In the mid-1990s, Václav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic, hosted a reception at Prague Castle to celebrate the anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Gothic hall was filled with guests and in the group where I was standing someone said that the empire should never have split up because the small states that emerged from its ruins were easy pickings for the tyrants who took over that part of Europe: first Hitler, then Stalin. Half of those present nodded in agreement. Havel said that the empire, with its mosaic of languages and cultures, was the prefiguration of the European Union and that, to survive, it should have been democratized and it should have given much greater recognition to the diversity of languages, cultures and religions that made it up.
Unlike the other guests, most of whom belonged to previous generations, I was born in totalitarian Czechoslovakia. As a child I listened to teachers telling us that, with Lenin’s teaching and under the red flag of the Soviet Union, we were heading towards a radiant future. At home, however, the narrative was different. My parents insisted that the Soviet regime with its Leninist doctrine was based on a dogmatic and totalitarian ideology. And in the end, my parents, harassed by the Communist police, had no choice but to leave the country with their children clandestinely. We left in the mid-1970s.
At Havel’s celebration, still under the sign of euphoria after the fall of Communism, which many in the groupin which we were talking helped to bring down, we talked about European values. Seen in retrospect, Havel was the last politician who spoke to citizens about essential values such as honesty, solidarity and tolerance; today the political class does not dare to express itself in those terms, because the cynical social mediawould mock it for its naivety.
Over the years, some of those same guests ended up giving their support to populist parties. On one occasion I asked one of them the reasons and he replied, “We want to move away from Lenin who said that parliamentary democracy is a device for manufacturing deception.” I replied that these parties are enemies of democracy; under the authority of Americans like Steve Bannon and Trump they are trying to eliminate the values of the Enlightenment and thus strip Europe of its identity. And I reminded him that often the ultra-right and the ultra-left touch each other. So with regard to Lenin, in 2017, the ultra-right Bannon publicly equated himself with the revolutionary: “I am a Leninist,” he said at a rally, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and this is also my goal.” Trump seconded him by asserting that the solution for America is to sink into a catastrophe, after which it will miraculously rise again. I then reminded my interlocutor that this phrase is not far from the tales of the radiant future that were told in Communist countries.
Under the auspices and with the financing of Bannon, Musk and others, the anti-European leaders are determined to do away with the European Union and break it up into small and medium-sized independent states that can easily be dominated by powers such as the United States and the large multinationals. If that were to happen, Europe would be lost, as it were, for half a century, including all those states that had emerged from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire, among them my native country. Since their formation more than a century ago, these states have only been able to feel fairly strong when they have been part of the European Union.
How did this situation come about? At the end of the last century, the European democracies began to find themselves under pressure from the American neocons, a radical, politically groundbreaking and electorally dynamic right wing. Dissociating themselves from the traditional extreme right – the neo-fascists and neo-Nazis – and their incitements to violence, the emergence of these “modernized” parties on the political scene represents one of the greatest challenges facing democracy. Without openly criticizing the legitimacy of democracy, but above all by waving the flag of freedom, these parties reject the established socio-political system and advocate an ultra-liberal market, accompanied by a drastic reduction in the role of the state. An example of this is Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, which has turned Hungary into an autocratic state.
Most European countries have the far right and populism well infiltrated in their ranks. Germany is constantly striving to keep the dangerous Alternative for Germany at bay. Almost all former Communist states in Central and Eastern Europe have a xenophobic party in government or in opposition. Ursula von der Leyen decided to go with the times and accept some of these parties – those that are not anti-European, anti-democratic, and which support Ukraine – such as Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
Clearly, mistakes were made. Despite protests, such as the open letter of writers and academics on April 17, 2018, Angela Merkel gave a free hand to Orbán who was turning democracy into autocracy, because the two had a close relationship and had helped each other. Because of their serious blunders, the axis of Europe, Germany and France, is in crisis. The traditional left also erred in betraying the ideals of humanism by abandoning the middle class and the most fragile to their fate, allowing itself to be tempted by the siren song of transnational financial capitalism, against which it has not dared to act. That is why in many European countries the social democratic parties have disappeared.
However, one of those vanished frontline socialist politicians, François Hollande, once stated lucidly that if Europe did not unite more, it would end up defeated.
And indeed, the present times are a far cry from the party of hope at Prague Castle 30 years ago. Europe today is threatened internally by the growing lack of confidence of its citizens in democracy, fueled by the incessant activity on social media by Russia and other countries and organizations opposed to the democratic system. From the outside, and specifically militarily, Russia would like to encircle Europe through Ukraine and Belarus, but also in the Mediterranean where the Russian army is present in two ports, the Syrian Tartus (now in danger since the fall of El Assad) and the Libyan Tobruk, which have received large quantities of arms.
The United States, Europe’s main ally for more than a century, which saved it from physical and moral destruction, now appears, with Trump at the helm and with the long and intense activity of Steve Bannon and other Trumpists in favor of the European extreme right, to be a real threat. And the fact is that Europe irritates ultra-liberalism, financial capitalism and the big tech companies that would like to put an end to the capacity of the European institutions to defend citizens in the face of their strategies.
Europe today represents the mosaic of cultures, languages and religions, the cultural and linguistic diversity of which Havel spoke at the Prague Castle party.
With all its mistakes and shortcomings, which all European citizens should play a part in solving, Europe is today the most powerful political project for democratic freedoms and human rights. Otherwise, why do millions of human beings risk their lives to reach Europe and many millions more dream of one day having a European passport, among them many of the richest people on the planet?
