30 World-Famous Intellectuals Publish an Open Letter: Save "Europe" From Mortal Danger

"Three-quarters of a century after fascism was defeated, thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, a new war of civilizations has begun."

On January 25, 2019, 30 world-famous intellectuals from 21 countries published an open letter in the French newspaper Libération titled Fight for Europe – or the Wreckers Will Destroy It. It appeared in French, English, German, Russian, Turkish, Polish, Hebrew, Arabic and other languages.

The idea of Europe, they wrote, is in mortal danger, with criticism, insults and abandonment pouring in from every direction. The European Union and liberal democratic values now face their gravest challenge and crisis since the 1930s — the decade when fascism rose.

"Unless something changes, unless some decisive act turns the tide, unless a new spirit of struggle takes hold, we will face a disastrous election result. Those with ill intent will have triumphed, while those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe and Comenius will have nothing but shameful defeat. If political forces that hold intellect and culture in contempt prevail, the disaster of xenophobia and antisemitism is upon us," the open letter says.

The letter was drafted by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. The other signatories include the French writer Milan Kundera, the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the British writers Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek and the German writer Herta Müller, among others.

Britain's Guardian and other outlets reprinted the letter. The Guardian also interviewed three of the co-signers: Rushdie, McEwan and Pamuk.

Rushdie said: "Europe is in its worst crisis in 70 years. If we believe in the European Union and in the idea of liberal democracy, now is the time to stand up and say so in public. I hope the British parliament has the courage to call a second referendum. That would not only end the disaster of Brexit, it would help save the EU."

McEwan said he is deeply pessimistic about the moment but still hopeful that the spirit of the times can be turned, which is why he signed the manifesto.

Pamuk said the idea of Europe matters just as much to non-Western countries. "Without the idea of Europe, values such as freedom, women's rights, democracy and equality would be much harder to defend anywhere else in the world. Europe's historical success makes it easier for us to defend ideas and values that are vital to people everywhere. Without them, Europe would be reduced to tourism and commerce. Europe is not only a geographical concept; it is first of all a collection of ideas. And right now the idea of Europe is in crisis."

According to The New York Times, Lévy called populism a "smokescreen for a new fascism" in an interview and said the co-signers were bound by a shared love of Europe. Europe is in a state of emergency, he said, and they are afraid.

The co-signers, Lévy added, embody the soul of Europe. They hope to move the public to act before the European Parliament elections in May 2019, and refuse to surrender to the gravediggers. From March to May, Lévy planned to travel to cities across Europe to make his case and sway more voters.

As Lévy said, the manifesto is aimed squarely at the European Parliament elections to be held in May 2019. They will also be the first such elections since Brexit, with more than 500 million EU voters expected to choose members of the European Parliament. The Parliament is the EU's only directly elected body, and together with the Council of the European Union it forms one of the bloc's main decision-making institutions.

By another New York Times count, Europe faces 14 elections in 2019, the European Parliament vote included. That makes 2019 a decisive year for European democracy.

But if you have followed international news in recent years, you already know that populism and nationalism are surging worldwide, that politics is deeply polarized, and that liberal democracy is in crisis in many countries. Plenty of observers therefore expect parties that push populism, nationalism and opposition to immigration to gain ground in these European Parliament elections. Such parties have already won victories, large or small, at home, while the established centrist parties mostly look tired.

The trend is usually dated to 2016, the year of the Brexit vote and Donald Trump's election as U.S. president. Related events have piled up ever since.

In Britain, Brexit is deadlocked: on January 21, 2019, Prime Minister Theresa May submitted a fallback plan after her withdrawal agreement was voted down. In Germany, on January 13, 2019, the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) voted through a manifesto saying that because its demands to reform the EU had been ignored, it would push for Germany to leave the EU at the May elections. In France, anger at the government's plan to speed up fuel-tax increases from January 2019 set off the "yellow vest" movement in Paris in November 2018, throwing both Emmanuel Macron's rule and French democracy into crisis. More recently, yellow vest protesters have been putting together campaign teams to run in May. Harder to ignore than the yellow vests is the rival Macron once beat, Marine Le Pen. According to Agence France-Presse, a poll by the Elabe institute found that if the vote were held today, the yellow vests would come third, President Macron's party La République En Marche first, and second place would go to National Rally, the far-right party formerly known as the National Front and led by Le Pen.

Or take Gideon Rachman, a columnist at the Financial Times, who wrote in Populism's Darkest Hour? that populism is now a global phenomenon. From Brasília to Budapest, from Rome to Manila, populist politicians hold power. The 2018 elections in Italy and Brazil stand out: a major Western European country and Latin America's largest country are now both governed by populist parties. If the League, led by Italy's leading populist figure, Matteo Salvini, does well in the May elections, he could call a snap national election and turn the party into Italy's dominant political force.

