accents. In the real world, Coureurs spent most of their working lives delivering mail, which
at its most clandestine meant nothing more than a pickup from Dead Drop A, a short train or car
or aircraft journey, a delivery at Dead Drop B, and very little scope for getting laid. (EIA loc. 2353)
No one was sure how many Coureurs were drifting around what used to be Europe. Could have
been a hundred, maybe a thousand, maybe ten times that. The nature of their work made them
hard to find; popular legend had it that they would find you, arriving on your doorstep one dark
night when you needed them most, with their stealth-suits hidden under long black trenchcoats,
fedoras tilted in best noir fashion to shadow the eyes. This was ludicrous, of course, as anyone
could have told you if they really thought about it: anybody who went about dressed like that
would deserve to be arrested. (EIA loc. 1460)
Sharae Deckard - “Restarting the Clock of History: Periodicity,
Neoliberalism and Contemporary World Literature”, p. 7

“The text projects its own dehistoricized conception of post-Fordist

subjectivity (the structure of feeling of a declining core, Britain,
riven by post-imperial melancholia and confronted by climate
crisis) [forwards] across time […]. … the novel’s form moves
beyond its content in juxtaposing a future setting with its array of
historical settings, interpellating science fiction alongside an
assembly of other nostalgic genres”.