The Empires Strike Back in Europe
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A new World View contribution from Europe should begin at the beginning. What is going to happen in 2013? There have been plenty of well-informed predictions for how Europe's debt crisis will unfold this year, most of which, as a simple fact of mathematics, will have to prove wrong.
More interestingly, some of the continent's best thinkers have been going back to the future, following that portentous aphorism of U.S. philosopher George Santayana that: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” So what, and from which piece of the region's long and fractious history, can the past teach us about Europe's future?