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The Meaning of Europe: Geography and Geopolitics, M. HEFFERNAN, Edward Arnold, London (1998). viii+294 pp. L15.99 (pbk). ISBN 0 340 58018 6.
`Now, I know I'm a European', said my daughter as she stepped from the plane after spending her Junior Year in an American university thus echoing Kipling's observation that `what can they of England know, who only England know?'. What Europe means can probably be seen more clearly from across the Atlantic, from Asia or the Arab world, than from the continent's penumbra, and in particular from the most comfortably parochial part of it: the English Midlands. Alternatively, to understand the meaning of Europe, the writer must be `at its heart'; not, that is, in one of its two great nations of France and Germany the glare of whose own light is too strong to permit a proper view of the rest, let alone in some fantasy land of John Major's imaginings, but in one of those lesser countries, whose history should prick the conscience of every self-styled European - `though with a scornful wonder, men see her sore oppressed' - such as Bohemia or that soul of Europa: Poland. For a real understanding of what it is to be European, readers should turn to Neil Ascherson or Norman Davies, also writing from Britain, but drawing on deep personal experience of central and eastern Europe. It is unfortunate that The Meaning of Europe demonstrates...