This war in Europe upsets us for man’s impotence in the face of destiny, for that mechanical and technological killing of himself with his gigantic arsenal of tank artillery missiles, which no one seems to be able to remedy. This power of fate relates this conflict to the First World War. The fragility of the human body in the face of metal and technology, mechanical death and the high number of victims in the cities that increasingly resemble the trenches of Flanders link today to the atrocities of the beginning of the twentieth century. This war that is both hypermodern and ancient is uncovering its cards and will put an end, for the second time, to progressive and humanitarian illusions. In 1914 the nineteenth-century dreams that the destiny of man would necessarily have been better were shattered, today the propaganda of an open and global world will come out in crumbs, where goods, ideas and men would have walked and progressed together. We know from having proved it in the twentieth century on us Europeans that civilizations possess the same fragility of a life. They sink with their men and their machines, with the gods and the laws, the academies and the sciences. The abyss of historical irrelevance is big enough for everyone.
Until a month ago, Europe was still full of things, characters, projects, utopias. Now it has become, beyond a defused consoling rhetoric, something abstract, foggy, it has only problems, fears, addictions, suspicions, it lives every day in the anguish of becoming a great battlefield. The problem becomes again: what reason does Europe have to do? With what content and right? What does it represent? Is she a character with something that sets her apart from others who make themselves so brutally felt on the world stage? Or just a “collage”, made up of attachment and disaffection, as they say in French, of members of the Atlantic military alliance? Even before unity, which the need to survive Putin’s instinct for prey seems to have hastily bagged, a problem of identity.
As in 1918, I fear that we are about to witness, in dismay, the second death of Europe. It is what will emerge, whatever the outcome of the conflict, whether the Russian fury to redefine equilibrium that it no longer considers definitive and which are an imperfect legacy from the fall of the Wall is successful or whether it is rejected or contained. The world that will emerge will see the United States consolidated on the one hand, remained in the shelter of their splendid transoceanic isolation, skilled in stoking the war entrusted to the punishment of allies and familiars who have found an opportunity to put some make-up on a inevitable imperial decline.
On the other hand, two Asian powers, China which will consolidate the imperialist transition from economic power to military giant with its astute wait-and-see; and Russia which, in the ferocity of the clash and the scars left by isolation and sanctions, will deny its European vocation to turn the other way. From that Asian temptation from which Peter the Great’s forceps had stolen her by forcing her to look west while remaining under her autocratic mark. This defeat would be gigantic for the Europeans and the West. Because Russia has always been the West even when the country wall of real socialism and bureaucratic and authoritarian Marxism separated it. Even in that development she remained European because she spoke an ideological language familiar and familiar to us.
The three powers that survive will battle it out in the Third World. Provided that taking advantage of our mistakes and our fratricidal quarrels, the totalitarian project of Islam does not find lymph and opportunities to sit at the table as a fourth, dangerous inconvenience.
In 1914 Europe which was still garrisoned by great powers, England, France with their empires, the continental bloc of autocracies, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia (they called it the European concert, quarrelsome full of hatred but with a proven mechanism which guaranteed the diplomatic security exit), ran with blind indifference to the fratricide of the civil war. The fault of a particularly fertile generation of politicians who are very good at putting everything in turmoil and jeopardy, very careful not to introduce order, measure, patience. This ability to complicate conflicts was matched only by the powerlessness, once they broke out, of clarifying them, limiting them and resolving them. This generation of subversive prophets does not remind you of the generation that faced the Ukrainian fire and Putin’s overbearing ultimatums instead of appealing to its role as strong mediator that geography and convenience imposed on them, set about stoking fires like pyrotechnic bombers. what others threw in front of them, urging them to trigger them? So that we have witnessed the scandal of a war between European and Christian nations in which those who try to wet the dust and snatch an armistice are a Muslim with a very dubious reputation, a Jew who has wisely kept a voice in the two warring camps, and perhaps but, with subtle reticence, a Confucian Communist.
We Europeans who had just finished congratulating ourselves on giving each other support in the storm of the pandemic, have slipped into this new problem by continuing blind and deaf to comfort each other: a war here between us is completely unreasonable. , therefore impossible.
And that’s not all. The burning lesson is even more complete. Europe felt that in the face of this “impossible” danger it would no longer recognize itself, that it ceased to resemble itself, that it was about to lose an acquired conscience after a long period of bearable misfortunes. We cannot accept aggression, it was said. And it was right, even though many others have accepted it in other parts of the world. But then it abdicated what made it great, that is, its extraordinary and perhaps unique capacity for transmission combined with an intense capacity for absorption. Perhaps it is his true wealth, the original form of his intelligence, his reason for enduring. Any closure of the game would be fatal making it superfluous.