After a long decline, Europe tries for a comeback

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As metaphors go, the complete closure of Europe’s busiest airport on Friday because of a fire in a suburban electricity substation is a timely one.

If you believe that the old continent is collapsing into a decrepitude of its own economic dysfunction, the symbolism of Heathrow’s shambles has strong symbolic value. It can even be made to work, with a little imagination, as a parable for Europe’s wider existential retreat: decades of environmental extremism that has battered its competitiveness, multicultural relativism that has sapped its social cohesion, official delusions about a borderless, peaceable world that have rendered it defenseless against threats, foreign and domestic.

Like Heathrow on Friday, Europe is a civilization gone dark, its people grounded, the rest of the world turning around midflight and finding opportunity elsewhere. As a New Yorker trying to get home, one of the estimated 200,000 people frustratingly stranded, I can see the illustrative appeal.

But metaphors can be too tempting. I could as easily draw different figurative conclusions from the unexpected opportunity the snafu provided to spend an extra day in the cloisters of the University of Oxford and see a metaphor for an enduring civilization that has offered enlightenment for the world for a thousand years.

Still, there is no doubt that Europe’s existential crisis is real. I have spent much of the nine weeks since Donald Trump’s second inauguration over there: attending my father’s funeral in England, listening to the customarily flawed prognostications of the Davos crowd, tuning in to the observations of business leaders at gatherings in Italy, accepting an invitation to offer my own thoughts to a