Europeus equivocados vao votar pelo novo totalitarismo, ou pelo velho fascismo - Roger Cohen (NYT)

Poor Angry Magnetic Europe

MAY 22, 2014

Roger Cohen

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.