Which idea of Europe?

So why should Europe join this crazy dance? Because it is clearly an exception: it doesn’t fit the world of the struggle for domination between America-first, Russia-first, and China-first. Not building an army would just make Europe the playground of the battle for the domination between the big three (which Europe is already becoming). The US and Russia both work hard to destroy European unity, while China retains an ambiguous distance.

Europe is increasingly an anomaly, standing alone, with no allies. The only way for Europe to maintain autonomy is to become even more united and signal this unity through united armed forces.

However, how flexibly attitudes are dealt with in politics is made clear by an example from the cultural Cold War. When, in the late 1940s, Western culture was perceived as promoting universalist cosmopolitanism (under Jewish influence), pro-Soviet communists (from the USSR to France) decided to turn patriotic, promoting their own cultural tradition and attacking imperialism for destroying it.

Was not something similar going on in the reaction to the Catalonia referendum? Remember how Putin proclaimed the disintegration of the Soviet Union a mega-catastrophe – but he supports Catalonian independence. The same holds for all those European Leftists who opposed the disintegration of Yugoslavia as the result of a dark German-Vatican plot; now, however (as with Scotland), separation is OK. And Western centrist liberals are no better: always ready to support any separated movement that threatens the geopolitical power of Russia, they now warn against the threat to the unity of Spain (hypocritically deploring the police violence against Catalonian voters, of course).

In Slovenia, my own country, this confusion reached its peak: the old Left, which was to the end mostly against Slovene independence, pleading for a renewed more open Yugoslavia, is now organising petitions and demonstrations for Catalonia, while the nationalist right, which fought for full Slovene independence, is now discreetly for the unity of Spain (since their conservative colleague Mariano Rajoy was the Spanish prime minister).

Working for the disintegration of European unity

We can only say: shame on the European establishment – obviously, some have the right to sovereignty and others not, depending on geopolitical interests. One argument against Catalonian independence nonetheless seems rational: is Putin’s support of Catalonian independence not obviously part of his strategy to strengthen Russia by way of working for the disintegration of European unity? Should then partisans of a strong united Europe not advocate the unity of Spain? Here, one should dare to turn this argument round. Support for the unity of Spain is also part of the ongoing struggle to assert the power of nation-states against European unity.

[For] the European establishment […] some have the right to sovereignty and others not, depending on geopolitical interests.

What we need in order to accommodate new local sovereignties (of Catalonia, of Scotland, maybe, etc.) is thus simply a stronger European Union: nation-states should accustom themselves to a more modest role as intermediators between regional autonomies and united Europe. In this way, Europe can avoid the debilitating conflicts between states and emerge as a much stronger international agent, on a par with other large geopolitical blocs. The failure of the EU to take a clear stance on the Catalonian referendum is just the latest in a series of blunders, the biggest being the total lack of coherent policies towards the flow of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa into Europe. The confused reaction to the flow of refugees failed to take into account the basic difference between (economic) immigrants and refugees: immigrants come to Europe to search for work, to meet the demands for workforces in the developed European countries; refugees don’t primarily come to work, but simply to look for a safe place to survive – they often don’t even like the new country they find themselves in.

Immigrants come to Europe to search for work, to meet the demands for workforces in the developed European countries; refugees don’t primarily come to work.

Refugees who used to gather in Calais are paradigmatic here: they didn’t want to stay in France, but to move on to the UK. The same holds for the countries that most resist accepting refugees (the new ‘axis of evil’ Croatia/Slovenia/Hungary/Czech Republic/Poland/Baltic countries) – they are definitely not the place where refugees want to settle.

But perhaps the most absurd effect of this confusion is that Germany, the only country that behaved in a half-decent way to refugees, became the butt of many critics, not only of the rightist defenders of Europe but also of the Leftists, who, in a typical superego turn, focused on the best element in the chain, attacking it for not being even better.

The most worrying aspect of the Catalonian crisis is thus the inability of Europe to take a clear stand: to allow its members states either to adopt their own politics with regard to separatism or refugees, or to adopt efficient measures against those who don’t want to apply the common decisions.

Democracy coming apart

In January 2019, a group of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates – including Bernard-Henri Lévi, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosa, Adam Michnik – published a manifesto in several newspapers all around Europe, including the Guardian in the UK and Die Welt in Germany. They claim that Europe as an idea is “coming apart before our eyes”. “We must rediscover political voluntarism or accept that resentment, hatred and their cortège of sad passions will surround and submerge us.”

Its signatories – the flower of European liberal intelligence – ignore the unpleasant fact that the populists also present themselves as the saviours of Europe. Immigrants are tearing apart the fabric of European mores and ways of life, they pose a danger to European spiritual identity – this is the tenor of people like Orbán or Salvini. One should never forget that they also want to defend Europe.

So which Europe bothers the European populists? Is it the Europe of transnational unity, the Europe vaguely aware that, in order to cope with the challenges of our moment, we should move beyond the constraints of nation-states? Is it the Europe that also desperately strives to somehow remain faithful to the old Enlightenment motto of solidarity with victims, the Europe aware of the fact that humanity is today One, that we are all in the same boat (or, as we say, on the same Spaceship Earth), so that others’ misery is also our problem?

Between heresy and non-belief

The idea that underlies a united Europe got corrupted, half-forgotten, and it is only in a moment of danger that we are compelled to return to this essential dimension of Europe, to its hidden potential. Trump and Putin both supported Brexit; they supported Eurosceptics on every corner, from Poland to Italy. What is it that bothers them about Europe, given that we all know the misery of the EU, which fails again and again at every test: from its inability to enact a consistent politics about immigrants to its miserable reaction to Trump’s tariff war? It is obviously not this actual existing Europe, but the idea of a Europe that flares up against all the odds in in moments of danger. The problem for Europe is how to remain faithful to its emancipatory legacy, which is threatened by the conservative populist onslaught?

The only way to really defeat populism is to submit the liberal establishment itself, its actual politics, to a ruthless critique which can sometimes also take an unexpected turn.

In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great conservative T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is what has to be done today: the only way to really defeat populists and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy is to perform a sectarian split from liberal democracy’s main corpse. Sometimes, the only way to resolve a conflict is not to search for a compromise but to radicalise one’s position.

Back to the letter of the 30 liberal luminaries: what they refuse to admit is that the Europe whose disappearance they deplore is already irretrievably lost. The threat does not come from populism: populism is merely a reaction to the failure of Europe’s liberal establishment to remain faithful to Europe’s emancipatory potential, offering a false way out of ordinary people’s troubles. So the only way to really defeat populism is to submit the liberal establishment itself, its actual politics, to a ruthless critique which can sometimes also take an unexpected turn.

For example: does Europe need its own army? Yes, it needs it more than ever. But why, when we all know that the most sickening excuse for joining the arms race is that, when our prospective enemies are arming themselves, the only way to deter war and protect peace is for us to also get ready for war? Already, for a decade or so, the arms race between three superpowers (US, Russia and China) has been exploding at a frantic pace.

The entire Arctic area is becoming militarised; billions are being invested in military supercomputers and biogenetics. Chinese military journals openly debate the need for China to engage in real war (while the Russian military has recently been tested and still is by conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, etc., the Americans in Iraq, the Chinese army has avoided a real fight for decades).