Why Europe's foundational crisis runs through Syria and Gaza

Europe blames Putin, Trump and Xi for its predicament. But the rot began with the 2015 Syrian refugee deal with Erdoğan and became visible in the silence over Gaza genocide.

The question that opened the Dahrendorf Lecture last week at St Antony’s - Oxford’s most relentlessly pro-European college - would have been unthinkable five years ago. Does Europe matter? Is Europe still relevant? Dimitar Bechev, who runs the programme founded by Timothy Garton Ash to honour the late Ralf Dahrendorf, was being deliberately provocative, but only just… The question is one that some of the best European magazines have begun to ask, and the room knew it.

The lecturer answering it was Comfort Ero, the President and the CEO of the International Crisis Group — perhaps one of the few organisations that produces genuinely granular, on-the-ground conflict analysis. Founded thirty years ago in response to the international community's failure to prevent the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the state collapse in Somalia, and animated by the dictum ‘never again’, Crisis Group spent most of its institutional life treating Europe as the stable periphery from which the world's diso…