Subsequently, that padding got increasingly worn away, and it was only then that I and many others really, fully understood the true meaning of “1989” beyond the obvious.
Nevertheless, the past thirty years of the European history have not always been as hopeful. In fact, the reality is that Europe is in decline in terms of their reproduction rate, defense spending as well as their weight in the global economy. What did in your view lead to this decline over the decades?
As a matter of fact, I’m quite open to the idea that decline is only half the story. If we adjust our perspective in line with my favorite philosopher, Nietzsche, it is quite conceivable that what we experience as decline is really a metahistorical shift rather than sheer destruction. Back in his day, Nietzsche attributed the decline he perceived to an all-powerful nihilism permeating and destroying Western culture and civilization from within. But he wasn’t a pessimist! Once we hit bottom, he said, we’ll actually overcome that nihilism and enter a new era, a new paradigm. The most interesting implication of his argument is that what appears as the destruction of our heritage may, at the same time, constitute the very growth of that new paradigm, whose outline we cannot discern yet but which carries all the historical substance previously contained in our Western traditions. – Now, this is a very protracted answer to a simple question, but I’ve always felt that there’s much more to history than what meets the eye. And my guess is that, if Nietzsche was right, that new paradigm will be heavily informed by technology. Actually, this is what another of my favorite thinkers, Ernst Jünger, predicts.
We need that kind of optimism as it seems that the European integration has been experiencing a decade long crises: the financial crises, the migration crises, the loss of one of its key Member States, and now the devastation of the pandemic with its terrible health and economic consequences. Some of the times it seems that EU wish to solve all the problems of the world but ends up being unable to help its own Member States. How would you assess the responses to the crises as well as the overall operation of the European Union?
It seems to me that since the Maastricht Treaty, the EU has shown a tragic propensity to put carts before horses. Take political integration. What the EU institutions should have done is encourage and support – with a very light touch! – multilateral cooperation between sovereign members states. Such cooperation would then lead to the growth of common interests and common values which would ultimately, at its own speed, become an ever-sounder basis for deepening political integration. – Instead, the EU has done exactly the opposite. It went to the drawing board to devise what it supposed were “European values” and “European interests”, forcing them down members states’ throats and hoping they may somehow catch on and become a basis for political integration. But they didn’t catch on, and, thus, the EU remains incapable of actually acting politically – as opposed to bureaucratically – which becomes particularly evident in emergencies such as the Covid crisis.