The other evening I visited the impromptu monument outside Maalbeek metro station, where 16 people died in last month’s Brussels attacks. It’s becoming a familiar European sight: flowers, flags and handwritten notes spilling over a barrier.
Scenes like this are prompting a scary comparison: the west, it’s said, is going back to the 1930s. Then as now, we have urban violence, economic stagnation, rising populists and a menacing Russia. Isis is auditioning for the role of Nazi Germany.
The 1930s analogy could still prove correct. But, so far at least, there’s a more plausible comparison. The scene at Maalbeek jolted me back to the decade many of us are currently reliving: like so much of Brussels, the spot looks like the 1970s. The flowers lie beneath a brutalist office block, whose ground floor is a car park, beside a four-lane road. Our current era is more similar to the 1970s than the 1930s.