How to Save Europe

A few days ago, a group of 30 writers, historians and Nobel Prize winners including Bernard-Henri Levin, Milan Kundra, Salman Rushdi, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosan and Adam Micnik published a manifesto in several newspapers across Europe.

They claimed that Europe as an idea, is “being dissolved in front of our eyes”. “Now we must fight for the idea of Europe, or we will see it disappear under the waves of populism. We must reinvent political volunteerism, or accept that the displeasure, hatred, and bond of these sad passions surround us and sink”.

This manifesto is full of faults - it's enough to read carefully, and it understands why populists are prospering. His signatories consider himself to be the saviors of Europe.

In July of last year, after participating in a tense meeting with EU leaders, Donald Trump spoke for the European Union as the first in the line of “enemies of the United States, ahead of Russia and China. A hurry followed to denounce this claim as unreasonable (“Trump is treating US allies worse than his enemies” and so forth).

But instead, we have to ask some simple questions. What upsets Trump so much with the EU? What Europe is he talking about? When asked by journalists about the immigrants coming to Europe, Trump responded as an anti-immigrant populist that he is: immigrants are ruining the structure of the European way of life; they pose a danger to European spiritual identity.

In short, there were people like Orban of Hungary or Salvin of Italy, who were speaking through it. Nobody should forget that they too want to protect Europe. So, what is that Europe, that upsets Trump and European populists so much? It's Europe of the Transnational Unit, Europe being a little bit aware that to cope with the challenges of our time, we have to move beyond the national restrictions.

It is Europe, who desperately tries to remain loyal to the old motto of Enlightenment for solidarity with the victims, Europe that is aware of the fact that humanity is today One, and that we are all on the same boat (or, as we say, in the same cosmic cosmic vessel; which is called Earth).

Europe that believes that another person's misery is also our misery. Here we have to point to Peter Sloterdijk, who noted that the challenge today is, how to ensure the survival of modern Europe's largest economic-political achievements, and the Social Democratic state of social welfare.

According to Sloterdijk, our reality is at least in Europe a targeted <x0 social democracy”, which opposes social democracy “subjective”: we need to distinguish social democracy as a shield of political parties, and social democracy like “formul of a system”.

In a 2009 article, Sloterdijk wrote that the social-democratic formula “accurately describes the political-economic order of things, defined by the modern state as the state of taxes, like the state of infrastructure, as the rule of law, and not the last in importance, such as the social state and state as the 44x1> therapy.

“We have everywhere a phenomenal and structural social democracy, one public manifesto and another hidden, one that appears as one party and another that is largely being built irreversibly in definitions, functions and procedures of modern citizenship such as”.

The idea based on united Europe was corrupted, half forgotten, and at only a moment of danger, we are forced to return to this essential dimension of Europe, to its hidden potential. Europe stands as a substitute between America on the one hand and Russia on the other, which they want to break up: Both Trump and Vladimir Putin support Brexit, but they also support Eurosceptics in every corner from Poland to Italy.

What problem do they have with Europe, when we all know the misery that the EU continually sinks into after every test: from its inability to implement a stable policy about migrants, to its sad response to the trade tariffs Trump has launched?

Of course, it is not existing Europe, but the idea of Europe being restored to all disputes becomes evident at times of danger. The problem with Europe is how to remain loyal to its emissary heritage when threatened by the conservative-populist attack. So how should this be done?

In his “his views on the definition of culture, writer Thomas Eliot, a great conservative, points out that there is no moment when the only choice is that between heresy and disbelief, when the only way to keep a religion alive, is for her to carry on a sectarian separation from the main corpse.

This is what needs to be done today: the only way to actually defeat populists, and to save what's valuable, to save liberal democracy, is to become a sectarian separation from the main corpse of liberal democracy. In other words, the only way to resolve a conflict is to seek, not compromise, but radicalize your position.

Returning to the letter of 30 liberal columnists: what they refuse to accept is that Europe, whose disappearance they fear, has already been irrevocably lost. The threat does not come from populism: populism, it is simply a response to the failure of Europe's liberal integrity to remain faithful to Europe's emancipative potential, offering false ways to solve the problems of ordinary people.

So the only way to actually defeat populism is to submit the liberal establiable itself, its current policy, a ruthless critic from the point of view of that “Social Democratial” that created estabity in its neoliberal turn.

This does not mean that we can just go back to the old times of the state of social well-being: the only way to revive “reforming” for Europe is to redefinish it into a much more radical form, in a form that fits the present situation and with new ecological and social challenges. The only way to save what is worth saving from the past is to move on.

“World.al