This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

This chapter begins from the historical conjecture that, at the level of social and political geography, globalization is best defined by the practical and symbolic parcellisation of social and political space, not through metaphors of borderlessness. Such parcellisation is epitomised by the proliferation of actual enclaves zones such as business parks, gated communities, refugee camps and export processing zones. They also have their fantasy versions, such as the so-called No-Go Zones that, political activists and commenters have alleged, represent areas of effective Muslim secession from secular states such as Britain and France. The chapter considers empirical and theoretical evidence for the break-up of global social space. It concludes by showing how these spaces become important formal and thematic topoi in contemporary literary works by J. G. Ballard, Ali Smith and Caryl Phillips. Other authors discussed include John Berger and Joseph O’Neill.