I may be biased by a personal lifelong commitment to Europe. I often tell the story that my two grandfathers fought on opposite sides during the Great War. They might well have killed each other. They were, however, on different fronts, and they didn’t. That’s why I say sometimes that Europe is, literally, in my DNA.
I understand very well that such memories come to mean progressively less to younger generations. But the young are also those who seem to feel the most disaffected, the most estranged from the ‘establishment’, and the most in need of clearer, brighter long-term prospects.