Opinion | Europe pretends to fight for democracy

After days of diplomatic consultations, the heads of government of the EU member states met in Brussels on October 26 to reach a joint EU position on the situation in Israel and the Gaza Strip. Crucial in this statement: the pursuit of “humanitarian corridors and pauses for humanitarian needs.” Urgently necessary, given the dire circumstances in Gaza, which was hermetically sealed off by Israel after the Hamas terrorist attacks and had been bombed for weeks. And a concrete goal.

That concrete goal could perhaps be brought a giant step closer a day later in the United Nations General Assembly. Jordan submitted a resolution calling for a “humanitarian ceasefire.” This resolution could count on a majority of one hundred and twenty countries. But the EU fell apart, and the resolution lost much of its impact.

Eight EU member states, including France and Spain, voted in favor. The largest group of EU member states, fifteen in total, abstained from voting. This includes the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. Four smaller member states, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Croatia, voted with the United States against the resolution.

The EU goal of “humanitarian corridors and breaks” immediately disappeared from view. The EU member states sacrificed it to all kinds of considerations. First of all, the abstainers had the major objection that Hamas’s horror terror was not explicitly condemned in the final resolution text. At the same time, however, there was a colorful collection of specific domestic motifs. This ranged from fears of increasing unrest in their own country to economic and geopolitical interests, and from electoral to highly personal calculations. Each member state had its own combination to put the EU under its wing.

This division and confusion is consistent with Europe’s troubled history with the Middle East. Perhaps that, however cynical it may be, will provide opportunities in a diplomatic sense. Because of its divisions, the EU is difficult to divide into one camp, and that offers additional room for maneuver. But the division is above all a sign of inner weakness. The fact that this weakness is now being exposed against an acute background of more and more innocent deaths is distressing.

It is the European reflection of a broader international trend: human rights and the rule of law are immediately challenged when conditions become challenging. It is high time to face that reality and its consequences.

Meloni’s silence

In early April, journalist Ariel David wrote a flaming piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The piece was about Giorgia Meloni, who had just been Prime Minister of Italy for a few months. The whole of ‘Brussels’, from the EU institutions to NATO headquarters, breathed a sigh of relief at that moment. Meloni, from the (neo)fascist party Fratelli d’Italia, turned out to be surprisingly in line with the EU, also with regard to Western support for Ukraine. Some European leaders couldn’t wait to have their picture taken with her and work with this new star.

However, David pointed out that while Meloni’s positioning in international politics may seem moderate, that same international positioning was also characterized by something else. The other was the silence about the highly controversial ‘legal coup’ by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. His ultra-right government wants to severely limit the power of the Israeli Supreme Court through a constitutional amendment and led to mass protests before the October 7 attacks. Meloni’s silence about this was a bad sign, according to David.

Meloni leads an openly fascist party. In Italy itself, Meloni does what suits her profile. Her government is pursuing an ultra-conservative course, for example with regard to LGBTI rights. And she constantly creates riots by whitewashing the role of the fascists in World War II. This domestic dimension is ignored in European centers of power. As has been happening for years with comparable trends in the domestic politics of other Western European member states, which are known as founders and/or carriers of European integration. David’s core point: anyone who does not ignore this sees a frightening reality. The new international trend in the world’s democracies is that of the ‘illiberal agenda’. Meloni and Netanyahu both promote them.

This illiberal agenda always consists of two components: more democracy, less rule of law. In other words: strengthening the will of the majority at the expense of minorities and individual rights. Everything therefore revolves around winning and retaining the majority. That end justifies the means, even if they are blatant lies. And once the majority is in, everything is subordinated to it, including the rule of law. This has already happened in election campaigns with the pursuit of truth, on which the rule of law must be based. Ultimately, this legitimizes the censoring of objectionable sounds and state intimidation.

Europe’s international actions are not real actions; the passion for the ideals is no longer genuine

The illiberal trend is widespread. Major democracies such as the United States and Brazil experimented with it under Presidents Trump and Bolsonaro, who at the same time remained internationally accepted. It has not gone unnoticed.

New superpower India presented itself as an exemplary host of the G20 at the beginning of September. Pankaj Mishra describes what is happening within the borders of the largest democracy in the world his recent essay ‘When the Barbarians Take Over’. It is a heartbreaking account of the violent intimidation and ethnic killing practices of the Modi regime, the battle already lost against it, and the Western disinterest in it. In the West, people currently prefer to see India as a partner that can provide a counterbalance to China and Russia. In short, India is up to date in many ways.

