Ten summers ago, in the mid-year heat of 2016, a particular kind of light washed through the seminar rooms and shared flats where I was finishing my doctoral dissertation on the Arab revolutions.
Having a doctoral viva on the Egyptian revolutions the month the Egyptian government murdered my academic twin has, in a different way, taken me a decade to process.
But the summer of 2016 was, for me, not about the Arab revolutions that had dominated the early part of the 2010s, but rather about a European focus that, in hindsight, feels haunting, like stories of the summer of 1939, all Auden-ish in retrospective fondness.
In my mind now, the summer of 2016 is imbued with the golden, slightly hazy light of late academic deadlines: stacks of open books, printouts marked in red, cold coffee, and the quiet, collective hum of my friends and me as we complete our doctorates.
Around me was a micro-community of cosmopolitan Europeans—and Britons who regarded their European identity not as a political stance but as a natural atmospheric condition.
We spoke in a shared dialect of academic jargon, terrible puns, and shared ideals for a borderless world of ideas. We were not entirely naive; we had watched the early part of the decade leave deep scars across the continent.
We had felt the tension of the 2014 Grexit crisis and tracked the low, rumbling rise of populist discourse across borders. Yet we viewed those shocks as structural stresses within a resilient frame—bruises on a system that would ultimately hold.
Nothing prepared us for the violent assault of Brexit, or the sheer velocity with which the unimaginable became reality.
We had no idea what was waiting on the other side of that summer. On the day of the Brexit referendum result, I walked through the university parks and bumped into my German friend, in tears, in shock.
Later that day, I met a friend who reflected on our own hubris. Why didn’t we think it could happen? Many of my friends stopped speaking to each other over the fault line of ‘you didn’t even bother to vote’.
The jokes early in the summer, “Haha, imagine if Brexit actually happened”, haunted our interactions; the “Haha, imagine if Trump actually got elected” jokes stopped.
Nigel Farage’s claim that Brexit was achieved “without a drop of blood being spilt” just days after MP Jo Cox’s murder deeply affected me. As I read about Cox, who also spent time in Bosnia and incorporated those experiences into her later work, I was haunted by the contrast.
Things began to feel Alice-in-Wonderland-like, in a way that, in retrospect, I find hard to separate from my own mental distress and turmoil.
Years later I began Jungian psychoanalysis and spent a month exploring how ‘No, I think it was probably me going mad and the world going mad at exactly the same time’. Ten years on, I think many of us feel like this.
The political divisions of 2016—such as Brexit in June and the US presidential election later that year—initially seemed like anomalies we could analyse and understand separately.
Instead, the years that followed felt like an extended, chaotic remix of 2016: the same arguments looping on dynamic repeat, the same fault lines widening, the same ideological battles reframed but never resolved.
We lived in a state of suspended animation, waiting for the fever to break, until suddenly a decade had slipped by and the political landscape had been entirely transformed.
My personal theory is that we never actually processed the shift of the 2010s because COVID came along like a huge new tidal wave, swallowing the discourse and washing away whatever reflective space remained.
Over the past decade, the world has rearmed itself, with borders—whether physical, institutional, or ideological—reasserting themselves strongly. The once steady confidence of our international community has been replaced by a period marked by institutional instability, shifting geopolitical landscapes, and a deep crisis in shared understanding.
The futures we imagined for ourselves while writing our conclusions were quietly rewritten by forces no thesis methodology could have anticipated.
Standing a decade removed from that summer, the lingering emotion isn’t bitterness but a sharp, elegiac wonder. Like W.H. Auden’s poems looking back on the summer of 1939, it feels like a miracle that we were ever there.
We cannot return to the rooms where we wrote those dissertations, nor can we retrieve the innocent certainty that sustained us through them.
But as summer ends once again after a decade, it reminds me that the systems we live within are more fragile than they seem, and that the future is quietly taking shape in the shadows of our most confident assumptions.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
