The café lights burned brightly in Riga, the capital of Latvia, upon my visit just late last year. The country, an EU member since 2004, appeared to be yet another model of European democratic reclamation in miniature. The Soviet-era factories had become cafés or galleries, and the shops were filled with goods from Sweden and Germany. But as of this writing, loan negotiations with the International Monetary Fund were stalled over the question of budget cuts. Many economists tell us that all Eastern European economies, not just Latvia’s, will soon be obliged to adopt the euro, even if they don’t officially join the eurozone.

It is hard to see how the EU can avoid becoming far more deeply engaged in the fates of the places to the east that it proposed to save, even though this is something most Europeans would be loath to see happen. (The Germans, on whom the burden will fall heaviest, because they still have money, are most reluctant to offer assistance, recalling the expensive bailout of East Germany.) Countries within the eurozone may also fail and require help: after Ireland, Austria is expected to go down, and Greece and Italy are said to be on the sick list. In a way in which the EU’s founders couldn’t have anticipated, but that harks back to the postwar days of the eec, economic crisis may lead to a different, more closely organized Europe as an alternative to the breakup of the Union. But it is possible, too, that the old demons of nationalist Europe will be reawakened by economic misery. We Europeans know these things can happen.

I retain some faith in the possibility that Europe can use this moment to become more than the sum of its economies and bureaucracies. When I set out to discover the continent more than a decade ago, what gave me hope was not just the flourishing of democracy, but the potential of pluralism, even in the worst circumstances. At its best, Europe now shows how elements of national cultures can be mixed together without ever quite losing their separateness. And the new Europe now has a history of its own — comprising the official process of integration, to be sure, but also, more important, the knowledge that so many millions of Europeans, with their tangled histories and ethnic origins, can live together without all-encompassing war.

Many of the greatest achievements of European civic culture have come from the continent’s margins — from such inspired inventions as Médecins Sans Frontières or Amnesty International, or indeed the green movement. To be a European internationalist, you don’t have to sign up to some of the more outlandish aspects of European integration. It’s possible to remain a bit remote, yet fitfully respectful. Scandinavians, for example, have kept their distance from the European experiment without ever becoming mindlessly hostile, as so many Brits have. Recently, I’ve grown interested in the degree to which Europe has become Scandinavian, in things as diverse as generous unemployment provisions, greenness, and the freely expressed attention paid to the plight of the world’s poor — a vision of good that Canadians might appreciate.

Some of these attitudes are present in the current Scandinavian bestsellers, now being sold in their millions throughout Europe. The Millennium Trilogy recounts the efforts of a left-wing journalist and his punkish female companion to ensure, in the style pioneered by Tintin, that the cruel, the stupid, and the greedy receive their just deserts. The author, Stieg Larsson, who died at fifty, before his books were published, was a left-wing journalist and an anti-racist campaigner, and his books reflect these views comprehensively. Mildly paranoid, featuring the odd bit of deviant sex happily engaged in a Scandinavian spirit of collaborative equality, they trade on our indignation over the evils of greed and patriarchal sexism. There is something wholly old-fashioned and generous about these fat page turners, and I suspect that in their idealism and nostalgia they represent, charmingly, the true state of European opinion. In a bad time, they are making Europeans feel better about themselves.

We’re not likely to see grass growing on the Unter den Linden anytime soon, but I’m starting to think that our leaders, like the rest of us, should come off the fence and appeal to Europeans — starting with the Irish, but including the Brits — to preserve and strengthen what has been accomplished with such pain. It might just prove to be the making of Europe. In the meantime, I’ve shed any vestiges of skepticism. Europe matters in the world. Now that the new Europe has a past, it should be possible to map out a future that doesn’t consist of slogans and detailed directives. I’d like to see the lights burning night after night in the European café, as Europeans finally resolve the question of who they can be.