I read a couple of books about post-1945 Europe this summer by the late center-left Jewish-English historian Tony Judt, his magnum opus Postwar and his short A Grand Illusion.
Judt died in 2010 of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Wesley Yang wrote a memorable tribute, “The Liveliest Mind in New York,” about Judt’s heroic efforts to keep writing even as less and less of his body could move.
Reading his books, I am impressed by Judt’s insight and realism on a host of questions.
Yet, there was one topic on which this enormously reasonable scholar tended to be adamantly knuckleheaded: European immigration policy. To Judt, Good Europeans like himself didn’t worry about immigration. Only Bad Europeans cared.
Similarly, from the New York Times op-ed page:
There’s a Reason Europe Is So Obsessed With Immigration
Sept. 15, 2026
By Anton Jäger
Mr. Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “Hyperpolitics.” He wrote from Brussels.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm was no friend of nationalism.
Growing up Jewish in the ruins of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, he held an instinctual suspicion of all claims to national belonging. Yet as a phalanx of new nationalist parties entered European parliaments in the early 1990s, claiming that migration constituted a mortal threat to their communities, he offered a surprising interpretation. The appeal of anti-migrant politics, he speculated, lay less in a sense of national pride than in its ability to cover a hole at the heart of Europeans’ self-understanding. “There was no other way left to define group identity,” he wrote, “except by defining the outsiders who were not in it.”
Well, yeah, that’s kind of how group identity works. As Ronald Reagan explained to the U.N. in 1987: “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” (The tragedy of Reagan’s movie career was that during his prime there were made so few science fiction movies, for which his sincere acting talents were best-suited.)
You see this type of question quite often from Jewish intellectuals, with pedantic quibbling suddenly leading to extremist policy conclusions: How exactly do you define an American? Huh? Huh? Therefore, we must have open borders!
Jews are used to having a council of rabbis define precisely who is a Jew and who is not (even if they don’t, personally, qualify as halachically Jewish). So, the vagueness of European thinking about being European — I dunno, I guess, we Europeans are basically Christians, whether or not we still believe, but of course we make an exception for Jews — seems alien and threatening.
The words carry a strange resonance for Europe today. More than six weeks after tens of thousands of migrants crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, hoping for passage to mainland Europe, immigration continues to dominate the continent’s conversation.
Ceuta and Melilla, tiny exclaves of Spanish sovereignty in North Africa, are rare exceptions to the rule that the Mediterranean is the southern border of Europe.
… The furor clearly concerns more than migrants. Though polls indicate that European electorates care deeply about migration and want to see it addressed, such worries outstrip objective reality.
Yeah, sure. After all, why do anything now about immigration policy rather than wait until the problems get harder to reverse? After all, it will be so much easier to kick out the children of immigrants a generation from now than to prevent their parents from moving in in the first place.
Oh, wait … that’s not how it works, actually. It turns out it’s really not that hard to keep out unwanted immigrants in the first place, but expelling their progeny later is wrenching.
Instead, the topic has become a prism through which all the continent’s ills are viewed, a convenient kaleidoscope of discontent. The problems of such a worldview are legion. Yet there is a deeper reason, beyond the continued arrival of migrants, for the continent-wide obsession with outsiders: Europe doesn’t know what it is.
Nah … in reality, everybody knows what Europe is.
One obvious definition is that …
Paywall here.
