I was born in November 1991, a month before the Soviet Union disintegrated. At the time, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the European Union was gripped by the euphoria of the continent’s reunification. It seemed that the western model, upholding democracy and market economics, had triumphed over all others. Almost all the countries of central and eastern Europe – a chunk of the western world that had been kidnapped – expressed their determination to join the EU, as if it were some VIP club.
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was seen as a great “liberal”, a champion of opposition to Soviet power. Everyone watched American soap operas on television. Despite the wars in the Balkans that followed, we took it for granted that liberal democracy would spread all across the world.
As a child I spent the summer months in Normandy. On the D-day beaches we dug up bullets, the remains of an unreal, remote past, only found in books. Wars occurred “in the old days”.
Twenty-seven years on, our world seems to be falling apart. The twin towers collapsed long ago, plunging us into an era when progress has gone into reverse, and the political disintegration has coincided with major technical and cultural upheavals, and rising economic insecurity and inequality in the western world. Meanwhile, the “free” market has taken an autocratic turn and Brexit has wrecked the myth of a European integration process we thought irreversible. In the US, Donald Trump has taught us that truth is a very relative concept; and Orbán has led the debate on the rejection of Islam.
It would be a mistake to describe them as “nationalists”, as if this were just a new version of a 20th-century creed. In fact Orbán has no intention of quitting the EU. He wants to change it from the inside. Those obsessed with identity have set about constructing their own idea of Europe, the purpose of which is no longer to preserve peace but to protect a white, Christian European “civilisation” against other civilisations, primarily Islam. This new idea seeks to develop a pan-European political platform hinging on rejection of Muslim immigration and cultural liberalism. It would reduce EU institutions to moral authorities dedicated to preserving that very notion of a “European civilisation”.
A vision combining an allegiance to this civilisation and to nationhood has now spread among many rightwing and far-right parties – in Austria, Italy, Poland, Germany, Slovenia, the Netherlands and France. Young French far-right groups have gathered under the banner of Génération Identitaire (Generation Identity), an organisation that opposes “the Islamisation of Europe and mass immigration” and is the youth branch of the Identitaires political party.
Last winter its “Defend Europe” campaign brought it to the public attention: high in the snow-capped southern Alps, which they’d reached with the help of a private helicopter, young people in matching blue down jackets stood on the border between France and Italy and proclaimed: “NO WAY. You will not make Europe your home!”
Generation Identity has moved away from the traditional nationalism of the far right by aiming for a fully continental ambition. It casts itself as “a political movement for young people from all across Europe”.
Yet those who claim we’re heading for a “clash of civilisations” – as first popularised by Samuel Huntington – are taking us down a blind alley. There is no solution to such a clash, if it ever occurs. Nor is there any prospect of peace or prosperity in a strategy solely concerned with defending and preserving the supposed attributes of our identity.
So what comes after the cult of identity? What will survive, if we want it to, is our ability to talk to each other, all of us together with our roots and our vibrant culture. Huntington claimed that when ideologies disappear, culture will become the new battleground for politics. We in the west must engage with political ideas once more – but not by setting ourselves the goal of imagining some ideal city, nor by inventing new vindictive utopias.
Our task will be to forge a new universalism, no longer centred on western values, nor just on the economy, but one that preserves our world from ecological disaster and prevents civilisations from clashing. The immediate task, however, is to defend our democratic freedom, for it enables us to think as citizens and act as the children of history.
Let’s be honest: our feelings in the face of this rampant disorder have been mixed. Many young people are tempted by some form of blank slate: 46% of French people aged 18 to 35 think democracy is no better than autocracy. In our present disarray we may hear them murmuring, “This is a great victory. History is back with a bang.”
But does that mean everything must be reinvented and rebuilt? We need to start by understanding the world we’ve inherited. We need to find our own words to name it. Just looking at Europe, nothing could be more difficult, it seems. Its existence as a political project is in jeopardy. It has lost its bearings and any sense of the quest for an “ever closer union” – has run aground on the rocks of expansion into eastern Europe, and of Brexit. The overriding goal of peace no longer works as an incentive. The postwar European idea, proclaimed by the founding fathers of the European project, is dying.
In this vacuum – amid the clamour for greater protection and sovereignty – new ideas and dividing lines are emerging. In many countries the political rift that once divided Eurosceptics and pro-Europeans seems increasingly irrelevant, giving way to a new split over different concepts of the union itself. Right now, one such idea is making much more noise than the others, and it is advocated by Orbán and all those who endorse his discourse on identity.
Chloé Ridel is a French civil servant and a member of the Jean-Jaures Foundation in Paris.