The battle for Europe's soul may be lost – the fight against the populists will be about starting afresh

Europe lies in the great pincers between America and Russia who both want to dismember it. The problem is how to remain faithful to the continent’s emancipatory legacy

Earlier this month, a group of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates – including Bernard-Henri Lévy, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosa and Adam Michnik – published a manifesto in several newspapers all around Europe. They claimed that Europe as an idea is “coming apart before our eyes”.

“We must now fight for the idea of Europe or see it perish beneath the waves of populism,” they wrote. “We must rediscover political voluntarism or accept that resentment, hatred and their cortege of sad passions will surround and submerge us.”

This manifesto is deeply flawed: just carefully reading it makes it clear why populists are thriving. Its signatories – the flower of the European liberal intelligensia – ignore the unpleasant fact that the populists also present themselves as the saviours of Europe.

In July last year, just after attending a stormy meeting with EU leaders, Donald Trump spoke of the European Union as the first in the line of “foes” of the US, ahead of Russia and China. There was a rush to condemn this claim as irrational (“Trump is treating the allies of the US worse than its enemies,” etc.); instead we should ask some simple questions. What bothers Trump so much about EU? Which Europe is Trump talking about?

When he was asked by journalists about immigrants flowing into Europe, Trump answered as befits the anti-immigrant populist that he is: immigrants are tearing apart the fabric of European ways of life; they pose a danger to European spiritual identity. In short, it was people like Hungary’s Orban or Italy’s Salvini who were talking through him. One should never forget that they also want to defend Europe.

So which Europe is it that bothers Trump as well as the European populists?

It is the Europe of transnational unity, the Europe vaguely aware that, in order to cope with the challenges of our moment, we should move beyond the constraints of nation-states. It is the Europe which also desperately strives to somehow remain faithful to the old Enlightenment motto of solidarity with victims, the Europe that is aware of the fact that humanity is today One, that we are all on the same boat (or, as we say, on the same Spaceship Earth). The Europe that believes another’s misery is also our problem.

We should mention here Peter Sloterdijk who noted that the struggle today is how to secure the survival of modern Europe's greatest economico-political achievement, the social democratic welfare state.

According to Sloterdijk, our reality is – in Europe, at least – “objective social democracy” as opposed to “subjective” social democracy: one should distinguish between social democracy as the panoply of political parties, and social democracy as the “formula of a system”.

In a 2009 article, Sloterdijk wrote that the social-democratic formula “precisely describes the political-economic order of things, which is defined by the modern state as the state of taxes, as infrastructure-state, as the state of the rule of law and, not last, as the social state and the therapy state.”

“We encounter everywhere a phenomenal and a structural social democracy, a manifest and a latent one, one which appears as a party and another one which is more or less irreversibly built into in the very definitions, functions, and procedures of the modern statehood as such.”

This Idea that underlies united Europe got corrupted, half-forgotten, and it is only in a moment of danger that we are compelled to return to this essential dimension of Europe, to its hidden potential.

Europe lies in the great pincers between America on the one side and Russia on the other who both want to dismember it: both Trump and Vladimir Putin support Brexit, they support eurosceptics in every corner, from Poland to Italy.

What is bothering them about Europe when we all know the misery of the EU which fails again and again at every test: from its inability to enact a consistent politics about immigrants to its miserable reaction to Trump’s tariff war?

It is obviously not this actually-existing Europe that rankles but the idea of Europe that rekindles against all odds and becomes palpable in moments of danger. The problem for Europe is how to remain faithful to its emancipatory legacy when it is threatened by the conservative-populist onslaught. So how is that to be done?

In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, the great conservative T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is what has to be done today: the only way to really defeat populists and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy is to perform a sectarian split from liberal democracy’s main corpse. Sometimes, in other words, the only way to resolve a conflict is not to search for a compromise but to radicalise one’s position.

Back to the letter of the 30 liberal luminaries: what they refuse to admit is that the Europe whose disappearance they deplore is already irretrievably lost. The threat does not come from populism: populism is merely a reaction to the failure of Europe’s liberal establishment to remain faithful to Europe’s emancipatory potential, offering a false way out of ordinary people’s troubles. So the only way to really defeat populism is to submit the liberal establishment itself, its actual politics, to a ruthless critique from the standpoint of that "social-democratic formula" that the establishment betrayed in its neo-liberal turn.

This does not mean that we can simply return to the good old "welfare state" times: the only way to resuscitate the "formula" for Europe is to reinvent it in a much more radical form, a form that fits today's predicament with its new ecological and social challenges. The only way to redeem what is worth saving from the past is to move forward.