What for illiberalism is the will of the majority, for fascism is the will of the people. Umberto Eco sums up his essay Ur-Fascism from 1995, a number of characteristics that are always hidden behind the ‘catchwordfascism. Two important ones: ‘cult of tradition’ and ‘irrationalism’, or denial of rationally acquired insights. The latter usually happens on the basis of traditions cherished by the majority or, as it is often euphemistically called nowadays, traditional values.

These are the two eternal pillars of the absolutization of the ‘popular will’ at the expense of individual rights and the judiciary. We know from the 1930s that democracy carries its own demise in this way. That is to say: without the rule of law, democracy will sooner or later destroy itself, legitimized by the ‘popular will’. The demonstrators in Israel were concerned about their country moving in that direction. That was not random.

Uncertain position in a changing world

The attraction of hatred, which arises from the self-love of nation states and the groups that feel themselves to be the rightful bearers of it, is back in full force. It is rooted in the perceived injustice that accompanies a changing world in which one’s own position becomes more uncertain, for example because the openness of liberal society allows that other world to enter, on the basis of rational arguments, rule of law principles and human rights.

In his impressive book Danube from 1986, the Germanist and writer Claudio Magris travels through many guilty places in European history. When Magris passes Sigmaringen in Baden-Württemberg, he starts talking about the French writer and anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He took refuge there in 1944 with his wife and cat and joined the “paper mache court” of the hunted Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis, the leaders of which were holed up in the castle in Sigmaringen.

In addition to being a fierce anti-Semite, Céline was also a broken man full of hatred. As an adolescent, he was lured into the First World War by the big words of the ideology of that moment, nationalism. His life was hopelessly ruined before it had even begun (read the moving first part of Travel to the end of the night). This had shaped him. No one described so scathingly how empty big words like democracy or human rights can be. No one was more cynical about the mobilization of people for ideals of any kind. Going along with this was, according to Céline, like a “premature ejaculation”, which was experienced as something real but ultimately could never come close to the truth of “the complexity of (sexual) love”. Great ideals were hypocrisy, which destroys interpersonal relations.

Whether it concerns weapons, raw materials, population or international alliances, Europe is in a losing position

In a key passage on the European significance of Céline’s thought, Magris focuses on this mendacious cover-up of premature ejaculation and introduces Céline’s expression “the lyric bidet.” Seated on that bidet, the lower body is cleansed with the cloudy water of the “great half-truths”. Cloudy water also washes the lower body clean. And so one can pretend that the act had actually been something real. According to Magris, this is the self-deception that infuriated Céline and that fits with “the collective consciousness, which does not want to overcome violence but does not want to face it either.”

The recent European division in the UN is an expression of a civilization that constantly frequents the ‘lyrical bidet’. A civilization that uses the lyricism of big words to disguise what is happening in reality. Europe’s international actions are not real actions, just as the passion it professes for the ideals on which it was built is no longer sincere. Europe pretends to fight for democracy. See how Ukrainian President Zelensky, fighting for Western values, recently summed it up: the West gives us enough weapons to survive, but not enough to win.

In the world outside Europe, our hypocrisy, especially regarding human rights, has been visible for some time. We can no longer afford to ignore this. If only because the large numbers in the same outside world are in no way to European advantage. Whether it concerns weapons, raw materials, population or international alliances, Europe is in a losing position. Europe now increasingly resembles a contemporary version of the papier-mâché court in Sigmaringen Castle in 1944.

In this geopolitical force field, Europe can only halt its own decline by uniting further and deeper. Here is the worrying news of the EU’s position in the UN for ourselves: we ourselves still do not recognize this. We would rather wash away our inner weakness on the lyrical bidet, to appease a majority among the domestic audience.

Turning the tide requires the realization that our European world is threatened and that this threat largely comes from within ourselves. As long as European government leaders and politicians unconcernedly and unchallengedly put the values ​​they say they stand for into perspective in their domestic politics for electoral reasons, the European position in today’s escalating foreign issues will remain a projection of weakness. In this way, the EU will continue – not in words, but in half-hearted actions – to promote a world order that is not its own, and in which it itself will ultimately perish. Because if anywhere the law of the strongest and the logic of the majority prevails, it is in international politics. And in that respect, our European society is the obvious loser in today’s world.

Only if Europe finds a way to defend the democratic constitutional state tooth and nail, will it have a real alternative to offer today’s rough world. That’s happened before. For us, the geopolitical frontline of our time runs through our own democracies and constitutional states. On that front, the Europe of cooperation must unite to have a chance in this century.

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