Europe’s democracies face deeper problems than Brexit or the sometimes creaky, sometimes overbearing machinery of European governance, argues George Weigel, the Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy. Writing for the National Review, he identifies the real threats to Europe in these first decades of the 21st century, beginning with the external environment and then moving “inwards”:
One. Vladimir Putin, the president/czar/dictator of Russia, has made unmistakably clear that he intends to reverse the verdict rendered by history in 1989 and 1991, reconstituting Stalin’s internal and external empires and reasserting Russia’s predominant influence on the Continent. That he masks this neo-imperial ambition in the guise of the bizarre ideology of “Eurasianism” — when he isn’t proclaiming himself, even more weirdly, the paladin of Christian civilization and “traditional” values — is of less consequence than the massive propaganda and disinformation campaigns he is currently conducting, in a new form of war against the West…
Two. American indifference to Europe is at its highest level since the 1920s and 1930s — and everyone knows, or should know, how that spasm of isolationism turned out. …
Internal Threats
Three. Postmodern high culture’s insouciance about the intellectual and moral foundations of the West has magnified a crisis of civilizational confidence throughout Europe. The false claim that the roots of democracy run no deeper in the cultural subsoil of Europe than the Enlightenment has hollowed out Europe’s understanding of its own worth…
Four. The failure of the European Union’s leadership to respond to Brexit with anything other than disdain bespeaks an unwillingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of British concerns about the EU’s democracy deficit, which were one significant factor in the pro-Brexit vote…
Five. Europe is now deep into demographic winter, with below-replacement-level total fertility rates the norm across the EU (and among its aspirants). …..
Boell Stiftung
Six. New forms of populism that seem to have forgotten the lessons of the mid 20th century have destabilized European democracies old and new. These developments mirror a disturbing lack of confidence in democracy, and an even more disturbing willingness to embrace various forms of authoritarianism, in the “millennial” generation throughout the West. …
Seven. The rise of this new populism has been paralleled by an equally troubling phenomenon: the inability of many European elites to grasp the meaning of the enduring attachments to tradition (including religious tradition), family, and national community that have found an expression in populist insurgencies. …
Eight. The internal threats may be summed up in what has been called the Böckenförde Dilemma, first articulated by the German legal theorist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde in the mid 1970s: The modern, secular liberal-democratic state rests on a foundation of moral and cultural premises — on a fund of social capital — that it cannot itself generate. ….
“All of this does have a certain 1930s feel about it. If that low decade and its results are not to be replicated in the third decade of this century, the politically correct veto on discussing these eight threats to Europe must be ignored and thus rejected, and a lot more serious attention to these challenges is going to be required in Old and New Europe alike.”.
