A Medley of Arguments and Stories Captures European Lives

“I don’t censor people,” Ben Judah says over a WhatsApp call. “Just letting people really hold the mic is actually quite a radical act.”

We are speaking not about stand-up comedy or 21st-century media, but about Judah’s third book, This Is Europe: The Way We Live Now.

This Is Europe, Ben Judah, Picador, 512 pp., £22.00, June 2023.

Readers who are expecting an answer to Tony Judt’s Postwar will be surprised. This could, theoretically, have been a text that looks directly at the politics and economics of Europe after Brexit (or any number of other calamities from the past several years). Judah, a British-French writer, is, after all, also a policy analyst. At the Atlantic Council, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., he is director of the Transform Europe Initiative and a senior fellow at the Europe Center. I have interviewed him on British-U.S. relations and on post-Brexit Britain.

But this is not that book. Rather, This Is Europe is less a straight telling of contemporary European politics and more a series of vignettes. It reminded me of the movie Paris, Je T’aime, in which Paris is shown through a series of short stories, each reflecting or exploring a different neighborhood. This book is like that, but for all of Europe. Politics show up, of course. One chapter involves COVID-19; another, the war in Ukraine. But mostly the focus is on individual people telling the stories of the ways they live.

Judah had other works in mind, though, while writing This Is Europe. He initially became known as an author for This is London, his second book and a first-person account of the titular city. I talked to him about his new book, rather than writing a straight review, since he and I are friendly. By that, I mean we are in the same online Diplomacy group (he has ruined my game once; I have ended his three times).

How, I asked, did he move from writing about one city to writing about a continent? Judah told me that, for him, there are three Europes: a Europe of the mind, imagined by readers around the world as featuring glitzy coffee shops and philosophers and stained-glass windows; a political Europe, featuring the European Commission and the Eurozone and figures like French President Emmanuel Macron; and the Europe “we actually live in.” It was this third Europe that interested him, and about which he wanted to write.

Anti-Brexit protesters wave the flags of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and European Union outside Parliament in London on Oct. 13, 2021. Rob Pinney/Getty Images

He began reporting the book back in 2018. The first version of the book, or at least the first version of the first 40,000 words, was deleted by the author, who described the early attempt as “a great white male wandering through Europe,” which is “not how my generation should be writing or should be reading about Europe.”

In books like that, I noted to him, the narrator is often portrayed by himself as sane and sensible, and everyone he meets is a zany caricature.

And he didn’t want that, he said. “I wanted to create a form of journalism that gave you the intimacy of listening to somebody.” Plus: “Who cares about my impression of Paris? It’s not that different from your impression of Paris.” Besides, he said, in our day and age, people can travel by and for themselves and see this place or that on the internet. What they can’t necessarily appreciate, however, “is how it looks completely different and feels completely different through the eyes of somebody else.”

And so instead of narration by the author, each chapter, though written in the third person, is a sort of “as told to.” Judah was the reader’s ever-present guide in This Is London, but not in This Is Europe. The result is a series of snapshots of European life in the 21st century, one that includes both those born in Europe and those who arrived from outside.

There’s a young woman who breaks up with her boyfriend, leaves her child, and heads off to war in Ukraine. There’s a man in Portugal who marries a woman from Slovakia and then decides that he needs to learn how to herd sheep. There’s a man from Syria who finds a career as a porn actor in Central Europe. There’s my personal favorite, in which an Austrian man and a Turkish woman fall in love during their Erasmus program (the continent’s educational and cultural exchange for university students), break up, and get back together and try to start a family. Readers who have ever had the experience of, while traveling, looking at a random house and wondering to themselves what it would have been like to have been born and grown up there will find a familiar sensation here. The book takes their stories as seriously as the people telling them do.

People wait at a bus stop in downtown Lisbon on Dec. 30, 2021. Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images

Judah took inspiration from “really old books,” he said, and, in particular, The Decameron, the 14th-century masterpiece by Giovanni Boccaccio in which several men and women, having fled Florence to escape the Black Death, swap stories—some heartbreaking, some witty, many quite bawdy—to pass the time. Judah, in working on this book as the world grappled with COVID-19, found himself playing the part of Boccaccio’s stars: bringing together stories as both an escape from and reminder of the world outside during a plague.

He also had the Talmud, the famously argumentative Jewish commentary, in mind while writing it, and specifically how “you have to look at everything from a different way.” He pointed to Berlin. In one chapter, a Syrian refugee in Berlin finds the city completely oppressive; in another chapter, a queer man finds the city to be a place of liberation.

But despite the variety of stories, there are common threads throughout the book. Many of the chapters feature refugees, or at least migration. “Walls going up around Europe” is one of the defining features of the continent in the 21st century, Judah told me. And yet, he said, the story of Europe today still bleeds into that of Africa and the Middle East, and migration from the south impacts its present and future just as wars and revolutions for freedom from the east do.

“The quest for freedom is still really essential to understanding where Europe’s going,” Judah said. That includes freedom to move to a place where you can live with dignity—though that’s hardly the only form of freedom in the book. There is also freedom to pursue an education, freedom to pursue the career of your choice, freedom to be in love, and freedom to mourn. “I didn’t expect that, in some way or another, all the people I spent so much time with … are all about these quests for personal freedom.”

Many of the stories end differently than the reader (or at least this reader) might imagine. In one, a young woman turns to showing her body on camera for money to be able to afford her way out of Latvia and over to Italy for her studies. I read it quickly, my stomach sinking, certain that some terrible fate was going to befall her. But it never did. She made it to Italy and was able to pursue her education.

Protesters against the U.K. government’s intention to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda at the perimeter fence of Brook House Immigration Removal Center beside Gatwick Airport, south of London, on June 12, 2022. Niklas Halle’n /AFP via Getty Images

“The stories are unexpected and jagged and sudden because they’re real. Real people told them,” Judah explained. Similarly, though many of the people in the book speak in stereotypes—the Germans and Dutch are like this, while Chinese are like this—“almost every single one of those stories involves someone realizing the stereotypes are wrong.” He cites my favorite, the Erasmus love affair, which involves the Austrian man moving to Turkey, a sort of “immigrant story in reverse.”

Mostly, though, the chapters of This Is Europe almost offer a kind of alternate reading of news articles. The news loves trends and phenomena and threats and resolutions. Here, instead, are the people whose individual lives make up all those things.

“Every day,” Judah told me, “we’re bombarded by [reports of] human lives reduced to news stories, or statistics, or geopolitical trends.”

“I wanted to write something with enormous intimacy that would be the antidote to that.”

This Is Europe may serve as a reminder that the continent is made up not of old stone and fine wine and political referenda, but of the people who live there and who move across it, each of whom is the central character in the drama of their own lives.