When it was first published in 1996, this heretical "Essay on Europe" was a reflection with predictive power, skeptical disposition, and passionate argumentation about the state of the Old Continent.

Tony Judt addressed here the issues facing Europe in the face of the new millennium: What are the real prospects for an enlarged European Union that won’t turn out to be too big? Which nations should "belong" to Europe, when, and under what criteria? What defines "Europe," and how can we think about its future?

As he argued, if the myth of "Europe" is too abstract to gain the people's faith in it and inspire solutions to specific problems, we can only benefit from a critical examination of it. Indeed, things have progressed on their own.

Measured as well as sharp, the masterful analysis of the prematurely lost historian is at the center of the dialogue, the confrontation, and the documentation that, precisely because they were never convincing, have greater significance today.