Kingussie (two weeks ago)

I sit in a very plush hotel bar in the tiny Scottish town of Kingussie. I am waiting for the last train to take me back to Edinburgh and this was the nearest warm place I could find. The place is empty except for a barman who is flirting with two girls at the bar. A moment ago a scotsman was here, dressed in traditional costume and playing the bag pipes to the delight of the two girls. It is one of their birthdays and in between ear shattering renditions of highland anthems he was buying them drinks and trying to get the girls to have a go on the pipes. If it had worked then I would have refused to believe that there was ever any justice in the world.

But it didn't. The scotsman left and the two girls have now turned to chat to the barman, in Polish. Or what I think is Polish. It could be anything, but it doesn't sound west European. I think the girls work here as maids and he is obviously the barman.

I'm sipping ice cold coke in a remote highland town watching a Polish barman succeeded where a pipe weilding scotsman failed. On friday I take the bus down to London for the weekend to meet Kristina. A Bulgarian I met in Arkansas who has come to study international relations at UCL. She is able to do so thanks to an 'open society' scholarship from George Soros, the american billionaire. Up the road from here my Canadian girlfriend is being briefed on a future trip to Norway with her classmates who come from all over the developed world.

In front of me sits a book called 'war of the world', a history of the twentieth century. It argues that in 1907 the world was the most globalised, integrated and wealthy it ever has been, a period matched only by our world today. A hundred years ago a happy, educated and prosperous developed world descended into fifty years of brutal bloodshed which in both size and substance has never been matched.

No one saw it coming. Many thought that European and American dominace of the world would last forever and that history was effectively over.

Throughout its long and illustrious history Europe has never been so prosperous or so united as it is now. At the same its nations have never been so ethnically diverse or subject to such large peacetime migrations.

So to finish on a hyperbolic high:
I ask you - What would it take to unpick this tapastry of progress? And is Europe mature enough to survive the 21st century?