Ghosts from the riverbed: Europe’s new divides
It sometimes seems that the East now has an advantage even beyond the conservative longing for an impossible return to traditional societies. As reverse brain drain started to occur more recently, the West to East knowledge transfer brought with it an economic and digital boom in cities as far apart as Tallinn, Warsaw and Cluj. It would appear that any notion of a simple binary has been replaced by a more complex, fluid set of ideas and values.
September 11, 2026 -
Vesna Goldsworthy
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Hot TopicsIssue 5 2026Magazine
Panoramic view of Warsaw skyline at sunset with Vistula River and modern architecture
Photo: Strikernia / Shutterstock
London’s unforgiving, sun-bleached summer of 2026 has a dystopian, hallucinatory quality. As I write this, the city has not seen proper rain in 45 days. We swelter, unused to high temperatures. Air-conditioning in private homes is rare. People are suffering from sleep deprivation. Underground trains and buses are like ovens. A hosepipe ban has turned English lawns into dusty deserts of parched yellow and trees are shedding leaves to survive. We watch in horror as wildfires devour vast areas of France and seemingly everywhere else further south. Reports suggest that almost half a million hectares of European land have been consumed by flames so far this year.
Email exchanges with friends across the European continent frequently start and end with the weather. A distinguished university professor in Timișoara, in Romania, reports living as if under house arrest, with temperatures rising into the 40s. “In the end we will probably have a repeat of the 1980s,” she writes, “when, albeit for different reasons, there were constant power and running water cuts”. Our conversations about climate are increasingly coloured by a fatalism, which seems, in many ways, more difficult to argue against than climate denial.
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East-West divide, Eastern Europe, Western Balkans, Western Europe
