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No more war on terror: Europe needs 'de-Nazification'
There is a claim circulating in the EU that âmulticulturalism is dead in Europeâ
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There is a claim circulating in the EU that 'multiculturalism is dead in Europe'. Dead or dreaded? It's as if the cluster of European nation-states lived a long, cordial and credible history of multiculturalism. This claim and its resonating debate are false and cynical.
No wonder, as the EU has silently handed over one of its most important debates ' that of European antifascist identity, or otherness ' to wing parties. This was repeatedly followed by the EU's selective, counterproductive foreign policy actions.
The terrible Paris shootings will reload and overheat those debates. However, these debates start on completely wrong and misleading premises of 'terrorism, terror!' But terror is a tactic, not an ideology. How can one conduct and win a war on tactics?
Merely to win would need larger budgets for homeland security apparatus at the expense of our freedoms and liberties, like before. The January assassins at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine as well as those of Nov. 12 are 'Islamofascists'.
That these individuals allegedly included, again, those of Arab-Muslim origin, does not make them less fascist, less European, nor does it abolish Europe from the main responsibility in this case. How we define that challenge will answer whether we live the real democracy or are blinded by the formal one.
Fascism and its evil twin, Nazism, are 100 percent European ideologies. Neo-Nazism also originates from Europe and lately has blossomed unchecked, primarily in Europe. Some would call today an über-economy in the center of a continent, surrounded by neo-fascism.
How else to explain that the post-World War II come-and-help-our-recovery slogan, Gastarbeiter willkommen ('guest workers welcome'), has become an Auslander Raus (foreigners out) roar in only two decades. Suddenly, our national purifiers shout 'stop überfremdung ('over-foreignization') of the EU ' as if it does not always end up in self-barbarization.
In response, the marginalized 'foreigners' are calling for the creation of gastarbeiterpartie. Indeed, the first political parties of guest workers started in Austria, with similar calls in Germany, France and the Netherlands. We should know by now, how the diverting of mounting socioeconomic discontent and generational disfranchising through ethnoengineering will end up.
The old continent tried to amortize its deepening economic and demographic contraction by constant interference on its peripheries ' the Balkans, Caucasus and the Middle East'North Africa (MENA). Today's epilogue? A severe democratic recession.
Who is to blame for Europe's structural civilizational retreat? Is it accurate or only convenient to accuse a bunch of useful idiots for returning home with combative behavior and homegrown anger of the misused?
Notables like Umberto Eco and Kishore Mahbubani appealed for moderation and dialogue, and an end to supporting and promoting ethnofascism in the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine. This advice was and still is silenced or ignored. Conversely, what the EU nurtured and cherished with its councils, boots and humanitarian aid starting from Bosnia 25 years ago, the Middle East, until today's Ukraine, was less of a constructive strategic engagement and lasting compromise, but more of a history-rewriting cult of destruction, exclusion and fascism.
The European temple of multiculturalism, Sarajevo, was besieged for 1,000 days ' all that just a one-hour flight from Brussels. Still, 20 years after falling victim to genocide, Bosnia remains the only UN member that does not exercise its sovereignty, administrated by the retrograde international bureaucracy.
Cradles of multiculturalism like Jerusalem, Baghdad and Damascus still suffer horrors of externally induced destruction and perpetuated purges.
Claims of the European political system or even its historic perspective do not hold water anymore.
There is no lasting peace at home if the neighborhood remains restless. Ask Americans living at the Mexican border, or Turks next to Syria. The horrific Paris massacre is yet another a painful reminder of how much the EU has already isolated itself.
Europe promoted in the Middle East and Africa everything but the stability and prosperity of its own post-World War II socioeconomic model. No wonder that today, the EU is encircled by politico-military instability and socioeconomic despair.
The colonial overstretch and economic chauvinism abroad yesterday means moral overkill today at home. The Oxfam study, 'Wealth: Having it all and wanting more', documents the enormous wealth accumulation of the 1 percent as well as acceleration of the wealth gap.
When there is no opportunity, give at least a lame hope. That is what Europe keenly helped with in the Middle East: The very type of Islam that Europe supported in the Middle East yesterday is the version of Islam (or better, fascism) that we are getting today in Christian Europe as well as in the Christian neighborhoods of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Thus, in response to the Balkans, MENA and Ukraine crises, the EU repeatedly failed to keep up a single-voiced consolidated agenda and participatory basis with its strategic neighborhood. The EU missed it all ' despite institutions, World War II memories and credibility to prevent mistakes ' as it did wrong before at home by silently handing over its crucial issue of European identity, antifascism and otherness, to escapist antipolitics dressed up in the Western European wing parties.
It leads the so-called Western democracies into the deadlock of cycles of voter frustration: elect and regret, vote against and regret, reelect and regret again. It is a path of trivialization of our sociopolitical content or formalization of substantive democracy.
Eventually, the 'world's last cosmopolitan' place ' as the EU is often self-portrayed ' discredited its own transformative powers. The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, the EU undermined its own institutional framework, including the Nuremberg principles on war crimes and firm antifascist legacy such as the UN and Council of Europe.
The continent's only direct involvement included selective diplomatic delegitimization, satanization in media and punitive military engagements via the Atlantic-Central Europe-led coalition of the willing (the Balkans, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine). This resulted in a massive influx of refugees, usually met by criminalizing migration and penalizing the immigrants' way of life. Confrontational nostalgia prevailed again over dialogue and consensus ' both essential for any viable future.
The consequences: The sort of Islam that the EU supported in the Middle East yesterday is the sort of Islam that Europe gets today. Small wonder that Islam in Turkey (or in Kirgizstan and Indonesia) is broad, liberal and tolerant while Islam in Atlantic-Central Europe is brutally dismissive, narrow and vindictively assertive.
Our urgent task is de-Nazification. Let's start at once from Bosnia, Ukraine and Paris.
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The writer is chairperson and professor in international law and global political studies, Vienna, Austria. He is the author of FB ' Geopolitics of Technology; Geopolitics ' Europe 100 years later. His forthcoming book, No Asian Century, is scheduled for next year.
