Phone calls are passed A. Should they be? Faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business

are exploring how less text-based messaging and more talking could improve communication.

Discover more at www.shakagobooth.edu-slashcommunications.

Hello and welcome to the Economist asks, I'm Anne McElvoy. And this week we're asking,

what are the forces reshaping today's Europe? Within the EU, the idea of a journey towards

ever-closer union now seems very far from reality. The continent feels, in many ways,

to resemble the fractured world of pre-first world war politics, rather than a harmonious landmass

linked by strong institutions. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in

1989, Europe saw itself as a stronghold of liberal democracy. But in Hungary and Poland,

democratic norms are being eroded. The south of the continent is buffeted by economic winds,

and a wave of refugees and migrants has unleashed tensions about how open borders can or should be.

Major anti-migrant protests have erupted in Germany this week. To the east, a

resurgent Russia tests its boundaries. With us to discuss the roller coaster of recent European

events is a leading British historian Sir Ian Kurshaw. He's the author of definitive biographies

of Hitler, and to Hellenbach, a history of Europe from 1914 to 1949. His latest book,

Roller Koster, picks up the story of Europe from the high of the post-war economic miracle of the 1950s,

through to the dizzying turbulence of the present. Ian Kurshaw, what about the metaphor of

the roller coaster? You have to cope with a very broad kind of painably here. I'm sure lots of

other metaphors probably suggested themselves as you went through Europe in history since 1945.

Why did you fix on that? Not many metaphors do as a matter of fact suggest themselves. It's very

difficult to come up with one term, which summarises the history of the last 70 years or so,

because there isn't one constant theme in European history in the way that there was for the previous

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