The Sun Sets on the Transatlantic Dream

[Celerity]

As Trump weakens Western alliances and democracy erodes at home, Europeans confront a painful truth: yesterday's world is gone.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-sun-sets-on-the-transatlantic-dream



As World War II raged in Europe in the early 1940s, Stefan Zweig’s memoir Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European) was published by a German exile publisher in Stockholm. Zweig, full of sorrow, describes the “rupture of time” that brought the old Europe to an end in the fury of two terrible world wars.

Are Europeans today undergoing another such rupture? Are we once again witnessing the disappearance of the old order – the only one that most of us have ever known? If so, it is an unspeakable loss. The old order guaranteed peace, security, and prosperity – only to Western Europe, initially, but then to the rest of the European continent (with the exception of the former Yugoslavia) after 1989. That happy time now increasingly looks like The World of Yesterday 2.0.

It is worth recalling that America’s previous withdrawal from the continent created a fatal opening for radical ideologies and hateful propaganda. Under Hitler and the Nazis, extreme nationalists, glorifiers of violence and racism, enemies of democracy, and ardent supporters of dictatorship decided that their moment had come. The Nazis seized power and deliberately brought on WWII, plunging Europe into the abyss.

Where do we stand today? Russia has not only launched a war of conquest and annihilation against Ukraine but also begun to test NATO’s willingness to defend its airspace with drone intrusions into Poland and Romania, and fighter planes flying over Estonia. Still, while US statements of solidarity have often sounded rather weak since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, it would be a mistake to say that the situation is comparable to a world war.

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