Continent in Crisis; There is Chutzpah and Then There is David Cameron; On My Way Out – Advice to Young Scholars III: Edited Books; From the Editor’s Mailbag; Conflicts of Interest in the Editorial Process; In this Issue

In the early 1990s, when many were dancing in the streets to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the long-awaited arrival of the end of history in the form of a liberal victory, historian Mark Mazower was working on a book that would caution some sobriety.1 The victory of liberalism, he wrote, had not been inevitable, nor due to its inner charms and attractions; it had, instead, been hard-won, locked in deadly battle with the forces of totalitarianism both on the left and the right. The fact that liberal democracy came out victorious owed as much to the failings, structural and strategic, of fascism and communism as to liberalism’s own virtues. If anything, so Mazower demonstrated, Europe has always been a rich and fertile soil for totalitarian movements; the fact that these were momentarily defeated should not result in too much complacency and self-congratulations about European values and all that. Recent events demonstrate painfully just how correct Mazower’s assessment was. While communism remains largely dead and buried (unless one counts the surprise emergence of left-wing politicians in the UK and even the US as manifestations of a resurgence), Euro-fascism is clearly on the rise again. This is visible in Hungary and Poland, where the Rule of Law has been all but abandoned or, in an alternative narrative, cynically deployed so as to undermine itself. This is visible in much of the Balkans, with governments building fences and walls to keep out people fleeing persecution and destitution. This is visible in the streets of Finland, where self-appointed vigilantes patrol the streets at night in order to fight largely imaginary crimes, and find considerable encouragement in the speech by which the President inaugurated the parliamentary year in 2016. This is visible in Denmark, which enacts laws to strip poor people of their belongings so as to pay for being treated unkindly. This is visible in the streets of