When life allows, I often spend Sunday afternoons catching up on reading (I never keep up with all my subscriptions) and, as I did today, flipping through the “archives.” I’ve failed in my aspiration to scribble routinely, but over the years I was a diligent chronicler of periods in my life I knew would be both meaningful and transitory. I was away in service for much of my daughter’s first year, and although I regret that to this day, the journal I kept at the time (written to her, should fate have prevented me from seeing her grow up) is quite dear to me. Another well-chronicled chapter of my life was the period of my adolescence when I lived Germany – West Germany, to be specific. As I flipped through the pages, the entry on October 19, 1988 specifically caught my attention – the day I first visited East Berlin.
My thoughts this afternoon are less about the details of the experience and more about how it and others served to construct my worldview. Since those Cold War days, I have been an Atlanticist as a matter of temperament. I have spent a not insignificant portion of my life in Europe, both as an adolescent and later in life professionally. I’ve at least stepped foot in a large plurality of the countries generally understood as constituting Europe, and to this day feel myself indebted to the Western cannon. Although later in life some of the fecklessness I saw emerge in European political culture frankly annoyed me, I never fundamentally questioned the foundational nature of the importance of our relationship with Europe or its place in the global order.
It's difficult to pinpoint the time when that fecklessness drifted into seemingly deliberate failure. Whatever autopilot this class was able to rely on seems to have been fatally disrupted by the mass immigration caused by the Arab Spring and associated collapses of Libya and Syria. The European political class can hem and haw about the dangers of emergent populist movements in their politics, but the reality is these movements were predictable creations of these elites’ own policies. Their reaction of choice – attempting to hold the proverbial beach ball under water will no doubt end with the predictable eruption of force that occurs once that beach ball slips your grasp.
Back in 2011, many Arab governments were facing what felt to be an inevitable tidal wave of support for Islamist parties, threatening to overturn the established regional order. Most chose the same method European leaders seem to have chosen today – hold the beach ball under as long as you can. But King Mohamed 6 of Morocco chose a different path – he brought the Islamist PJD into government and with that, immediately removed the air from that proverbial beach ball. Now part of the “problem,” the PJD later suffered the same electoral defeats establishment parties had suffered under the barrage of the PJD’s criticism.
I can’t help but feel that the European establishment (perhaps more accurately, the western European establishment) is on a collision course with reality. They’re drifting toward overt repression to keep populist parties out of government, cobbling together coalitions that will only hasten or even amplify their collapse. They’re pathologically attached to energy policies that make their vision of rearmament and industrial renaissance a near fantastical delusion. They’re doing nothing to repair the frayed social consensus that pushed them to this precipice in the first place.
Back to East Berlin in 1988, reading my journal today I can vividly relive that euphoric buzz I felt about a year later when the Wall fell and communism collapsed in the East. And with that buzz, the optimism most of us felt about the European project in general. Of course I was young at the time, and as optimism so often is, a lot of this was always aspirational. But to think that well within one lifetime, we’ve experienced both revival and decline is dizzying.