Europe Facing Its Demons

No — the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine cannot be dismissed as a peripheral disturbance or reduced to a mere dispute over territory, whatever the assorted Putinists would have us believe. The Russian aggression exposes a deeper fracture: a clash between two visions of the world. On one side, freedom and the rule of law; on the other, the nostalgia for an imperial order, resurrected under the guise of a mythologized “golden age,” built upon domination and terror.

What unfolds today upon Ukrainian soil is nothing less than the deliberate attempt to resurrect the imperial logic of Russia and to impose it as the political paradigm of this century. The battle for the Donbas is not a local skirmish. It is a test for the whole of Europe — for its courage, its memory, and its very future. Nothing less. The regime of Vladimir Putin does not merely seek to annex land. Putin aims to restore an imperial architecture with explicit historical referents: Peter the Great, Catherine II, and the idea of a “civilizational space” sanctified by the myth of the “Russian world,” wherein peoples are not political subjects but ethnic matter to be absorbed, reshaped, or erased.

Every empire rests upon the negation of law. It recognizes neither popular sovereignty, nor pluralism, nor individual liberty. Freedom is wholly alien to it — an intruder concept. This war, therefore, is directed against the very idea of Europe. For Europe is not, in essence, a territory; it is, in the minds of its founders, a manner of dwelling in the world: a certain conception of human dignity, of legality, of debate, of the equality of rights. She is the daughter of the Enlightenment and of the uncompromising rejection of terror. She was born of cooperation, forged to rebuild what the culture of exclusion and annihilation — the culture of two world wars — had destroyed. She exists only in a space where the individual stands sovereign before the State.

The Russian imperial project is the precise antithesis of this: despotism justified in the name of a “vital space,” the very logic against which Europe rebuilt itself after the abyss of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Kyiv has thus become a frontier not between two nations but between two civilizational models. If Ukraine falls, it will not merely be a nation that collapses; the very possibility of a world governed by international law will collapse with it — as is also the case with what Netanyahu is perpetrating in Gaza and the West Bank, for that matter. As Nicolas Tenzer writes in Our War, the Russian invasion constitutes “a total offensive against the legitimate order.” This is not a regional disturbance; it is a direct assault on liberal democracy itself. The Kremlin knows this: by crushing Ukraine, it would demonstrate that law is but a façade, and that force alone confers truth. The consequences would be universal: a global regression into the logic of empire — protectorates, vassal-states, shifting borders, silenced peoples. A return to Europe before Westphalia.

Yet something graver still is unfolding: the parallel erosion of the Western pillar that, since 1945, has been the backbone of the free world. The United States — once the architect and guarantor of an international order, imperfect, often cynical, yet structuring — is now withdrawing from the stage of history. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has sealed this cataclysmic shift: a world reduced to transactions, to immediate profit, to moral vacuity. Trump, being himself, would no doubt have negotiated Munich with Hitler in the name of accounting pragmatism, chastised Warsaw for being “ungrateful” toward the Third Reich, and advised Churchill to “make peace” by redrawing a few borders. He might even have applauded Quisling for his pragmatism. Cowardice dressed up as realism — nothing older; but rarely has it been flaunted with such swagger, with such frank and carefree cynicism.

What unfolded last February between Trump and Zelensky was no diplomatic mishap. It was a historic rupture, if not a moral abdication — even if Washington has since attempted to gather the shards of its strategic blunder. The message sent to Putin was unmistakable: proceed, the road is clear. The Sudetenland, redux, in a twenty-first-century edition. This American strategic withdrawal offered Russia a perilous window: if Washington retreats, Moscow may intensify its assault, convinced that Ukraine will collapse under the weight of Western indifference. What looms is not merely the defeat of a nation, but the erosion of the Western idea itself — giving way to a coalition of Empires: Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, their clienteles and their political auxiliaries in Europe and the United States.

George Steiner would have shuddered in terror. It is the last door of Bluebeard’s castle now being shattered before the eyes of a world nearly bled dry — as in Palestine. The end of culture. Clairvoyant, he foresaw this in 1971: “I find derisory any theory of culture, any analysis of present conditions that does not place at its centre the mechanisms of terror which led, in Europe and in Russia, from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second, to the death — by starvation or systematic massacre — of seventy million human beings.”

“Derisory” is a feeble word. “Ignoble” lands closer to the truth today.

This American withdrawal has revealed what Kissinger once termed “the temptation of disengagement.” The West is suffering from an existential fatigue. It no longer believes in its own narrative. It no longer dares to defend what it claims to embody. Trump did not invent this; he is merely the hypertrophic symptom of a civilization doubting itself — doubting its bearings, its moral architecture, built precisely so that a new Hitler would never arise — a civilization sinking into a kind of Mephistophelian nihilism. And when civilization withdraws, barbarians advance. Ask Romulus Augustulus and Odoacer. Europe now stands alone — and this is no accident. De Gaulle foresaw it in the 1960s: great powers have no friends, only interests. Strategic dependence is a mortal error. Today, Atlantic solidarity rests upon the whims of a man oscillating between admiration for Putin and scorn for his allies. And Europe hesitates, trembles, calculates — as it did under Chamberlain, despite the lucidity of a few of its leaders.

What remains, then? Only one alternative: to awaken or to perish; to choose to exist as a sovereign political power or to revert to a protectorate; to understand that freedom must be defended as Churchill defended it, not in the manner of the Pétains – Orbán, the Salvinis and their ilk. Ukraine today embodies what Europe has forgotten after nearly a century of peace: that freedom is a vital necessity, not a rhetorical ornament. And, above all, that men and women die so that the idea of law may endure. A civilization incapable of recognizing this is already dead. Having lost its memory, it has forfeited its reason for being — its soul.

Our war — for it is the war of each of us, a moral obligation — is to uphold the symbolic and political frontier between the world of law and the world of Empire. If that frontier collapses, political humanity collapses with it. Nothing will remain to distinguish Europe from a mere geographical expression. Ukraine is, in its essence, the limes that still shields Europe from darkness. If the lock breaks, a certain idea of the world will vanish. We must say “no” to Putin and to his replicas across Europe — so long as they strive to transform the world into identity compounds subjugated to the heart and power of Empire. For it is this collective refusal of tyranny that has always allowed civilizations — despite their failings — to become more progressive, and more humane.

It is, quite simply, the price of our evolution — all of us.