Liberal values in Europe face a challenge “not seen since the 1930s,” leading intellectuals from 21 countries have said, as the UK lurches toward Brexit and nationalists look set to make sweeping gains in EU parliamentary elections.
The group of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates said in a manifesto published in several newspapers, including the Guardian, that Europe as an idea was “coming apart before our eyes.”
“We must now will Europe or perish beneath the waves of populism,” the document read. “We must rediscover political voluntarism or accept that resentment, hatred and their cortege of sad passions will surround and submerge us.”
Illustration: Mountain People
They wrote of their regret that Europe had been “abandoned from across the Channel” — an oblique reference to the drawn-out Brexit process that has arguably brought Anglo-European relations to their lowest point since World War II.
Unless efforts are made to combat a rising tide of populism, the EU elections will be “the most calamitous that we have ever known: victory for the wreckers; disgrace for those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe and Comenius; disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster,” they said.
“Abandoned from across the Channel and from across the Atlantic by the two great allies who in the previous century saved it twice from suicide; vulnerable to the increasingly overt manipulations of the master of the Kremlin, Europe as an idea, as will and representation, is coming apart before our eyes,” the text read.
The 800-word paean was drafted by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy. Signatories included the novelists Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, the historian Simon Schama and Nobel prize laureates Svetlana Alexievitch, Herta Muller, Orhan Pamuk and Elfriede Jelinek.
“Europe is in greater danger now than at any time in the last 70 years, and if one believes in that idea it’s time to stand up and be counted,” Rushdie said.
“In the UK, I hope parliament may yet have the courage to call for a second referendum. That could rescue the country from the calamity of Brexit and go a long way towards rescuing the EU as well,” he said.
McEwan said he had signed the manifesto, because he was “very pessimistic” about the current moment, “but try to be hopeful that the zeitgeist will turn.”
Pamuk said the idea of Europe was also important to non-Western countries.
“Without the idea of Europe, freedom, women’s rights, democracy, egalitarianism is hard to defend in my part of the world,” he said.
“There is no Europe besides these values except the Europe of tourism and business. Europe is not a geography first, but these ideas. This idea of Europe is under attack,” he said.
In the EU elections in May — the first that will not include Britain — most observers predict a rise in support for populist, nationalist or anti-immigration parties. Many of them have made significant gains in national elections, as the center-right and center-left that have traditionally dominated Europe’s postwar politics retreat.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of the far-right League has described the vote as a straight choice between “the Europe of the elites, banks, finance, immigration and precarious work,” and that of “the people and of labor,” pledging to form a Euroskeptic “Italian-Polish axis.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said the elections are a chance to bid farewell “to liberal democracy.”
Unlike Euroskeptics in the UK, most European counterparts do not want to leave the EU, but to take it over.
Leading the charge against the resurgent rightwing populists are French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. While both have been weakened by domestic problems, last week they renewed their countries’ vows of postwar friendship and warned the lessons of their bloody past were being forgotten.
EU officials in Brussels believe it is possible there will be a decisive advance for the populists and gains for pro-European parties, or at least a confusing mix of the two, leaving the populists significantly stronger, but still facing a strong, if disunited, majority of pro-European members of the European Parliament.
The net result is likely to be a far more complex parliamentary makeup, delicate coalition-
building and a European parliament increasingly unable to pass legislation to deal with major challenges, such as immigration and eurozone reform.
While they did not make any practical calls to action, the manifesto’s signatories said they “refuse to resign themselves to this looming catastrophe.”
They counted themselves among the “too quiet” European patriots who understand that “three-quarters of a century after the defeat of fascism and 30 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, a new battle for civilization is under way.”
Despite its “mistakes, lapses and occasional acts of cowardice,” Europe remains “the second home of every free man and woman on the planet,” they said, noting with regret the widely held, but mistaken belief of their generation that “the continent would come together on its own, without our labor.”
Pro-Europeans “no longer have a choice,” they said. “We must sound the alarm against the arsonists of soul and spirit that, from Paris to Rome, with stops in Barcelona, Budapest, Dresden, Vienna, or Warsaw, are playing with the fire of our freedoms.”
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