The struggle against discrimination and violence vis-à-vis the Roma has been an important issue of the accession negotiations between the EU and Central and Eastern European countries. But these challenges have now become Europeanised in a way that few would have anticipated. In the words of certain Western European politicians, the Gypsy today embodies one of the figures of the unsettling stranger (unheimlich) - the distancing or neutralization of whom would allow for the return to a former state of security and certainty. “Romanian hunts” in Italy, a mob clearing Roma families from a Belfast street in June 2009, exception measures of expulsion in France during Summer 2010: all these events call into question the principles of cohesion and solidarity at the European level. In her study entitled “Estrangements" Aziliz Gouez engages in a penetrating examination of the dangerous decoupling asserting itself in Europe between the dynamics of economic integration and intensity of migration on the one hand, and expressions of political and cultural exclusiveness on the other. She analyses the way in which the crimes perpetrated by some Roma immigrants have been instrumentalised by the Lega Nord in Italy and by the Jobbik in Hungary. The estrangement that these preachers of cultural purity propose to treat is that of the autochtones, of the rooted citizens who no longer feel “at home” in their town. Reading the interviews collected in the anthology “European encounters” also allows for a revisiting of a theme that has recently taken a tense and controversial turn in many European countries: that of identity. Whether architect, filmmaker, writer, historian, or poet; born during the Roaring Twenties, during the Second World War or the 1970s - all those interviewed agreed to undertake an in-depth dialogue on European identity. A multiplicity of voices, therefore, speaking of how Europe is lived, imagined and built at the turn of the twenty-first century. These voices are sometimes in tune, sometimes in discordance. Their succession does not allow us to see a European "grand narrative”, but rather entail the realization that in this continent broken by the crimes of the previous century, the epic mode has become impossible (and that this is perhaps a good thing...).