Bleak times, these. If the lights are not going out all over Europe they are, at least, flickering. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, revanchism and nationalist resentment are back in fashion. The theory of marginal gains, long championed by liberal democrats and guardians of what the first President Bush optimistically deemed the “new world order”, no longer feels like manifest destiny.

Most of the world really has never had it so good. Globalisation has been a wondrous, if still incomplete, success for billions of people in Asia and Africa. But gains in the east and south have come at the expense of the west and north. Increasingly it feels as though the postwar era, for all its troubles, was an