The speech delivered in Munich by the American Vice-President J. D. Vance made one thing clear – at least to the fringe of the European conscience that has managed to remain lucid: Europe, which has been lethargic for years now, and this despite the looming threats that Vance only had the dubious merit of pronouncing aloud, must pull itself together. However, pulling itself together – and however important it is to reflect on a common European defense policy – cannot be limited to taking realpolitik into account. On this point, we must be sensitive to the diagnosis in the form of a snub that Vance addressed to us, deploring the supposed divorce of Europe from the democratic values and freedom of expression so dear to the United States, even as the Trumpist regime is taking the path of open authoritarianism and systematic censorship. In the absence of a strong conception of Europe and its political vocation, there is a risk that the same path will be followed. That the lethargy of a liberalism that has long since ceased to reflect on the political basis of its existence will be succeeded by the very real nightmare of a sovereignism subservient to the great powers and playing “democracy” against the law.
In the very short term, that of the decisive federal elections that will take place in Germany this weekend, this nightmare has a name: AfD. We are therefore publishing a text by Monty Ott on the history of this movement, and the democratic cataclysm that the collaboration of conservative parties with the far right would represent. Vance also indicated where his allies were to be found, by meeting the AfD’s candidate for the chancellorship, Alice Weidel, and by describing the treatment of this party as a “denial of democracy”. We also know about the sympathies that unite the international networks of the far right with Putin’s Russia. The paradox is only apparent: the sovereignism of “national preference” becomes subservient to the great policies of national power, insofar as it knows no other policy than force.
It is against this threat that Europe must be able to formulate the exceptional nature of its political project, which is rightly based on a distrust, acquired in the trials of history, of any policy of power. Today, it is the fate of the “small nations”, that of a dizzying experience of the precariousness of their existence, that must illuminate the destiny of Europe and lead it to pull itself together. The clouds are gathering over the very principle of their existence, but, as Ukraine has been able to demonstrate over the past two years, the “small nation” is not without resources. To support this point, we are publishing an account by Joseph Roche of how Odessa, and within it the “small Jewish nation”, was able to survive the war.
And, to accompany this diagnosis, we are republishing Danny Trom’s text “Kundera politics”. It is worth remembering, that for Kundera, Israel was the “small nation par excellence”, and that the political alternative taking shape there makes it the outpost of what Europe must be led to achieve for itself: in adversity, they are united.
