VIENNA — Last October, a group of respected conservative thinkers from across the Continent published a manifesto
titled “A Europe We Can Believe In.” It is, in many respects, a
thoughtful, beautifully written document, a rhetorical mixture of
national liberation movement discourse from the glory days of
decolonization and a retrograde museum guidebook.
The
impression that the reader gets from this manifesto is that Europe’s
conservatives are anti-imperial (the European Union is, they complain,
an “empire of money and regulations”), anticolonial (“emigration without
assimilation is colonization”) and defenders of the nation-state from
the contempt of pro-European elites (who, they declare, are “blinded by
vain, self-congratulating visions of a utopian future”).
Believe
it or not, the nativist revolution they call for resembles the
left-wing uprisings of 1968. Like the protesters then, these
intellectuals are not trying to simply win elections but to change the
way people think and live. At the same time, however, precisely what
they want is to undo the legacy of ’68 left behind in Europe.
The
key concept that drove ’68 was “recognition.” Recognition, to that
generation, basically meant that those without political power should
have the same rights as the powerful ones. The key word of the current
nativist revolution is “respect,” by which these 21st-century rebels are
saying that the fact that we all have equal rights does not change the
fact that we have different political power.
If
the demonstrators in ’68 were preoccupied with the rights of minorities
— ethnic, religious and sexual (one slogan was “We all are minorities”)
— the nativist revolution of today is about the rights of the
majorities. If ’68 was about nations’ confessing their sins — see Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany on his knees
at a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — nativist leaders today
are busy proclaiming the divine innocence of their nations. (The recent Polish law
criminalizing any reference to Polish participation in the Holocaust is
an especially ignominious illustration.) If the ’68 generation imagine
themselves as the children of slaughtered Jews, nativist leaders prefer
to position themselves as defenders of the state of Israel.
The
populist parties of the right today are, above all, cultural parties.
They see their position of power as an opportunity to shape national
identity, to get the historical narrative right. They are not much
interested in changing taxation or welfare. Far more important to them
is how society relates to its past and how children are educated. The
debate of immigration is, above all else, an opportunity to define who
belongs and could belong to a national political community.
But
while in individual countries the nativist revolution takes the form of
a struggle between liberals and conservatives, on the level of the
European Union it is experienced as a conflict between Europe’s West and
Europe’s East. More precisely, it’s a conflict between two versions of
conservatism.
Western
European conservatism is post-1968. It has internalized some of the
progressivism that has shaped the West in the past half century — like
freedom of expression and the right to be different — while
rejecting what it sees as the excesses of ’68. In Western Europe,
prominent activists and leaders of the far right can be openly gay
without raising eyebrows.
In
its Eastern version, conservatism is a more radical form of nativism.
It rejects modernity as a whole and sees the cultural changes of recent
decades as an attempt to destroy the national cultures of Central and
Eastern European societies. To be conservative in Central Europe means
to be not only against the excesses of ’68 but against any form of
cosmopolitanism or diversity.
This
view has no better spokesman than Prime Minister Viktor Orban of
Hungary. “We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not
want to be mixed,” he said this month.
“We do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be
mixed with those of others. We do not want that at all. We do not want
to be a diverse country. We want to be how we became 1,100 years ago
here in the Carpathian Basin.” (It is remarkable that the Hungarian
prime minister remembers so vividly what it was to be Hungarian 11
centuries ago.)
But
his position makes clear the difference between the East’s vision of
conservatism and the West’s. In the West, conservatives believe that it
is not enough to get an Austrian or German passport to become Austrian
or German — you should also adopt the dominant culture. In Mr. Orban’s
view, you cannot become a Hungarian if you were not born a Hungarian.
And
here is the paradox of today’s nativist revolution in Europe. Both
Eastern and Western Europe have shifted to the right in recent years,
but instead of contributing to the unity of Europe, this shift makes the
gap between the two regions even wider.
While
Western Europeans contest the merits of diversity, they do live in
culturally diverse societies and have for some time. Central and Eastern
Europeans, on the other hand, live in ethnically homogeneous societies
and believe that diversity will never happen to them. Conservatives in
the Western part of Europe dream of a continent where majorities will be
the ones shaping society; in the East they dream of a society without
minorities and governments without oppositions.
So
while conservative political leaders like Mr. Orban, who wants to take
his country back by 1,100 years, and Sebastian Kurz, the new 31-year-old
conservative prime minister of Austria, share similar views when it
comes to control over migration or mistrust of old-style conservatism,
they are not natural allies when it comes to the future of the European
Union.
In
fact, they differ in much the same way 1968 in Western Europe differed
from ’68 in Eastern Europe. In the West it was about the sovereignty of
the individual. In the East it was about the sovereignty of the nation.
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