Essays

THE RISE OF EUROPE'S
The formation of the European
Community and the end of the Cold War
had one common and quite
unintended result: Both gave
encouragement to the nationalist urges
of numerous regions zuithin
Europe's established nation-states.
What these stirrings zuill finally
produce in places such as
the fanner Yugoslavia, Scotland, or
Lombardy is impossible to predict.
But three of our contributors--
Alastair Reid, William McPJierson, and
David Gies-look at three...

t their outset at least, the 1992
Summer Olympics in Barcelona
appeared to be organized by
people who had nationalism, not sports, foremost inmind. Consider the curious fact that the three official languages of the games were English, French, and Catalan. Why Catalan and not Spanish? Because Olym- pic Committee rules allow for the use of Eng- lish, French, and the language of the country hosting the games. More to the point, the or- ganizers had no doubt that Catalan was the language of their...

38 WQ WINTER 1994

he years have been kind to the
memory of Winston Churchill.
Half a century has passed since his
rousing rule of Britain during World War 11, and while he still has his critics, and against them his defenders, the controversies that attended his career are muted or stilled now. Since the war, the empire he cherished has dissolved into a host of sovereign nations, and John Bull himself has had to swallow hard and learn to be a good European. Seen against such changes, Churchill's B...

Misleading to call it a move- ment, and still worse to think of it as a program, but we now have seen enough minor liter- ary eruptions to suspect that it is a cultural symptom that bears some reflection: this burst of novel-writing from people who liave lived the conceptual life, the life of method and ar- gument, who often carry leather cases, or who give public lectures and contribute essays to learned journals. In tlie past five years, some of the world's leading literary critics liave turned...