The Fault Line: Traveling the Other Europe, from Finland to Ukraine

Начало книги

You always go back to the scene of the crime. I suppose that’s why on a rainy day in January 2014, I set out again for the land of rivers, lakes, and forests that I had traveled through six years earlier on my unforgettable “vertical” journey along the eastern border of the European Union. To “blame” for my return was the First World War. One hundred years had passed since it began, and I had realized in amazement that the line of its endless Eastern Front coincided in many places—the Baltic countries, Masuria, Ukraine—with my 2008 itinerary.

The conclusion was almost automatic: the frontier of the European Union was not only located in the heart of Europe; it was also on a ruinous fault line.

Now, because earthquakes—including those of the geopolitical variety—tend to strike repeatedly in the same places, that long-term historical perspective inevitably consolidated the intuition expressed at the time I wrote this book, that a new Iron Curtain was forming, a few hundred kilometers east of the old one, which had collapsed in 1989. It now seemed even more plausible that countries like Ukraine, still Austro-Hungarian in the west and Russian in the east, were destined to be split in two, with grave consequences for the peace of the continent and the internal equilibrium of the Union.

Читать дальше →