In Europe

intervention in the Yugoslav wars, when Europe proved unable to dealwith that problem as well). On two occasions, America – not without interests of its own – has pulled Europe out of the mire. America set the tone of post-war European history. It was the pacesetter behind the European Community, it provided the atomic umbrella beneath which Western Europe could grow and blossom in the 1950s and 1960s and, by the same token, it forced the national politics of the European countries into a tight anti-communist straitjacket: if you're not for us, you're against us.
    During the first post-war decades, the United States and Europe travelled almost identical paths. Around the mid-1980s, however, both partners began going their own ways. While the phenomenon of immigration was regarded with increasing fearfulness within the EU, the United States continued to keep its own borders slightly ajar: between 1980–2000, that country took in about twenty million immigrants. In the short term, America's policy in this regard resulted in the problems regularly associated with integration. In the longer term, however, it will – as demographic projections from the University of Michigan show – ensure that America remains young, ambitious and energetic for some time to come. Unless policies change, the average age in the United States in the year 2050 will be thirty-five. In Europe that will be somewhere around fifty-two.
    A prognosis from the Institut Français de Relations Internationales points in the same direction: Europe will gradually exhibit less vitality, and participate less and less in the global economy. Around 1950, a quarter of the world's population was European; around the year 2000 it was twelve per cent. By 2050, it will be seven per cent. Unless policy changes, the active population of Europe will decrease in the next half-century from 331 million to 243 million. (Meanwhile, the active population in Canada and the United States will grow from 269 million to 355 million.)
    Yet the position of the United States is not unassailable either. In economic terms, the situation in which America finds itself is actually reminiscent of Great Britain after 1918: still the most important empire in the world, still in possession of the mightiest army and the greatest fleet, but at the same time locked in a fundamental struggle with growing economic, financial and social problems. Many longer-term prognosticators expect that China, where a quarter of the world's economy will be concentrated halfway through this present century, will ultimately surpassthe United States as a superpower. China, after all, not only possesses a staggeringly huge reservoir of diligent workers, but its economy is also open to an unprecedented extent to trade and innovation. China is therefore generally considered the new driving force in the world economy, a motor which will also exercise a great influence on economies in other parts of the world. (It remains entirely possible, of course, that factors such as climate change or major epidemics will once again overturn all these economic prognoses.)
    The proud American national self-image is still very much alive. But it does not necessarily imply that the old family ties with Europe will remain a part of that image. Around the year 2055, the majority of American voters will be former immigrants from Africa, Asia and Central and South America or their descendants, people who no longer have any affinity with Europe, with European problems or the Europeans themselves. In the coming decades, the descendants of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Friesland and Holland will enter the minority once and for all.
    Europe, in other words, must set a course of its own: politically, economically and militarily. Within a ninety-minute flight from Berlin, the Kremlin reigns over the unstable remnants of the former Soviet Empire – including a doomsday struggle in and around Chechnya. Two hours from Rome begins one of the world's major hotbeds of unrest, the Arab world. Five hours from London lies the centre of power of the old Atlantic alliance, now fallen into deep crisis, whose leader, the United States, is increasingly less interested in the international order to which it once gave shape.
    We shall not catch Bloomfield coming to the rescue of Hotel Savoy for a third time.
    I have often had the feeling that, despite our common heritage and our present-day contacts, Europe as it was in spring 1914 exhibited a