[Changes produce old ghosts anew--the insecure Europe]

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of existing socialist dictatorships, some of the ghosts that we thought to have long since exorcised have returned to haunt us anew-aggressive forms of nationalism, which we have turned a blind eye to for decades, and a violent species of xenophobia on occasion openly homicidal in nature are prominent features of present-day European reality. In Beland's view, such alarming phenomena can only be controlled successfully if we can contrive-both on an individual and collective plan- to de-activate the psychic mechanism of projecting our own evils and flaws onto others (i.e. "foreigners") and to achieve what Melanie Klein calls the "depressive position", i.e. attain to a higher guilt tolerance. This, Beland contends, is the central utopia of European humanism.