Rachman also warned that left-wing populism deserves as much attention in 2019 as the right-wing kind. "Cultural issues drive right-wing populism. Left-wing populism, meanwhile, will keep stressing minority rights and economic factors. For left-wing populists, the coming year could be a fruitful one," he wrote.

The wider crisis of liberal democracy offers many more examples: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Ali Khamenei in Iran, and so on.

Then there is this: in Slovakia and Malta, investigative reporters digging into corruption at the top of government have been assassinated one after another, and neither murder has been solved; in Austria, the far-right Freedom Party, part of the governing coalition, has been accused of purging a government agency; in Spain, more than 20 Catalan politicians could face long prison sentences on charges of "rebellion."

On November 11, 2018, at the ceremony in Paris marking a century since the World War I armistice, UN Secretary-General António Guterres sounded a similar note: "To me, many elements of today have a lot in common with the early 20th century and the 1930s, and that gives us reason to fear that a series of unpredictable events could happen."

This wave of thinking has drawn plenty of explanations and prescriptions. In The Great Regression, for instance, a group of intellectuals argue that it is the joint product of a crisis of globalization and a crisis of neoliberalism: problems created by the lack of political regulation over global interdependence, running into societies that are unprepared for them institutionally and culturally. The American writer John Judis, in The Populist Explosion, sets populism apart from fascism and argues that for all its faults it works as an early warning of crisis, exposing the cracks in accepted political wisdom. Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton University, wrote in the essay What Can We Learn From "Cold War Liberalism"? that today's liberals need to give up the illusion that "historical progress is inevitable," and can learn from the liberals of the Cold War, who held that conflict within democratic procedure is legitimate and that such conflict safeguards freedom — provided it stays faithful to the spirit of human dignity.

Back to Europe, where a lot of people really are unhappy with the EU. In June 2018, the latest survey from Eurobarometer, the European Commission's official polling arm, found that across the 34 European countries surveyed (28 EU member states and five candidate countries), most respondents in 13 EU countries did not trust the EU. Distrust was highest in Greece (69%), Britain (57%) and the Czech Republic (56%). Most Europeans (45%) thought the EU was moving in the wrong direction, against only 31% who thought its direction was right. Greece (65%), Belgium (56%) and the Czech Republic (54%) had the largest shares of respondents who said the EU was going the wrong way.

Yang Yunzhen, a researcher at Tongji University's Center for German Studies, wrote after analyzing the survey: "At the level of national governments, political debate is full of fierce anti-EU rhetoric. Criticism of the EU has taken root in the political groups of the European Parliament. In the 2014 European Parliament election, the far right was the biggest winner. Today, almost every transnational group in the Parliament contains extremist parties. … Even as the EU does everything it can to win over young voters, 63% of respondents believe new parties and movements can find better solutions than the parties now in office."

On top of that, many European voters are not keen to turn out at all, and many people worry that this is exactly what gives the more extreme voters their opening, helping far-right and populist parties to higher support.

So, as these 30 intellectuals see it, this is the moment to get the public to care about the question and to defend Europe and liberal democratic values through the European Parliament vote.

Salvini said the May elections are a choice between elites, bankers, financiers, immigration and precarious work on one side and working people on the other, and that he would form a Euroskeptic "Italy-Poland axis" with Poland. Orbán, another leading populist, said the vote is Europe's chance to say goodbye to liberal democracy. It should be said that not every populist wants to leave the EU; some claim they love it too and simply want it to go in a different direction.

Macron and Angela Merkel criticized the populists, and this week restated the postwar friendship between Germany and France, warning against forgetting its bloody lessons. EU officials in Brussels believe that both populist and pro-EU parties could win this election, or at least that both could make gains, which would leave the populists stronger — though they would still face a powerful pro-EU majority in the Parliament, provided those members hold together. The likely result is a more complicated parliament, more delicate coalition-building, and a European Parliament ever less able to pass laws to meet big challenges such as immigration and eurozone reform.

The 30 intellectuals who signed the letter call themselves the true lovers of Europe and want the public to fight for it. "Under attack from nationalists and identitarians, we must recover the spirit of activism, or we will be submerged in resentment and hatred. It is urgent that we sound the alarm against the arsonists of soul and spirit, rampaging from Paris to Rome, stopping in Barcelona, Budapest, Dresden, Vienna and Warsaw, brandishing the torches with which they seek to burn freedom down," the letter says.

