Why is a book published in 1943, during World War II, published again at the beginning of the 21st century and becomes a best seller long-duration, continually republished and cited as a reference? What circumstances does it address that may be repeating themselves today? This is what happens with the biography of that Austrian writer so popular in his time, called Stefan Zweig, with his The world of yesterday. Memoirs of a European (Cliff).
Why do people return to Zweig’s book in the first half of the 21st century? What do they see in it? Possibly this trend will be accentuated after the result of the elections to the European Parliament, with the growth of a xenophobic and anti-European extreme right. Another militant Europeanist responds to this, such as the British intellectual Timothy Garton Ash, who in his latest book, Europe. A personal story (Taurus), seems to maintain a permanent conversation with the Austrian: those melancholic memories (remember that Zweig and his wife committed suicide shortly after in Brazil, tired of fleeing Nazi totalitarianism) glimpse prophetic signs of a world that twice in a row (1914 and 1939) was on the verge of catastrophe. Zweig’s popularity says a lot about “our times, our fears, our sense that perhaps something is inevitably coming to an end.” When Garton Ash’s book was published, it was not yet known that the extreme right is the first force in France and the second in Germany, the two strong countries of the European Union.
Perhaps this pessimism is not entirely justified. The EU has gone through very different stages. For example, in the early 1980s he witnessed what later became known as “the great gallop,” in which he gained speed. Personalities as diverse as Gorbachev, Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl, Felipe González, Delors, etc., complemented each other. Delors’s advocacy of a single market in Western Europe increased the magnetic orientation that the EU exerted on those living on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The breakup of Central and Eastern Europe and German unification gave a strong impetus to European integration. The result was an upward spiral.
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The decline began around 2005 and gained speed from 2008. Between the “no” to the European Constitution of France and the Netherlands, and the beginning of the Great Recession. Then came the application of ruthless austericide, the Russian usurpation of some areas of Georgia (2008) and Crimea (2014), the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria and the other side of the Mediterranean (2015), terrorism that devastated the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that same year, the growth of populism in two countries as significant as Poland and Hungary, the extremely painful Brexit referendum in Great Britain (2016), the arrival to the White House of an enemy like Donald Trump in 2017, and the final blow with the covid pandemic and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And its consequences.
Garton Ash gives central importance to the Ukrainian war in the future of Europe. The era of perpetual peace is over. One out of every two words spoken in Ukraine is “Europe.” “Europe” resonates in President Zelensky’s mouth in the countless speeches addressed to foreign parliamentarians and in the countless meetings with leaders from all over. If “Russia” has become a word of hate, “Europe” is a word of hope. As it was for the Spanish, Portuguese and Greeks in the seventies of the last century, and then for Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the eighties, and further before the Baltic States and in Southeast Europe after the Balkan wars .
Are we predestined to go backwards? Garton Ash asks himself as the culmination of his personal story. The growing presence of anti-European groups in the European Parliament, which have picked up part of the social unrest, and the indifference with which a part of the population has received these elections, abstaining from them, pose problems.
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