With European parliament elections only weeks away, the continent has rarely been so anxious about the future. The assassination attempt on Robert Fico, the Slovakian leader, could lead towards a kind of civil war, according to the country’s interior minister, throwing fuel on a society already polarised by the Ukrainian conflict on its borders.
At the heart of this tension creeping across eastern Europe is the question of where a violently disruptive Russia fits into the security architecture of the continent. Does the very idea of Europe — once a beacon of hope for post-communist states — have to be defined in opposition to President Putin’s territorial ambitions? Or is there, as some populists such as Fico and Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, believe,
