In Europe

kitchen or the bedroom. No other television series had ever been received with such enthusiasm. A young man by the name of Bart, from the town of Roelofarendsveen, won the contest and became the nation's sweetheart.
    And a great deal has happened since. Kosovo has once again become a forgotten corner of the globe, and these days we can hardly find Bosnia on the map. Slobodan Miložsević died in a prison cell in the Hague, during his trial before the International Court of Justice. What we talk about now is 9/11, about the terrorists and the European Constitution, and about Iraq, America and the international rule of law.
    Meanwhile, almost everyone in Western Europe has grown accustomed to the euro. The introduction of coin and banknote went virtually without a hitch; only in the minds of older people do guilders, marks, francs, pesetas, shillings, escudos, drachmas and liras swarm stubbornly on.
    With the success of the Union, Europe's attractiveness continued to increase as well. One quarter of the population of Amsterdam's city centre now consists of ‘expats’. In London, English is no longer the mother tongue of one in three children. Immigration and integration – necessary in themselves for the vitality of the continent – are increasingly coming to be seen as hindrances. The problems surrounding certain groups of newcomers have in this way become a European issue – although the symptoms are different from one country to the next. With this, the chances increase that a permanent underclass will arise which, for whatever reason, will be unable to take advantage of the upward social mobility offered by European prosperity. In this way the global divide between rich and poor can slowly grow into fault lines that will tear apart European cities and regions.
    The attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, Bali in October 2002, the bombings in Madrid in March 2004, the murder of controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in November 2004, the bloodbath in London in July 2005: all these expressions of religious extremism have had their effect on the political climate. In some countries, politicians and others have wondered aloud about the extent to which Muslim immigrants in particular have been integrated into society, and in some circles the phenomenon of immigration itself has become a bone of contention: ‘Own People First!’
    At the same time, unrest has grown among Europe's seventeen million Muslims. Are we still welcome? Do we truly belong? In this way, Europe has in recent years become the unwilling front line in a conflict that must ultimately be fought out within Islam itself, a conflict concerning how such a traditional world religion must deal with secularisation, globalisation, individual liberties, women's rights and all the rest that goes with a modern society.
    In the Balkans the circus of international aid workers is largely gone. The biggest war criminals, Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, are still free men. The bombed bridges of Novi Sad are pulled carefully out of the river by the Dutch titans of the Mammoet salvage concern. Summer 2000 was a hot one. Little Gypsy boys, dangling their feet in the water, watch from the broken blocks of concrete, dreaming of far away. Meanwhile,the city has filled with the new homeless: the tens of thousands of refugees who, after years in the West, have been sent back to Serbia. The youngest among them do not even speak the language, the older children have experienced an orderly life as pupils at schools in Germany or the Netherlands. There is no work or housing for any of them. In Sarajevo, the sixteenth-century Begova Dzamija mosque has meanwhile been ‘renovated’ with piles of Saudi cash: antique decorative tiles have been removed, ornaments have disappeared, the walls have – in true Arab fashion – been covered in white plaster.
    When I visited Turkey in 1999, the newspapers there were full of reports about a Muslim activist who had been imprisoned only for reading aloud an Islamic-nationalist poem. Today, this same man, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is the prime minister, and is carefully steering his country towards European membership. On 1 May, 2004, the European Union was expanded with no fewer than 10 new members: Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Malta and Cyprus. In one enormous leap the population of the EU suddenly rose to more than four hundred and fifty million. Yet unity was