Poor Angry Magnetic Europe
MAY 22, 2014
BERLIN — Europe at the centenary of the war that devoured it is voting
in elections for the European Parliament that will no doubt reflect the anger,
disillusionment and boredom of people inclined to cast their ballots for an
array of protest parties, many from the xenophobic right, some from the
pander-to-Putin left.
Political sentiment across the Continent has converged at a grumpy and
small-minded nadir. There is anger about high unemployment. There is pessimism
over the future. There is irritation at immigration. There is alienation from
the European Union. What, the chorus goes, has Brussels ever done for me? The
answer, of course, is that it has brought peace, removed borders and spread
once unimaginable prosperity. But this achievement is no longer enough or no
longer deemed relevant.
In some ways Europe’s mood resembles America’s. Focus has narrowed and
solidarity atrophied. Europe, like America, does not want to die for anyone
else. It has turned inward, wanting its own problems solved, and damn the
Libyans and Syrians and Ukrainians and whoever else may be making demands
through their plight.
Anyone who believes the spread of freedom, democracy and the rule of law
matters is a “warmonger.” The sharing economy is in vogue because it affords a
better deal on a car ride or a room. Sharing politics is not because it may
involve sacrifice for faraway people with strange names.
So the National Front in France, and the U.K. Independence Party in
Britain, and Jobbik in Hungary and Die Linke (the Left) in Germany — parties
from right and left that have expressed varying degrees of admiration for
President Vladimir Putin and his homophobic irredentism (Russian-speaking gays
need not apply for admission to the imperium) — are all likely to benefit from
a diffuse anger, in which anti-Americanism mingles with general spleen.
Never have the idea and the ideal of the 28-member European Union been
so weakened, at least within its borders, to the point that several fringe
parties take Putin’s Eurasian Union with its promise of good times in Belarus
seriously. Just outside the Union it is a different story. Europe is magnetic
still. The dissonance between the Union as perceived by many of its more than
500 million citizens, and the Union as it is idealized and ached for by
millions on its fringes or in faraway lands, is complete.
The European Parliament election coincides with a critical election Sunday in Ukraine, where
Putin has created havoc by annexing Crimea, dispatching thugs to stir unrest in
the eastern part of the country, and inventing a “fascist” threat in Kiev to
conceal his own growing affinities with such politics (his beloved, much
lamented Soviet Union of course allied with Nazi Germany in 1939 before Hitler
tore up the pact in 1941; attraction to fascism is nothing new in Moscow).
On Kiev’s Independence Square, known as the Maidan, where Ukrainians
died in numbers to escape the rule of an incompetent kleptomaniac backed by
Putin, the European Union flag flies in several places. It is equally visible
on surrounding streets. It is draped down the facade of the Ukrainian Foreign
Ministry. It stands for something important in Kiev, something that seems
almost unimaginable to Europeans in the confusion of their bile: the glowing
possibility of freedom and dignity and pluralism, the possibility of a normal
life.
“Europe is a promise of liberty,”
said Nataliya Popovych, an activist in the Maidan movement. “As for Putin’s
Eurasian Union, we have been in that cage before. Why would we go back? Through
Maidan Ukrainians killed Homo Sovieticus in themselves. In Russia and some
parts of the east of Ukraine, Homo Sovieticus is still alive.”
It is not dead in Western Europe, either. As my colleague Andrew
Higgins noted, Aymeric Chauprade, the National Front’s
top European Parliament candidate for the Paris region, trooped off to Moscow
last year to declare that, “Russia has become the hope of the world against new
totalitarianism.” We live in a time when sentences need to be turned on their
heads. The “new totalitarianism” is of course emanating from Moscow.
But Europe is suddenly full of what Germans now call the Putinversteher
— literally someone who understands Putin, more loosely a Putin apologist.
Europeans of different stripes see him standing up to America, incarnating
“family values,” countering a loathed European Union, and just being tough.
Germans in surprising numbers are discovering their inner sympathy for Russia,
a complex emotion in which anti-Americanism, romanticism, guilt and gratitude
for Moscow’s acceptance of unification all play a part. The old temptation in
Germany to look eastward is not entirely overcome after all.
Europeans would do well to lift their gaze from the small world of their
current anger toward those blue and gold flags fluttering on the Maidan, the
better to recall what freedom means and with what sacrifice it has been
attained.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 23, 2014, in The
International New York Times.
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