Today I want to take a tour of Europe, but I propose to start as Marco Polo: traveling to distant Cathay. In February of this year and as a cynical preamble to the invasion of Ukraine, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin signed a common document in Beijing offering themselves as model of true democracy for the rest of the world. Cynicism is old as man, but there is something new in this modality: they try to appropriate democracy, an ancient European invention developed (and overwhelmed) in and by the western world, at the same time that they attack with weapons and baggage – not at all metaphorical in Ukraine – the culture and values product of that same democracy.
It is quite a novelty that the worst dictatorships want to pass themselves off as true and exemplary democracies; it is useless to look for it in Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” or Mussolini’s “corporate state”.. Meanwhile, in Western democracies, both attacked and falsely imitated, the most brutal illiberal populisms proliferate, from American Wokism to Europhobic supremacist nationalisms. And there are governments, like Sánchez’s, dedicated to demolishing the rule of law without which it is impossible to speak of any democracy. If Putin and Xi Jinping are two dangerous cynics, ours is privileged stupid, blind and self-conscious.
We depend on the United States for defence, energy and technological innovation, as the ongoing war has been responsible for revalidating
Talking about the ills of Europe is already almost a cliché, but it has its reasons: although it could be much worse (as bad as between 1914 and 1945) we are not going through our best moment. Except as a market and compared to the United States and China, Europe is a second order power, and only thanks to the relative unity of the countries of the European Union. putin shocked our fearful and blind elites, we fear China but allow it to buy strategic European ports, and we depend on the United States for defense, energy and technological innovation, as the ongoing war has revalidated. Everything indicates that we are a rentier continent that lives on its glorious past and insecure about its future (a dependent continent, as The Economist explains).
This is somewhat embarrassing on the continent where some of the major socio-cultural advances of the last 2,500 years have taken place in science, philosophy, politics, and the arts, including the separation of church and state, globalization, democracy, human rights, Enlightenment, capitalism and the industrial and scientific-technical revolutions, without forgetting the “western” arts and competitive sports.
Yes Qatar wants to strengthen its geopolitical role, it does not organize dromedary races, but buys the World Cup. If soccer, the modern novel and positive law ceased to be exclusively Western a long time ago, it is precisely because they have a universal human value; if they were mere idiosyncratic peculiarities of a minor continent (like Hindu castes, Muslim Sharia, or Confucianism) they would not have been adopted or developed outside of Europe.
The greatest European sin has been the invention and export of the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, designed to crush liberal democracy.
It is true that these wonders have been accompanied by horrors such as imperialism and slavery, supremacism and racism, fanaticism and genocide, but none of these works of the worst reverse of human inventiveness have been exclusively ours. The greatest European sin has been the invention and export of 20th century totalitarianisms, designed to crush liberal democracy, and now postmodernist intellectual and educational stupidity; in the rest, the authorship is very distributed.
The globalized world has adopted a civilization of Western origin – that of soccer, democracy and high culture – shared by cultures as different as the Arabs, Indians and Orientals, and the Latin Americans with their mestizo originality. This civilization has been enriched and opened up with crossbreeding and foreign hybridizations that have led the Orientals to dress and live in cities like ours and we now often eat like them and admire their art of living and understanding nature. Europe’s great contribution to the world is that highly adaptable civilization that is already global, that has democracy as its horizon and that allows people to live in very similar ways without ceasing to be Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or indifferent.
The homage of vice to virtue
Xi Jinping and Putin persecute and kill, but in public they pretend to accept human rights because the world would not accept otherwise. Is the valuable homage of hypocrisy to virtue. When the admirable Iranian demonstrators who are risking their lives against the theocratic dictatorship of the ayatollahs demand equality of the sexes and political freedom with separation of religious and political powers, they demand ideas born and developed in Europe, and they know it perfectly well. They want to live like us without ceasing to be themselves, like those undocumented African immigrants who star in incredible epics trying to live in Europe. The loss of meaning and value of these political and social conquests is a rather Western phenomenon, something of childish privileged people.
But being imitated should not increase European self-sufficiency, the cause of so many current problems. Let’s see an example: when Elon Musk bought Twitter, the European Commission celebrated the news by warning that Musk would have to comply with European rules to remain in the Union. It was missing more, but in Brussels it should worry about why it is not the headquarters of a single great digital technology such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon or Twitter, nor like the Chinese TikTok or Alibaba. However, computing was born in Europe, like Nokia mobile telephony, another lost leadership. The question is not how to enforce the copious and often paralyzing European regulations, but why we have become users and buyers of other people’s advances. We live on the income left by our ancestors; we run the risk of ending up being the luxury theme park for the rest of the world, fascinated by fashion, wines, European landscapes and cities, and little else.
Abandoning the best traditions of innovation and risk to take refuge in a paternalistic-bureaucratic asylum, Europe has no choice but to entrust its threatened protection and prosperity to third parties. This too is a hypocritical vice. Our problems are sclerosis, bureaucratization and self-absorption in discomfort. Quite the opposite of what made Europe the global laboratory of the world, namely, the union of material and educational progress with social and political progress, of freedom with creativity. The future of Europe and democracy depends on understanding it and acting accordingly.
