The spiraling coronavirus epidemic tore into the fabric of Europe on Tuesday, prompting its leaders to all but wall the continent off from the rest of the world and erect barriers within it, and to throttle back or turn off the engines of ordinary life and livelihoods in hopes of slowing the deadly spread. The European Union banned nonessential travel from outside the bloc into 26 nations stretching from Portugal to Finland, home to more than 400 million people, for 30 days, as Europe’s leaders grudgingly, belatedly accepted that being at the heart of a global pandemic and trying to fight it will mean severe social and economic hardship. The move by Brussels was just the most dramatic on a day full of evidence that European life was abruptly becoming more atomized and constrained than anything in Europe’s modern history […]