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Europe is nothing of the sort, of course. Like most political projects, it is the result of hard work and good fortune amid the vagaries of history, not destiny. It can be undone. Brexit is a key piece of evidence here. So is Russian aggression on Europe’s eastern fringes, and the increased focus on borders. So is the global wave of nativist identity politics that propelled Donald Trump to power, with counterparts in most European countries, most recently the far right Alternative for Germany, which placed third in last month’s election.

But Europeans seem to believe they are walking the sunny uplands of fateful progress. Like any successful political community, such as the United States, Europe has told an inspiring story about itself as the future, and it takes a cold-eyed expert on the past to set it straight.

“I don’t think most Europeans have woken up to what a critical moment this is, to the fact that we’re now on quite thin ice, and things are happening around the edges of Europe already that we thought were unthinkable a few years ago,” Garton Ash said in an interview with the National Post, the day after his sold-out lecture to the Munk School of Global Affairs.

The European project was once driven urgently by painful memories of gulag, but now those memories are fading. The result is an existential crisis, Garton Ash says. The whole project lacks passion, mobilization, commitment, he says. And so on the eve of the inevitably messy exit of the United Kingdom from its unhappy marriage to continental Europe, as it gawps across the ocean at the grotesquerie of Trump’s America, Europe has become a victim of its own success. It told its own story so well that people believed it, Garton Ash says. Now comes a reckoning.