And yet, as the historian Tony Judt warned in A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe: "If the European Union is treated as a cure-all, if the name of 'Europe' is chanted like an incantation and its banner brandished before the unrepentant heretics of 'nationalism' with cries of 'Repent, repent!', then one day we will find that the myth of 'Europe' not only fails to solve the continent's problems but blocks our understanding of them. We will find that the politically correct course has come to mean little more than papering over local difficulties, as though invoking the promise of Europe could by itself resolve real problems and crises on the ground. … 'Europe' is more than a geographical notion — but it is not an answer either."

Appendix: The Full Text of the 30 Intellectuals' Open Letter

Fight for Europe – or the Wreckers Will Destroy It

The idea of Europe is in mortal danger.

Criticism, insults and abandonment are pouring in from every direction.

They cry: "Enough of 'building Europe'!" "Let us reconnect with our national soul!" "Let us recover our lost identity!" These populist proposals have spread across the whole continent, even though hollow notions such as "national soul" and "identity" exist mostly in the imaginations of ill-intentioned politicians.

Europe is under attack from false prophets, deranged by bitterness, who seize every chance to preach their nonsense. Britain and America, our two great allies, twice saved Europe from tearing itself apart in the last century. Now we find ourselves abandoned by them. The continent has fallen so easily prey to the Kremlin's ever more brazen interference, and the idea of Europe is coming apart before our eyes.

That is the political climate the EU finds itself in ahead of this May's election. Unless something changes, unless some decisive act turns the tide, unless a new spirit of struggle takes hold, we will face a disastrous election result. Those with ill intent will have triumphed, while those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe and Comenius will have nothing but shameful defeat. If political forces that hold intellect and culture in contempt prevail, the disaster of xenophobia and antisemitism is upon us.

We, the undersigned, speak for those who refuse to bow before this looming catastrophe.

We consider ourselves the true lovers of Europe — a group larger than we imagine, though its members tend to choose silence and quiet — and we know full well the harm that silence can do. Three-quarters of a century after fascism was defeated, thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, a new war of civilizations has begun.

We inherit our convictions from those great ideas, and we are certain they remain a force strong enough to lift the peoples of Europe above themselves and above a past scarred by war. We believe that the forces which once resisted the darkness of totalitarianism can resist its new traces today. Europe hangs by a thread, and we cannot give up.

So this is an invitation from a new wave.

So we call for action on the eve of the election, and refuse to surrender to the gravediggers of the European idea.

So we raise once more the torch that carries the spirit of Europe — a spirit that has made mistakes, suffered failures and shown occasional cowardice, but that remains a beacon for every man and woman who believes in freedom.

Our generation was wrong. Like Garibaldi's followers in the 19th century, we repeated the prayer "Italia se farà da sè" (Italy will make itself). We believed the continent would knit itself together with no need to fight for it and no need to work at it. We told ourselves this was simply "the direction of history."

We must break with that stale idea. We have no choice. We must now fight for the idea of the European Union, or it will die in the tide of populism.

Under attack from nationalists and identitarians, we must recover the spirit of activism, or we will be submerged in resentment and hatred. It is urgent that we sound the alarm against the arsonists of soul and spirit, rampaging from Paris to Rome, stopping in Barcelona, Budapest, Dresden, Vienna and Warsaw, brandishing the torches with which they seek to burn freedom down.

In this strange defeat of "Europe," a crisis of the continent's collapsing moral sense is already on the horizon, one that will destroy everything that once made our societies great, glorious and prosperous. The biggest crisis since the 1930s has arrived: a challenge to liberal democratic values.

The full names of the signatories of "Fight for Europe" (in the order given in the original letter):

Greek-French writer Vassilis Alexakis;

Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich;

American-Polish writer Anne Applebaum;

Danish writer Jens Christian Grøndahl;

Israeli writer David Grossman;

Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller;

Albanian writer Ismaïl Kadaré;

Hungarian writer György Konrád;

Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes;

Italian literary critic Claudio Magris;

British writer Ian McEwan;

Polish historian Adam Michnik;

German writer Herta Müller;

Russian writer Ludmila Oulitskaïa;

Dutch philosopher Rob Riemen;

Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater;

Italian journalist Roberto Saviano;

Italian politician and journalist Eugenio Scalfari;

British historian Simon Schama;

German writer Peter Schneider;

Writer Abdulah Sidran of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina;

French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani;

Irish writer Colm Tóibín;

Spanish-Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa;

Polish writer Adam Zagajewski

Cover image: The European Union Is About To Explode. (Photo: William Murphy/Streets Of Dublin/CC); long-form header image via: Wikipedia.