The unbearable lightness of the West
The "accidental heroes" of Kiev.
Column by Francesco Grillo published on the Italian newspapers Il Messaggero and Il Gazzettino del Nord Est
Scan of the paper edition
“The dissolution of the Soviet Union not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. In this quote used by Francis Fukuyama to greet the fall of the “Soviet Empire”, we can find the resounding failure that has led us to the Ukrainian crisis. The illusion that history can reach peace without alternatives was the real mistake. When Western Democracy reached the apogee, Europe and United States started to exhaust their driving force by creating the conditions that led us to a new crossroads through increasingly serious terrorist attacks, financial and environmental crisis.
Through overconfidence, we lost the idea that democracy, freedom and peace can be preserved only by defending them. We should defend them from autocrats never defeated, and, even more, from laziness of who think to have won.
The pictures of tanks stuck outside Kiev bring us back over half century. In 1956 the Hungarian Prime Minister Nagy made a plea to resistance while the armed cars were entering Budapest; in the 1968, it was the turn of the spring of Alexander Dubcek to be defeated from a joint invasion of the Warsaw Pact’s armies. Nevertheless, the Warsaw Pact disappeared long time ago,
nowadays the West suffers from a weakness that makes it unrecognizable, even if we make a comparison with what happened in 1968 when the West was forced to assist to a tragedy over an impenetrable curtain.
At that time, NATO was certainly more united, while today is suffering an identity crisis started when the historic enemy disappeared. The economic relations without whom we cannot go on, that make our economy dependent from the energy, were less strong fifty years ago.
The Ukrainian situation shows us something more: a profound discomfort, but also the possibility of a reaction.
We started considering safety and welfare as unalienable rights. We lost the will of fighting in what we believe as we took our victory for granted. History has become something to watch on television or on our so called “smartphone”. Loosing that urgency related to the survival instinct, we lost the interest on finding solutions as well. Not only for the problems related to the war, but also for more complex issues linked, for instance, to climate change or the will to find a cure to treatable diseases. We regularly assist to mounts of declaration that led us to nowhere. At the end of the day, we lost confidence in our ability to build new words that enchanted all the human kind at the end of the ‘60s.
However, in these darkest hours, the West can find again what it losted thanks to the bravery of a great nation that is in the geographic heart of Europe.
The almost total ban of payment to and from Russia, that transit through the SWIFT system, would have the effect of suddenly drain the flow of money that is fundamental to the energy of Russian giants. This fact could originate a fracture in the system that for decades saw the economic, military and political power of Moscow unified in a monolithic block.
This kind of sanctions would have rough consequences on the entire productive system and even on the European families that were emerging from another crisis, with great difficulty. Nevertheless, this is the time to change from contemplation of problems to concrete plans to solve them.
It is necessary to make automatic mechanism permanent - tested during the pandemic - that are able of sharing the increasingly frequent crisis damages in order to make them less catastrophic for business and other exposed actors.
And also, it is necessary to take the opportunity to define a precise timing in order to build a European system of energy production that moves us away from fuels that have poisoned our cities and the relationship with different people.
We have to abandon the perpetual misunderstanding of the paralyzing unanimity agreement and we have to decide with whom of the Member States of the European Union we want to create an autonomous defense system that allows us to prevent problems that nowadays find us unprepared. And, since defense is what we most value, it’s time to think about mandatory civil services in order to strengthen the most important rights.
The Spring of Prague is narrated in a famous novel of Milan Kunder. In this novel, the lives of two men, two women and a dog come together in a city petrified by a paranoic regime. They cultivate contradictions that make life worth living. In order to defend that light, the characters challenge a sterile conformism and they pay the price for that.
Nowadays, West is no more capable of bravery.
Heroes are such by chance. The day before yesterday, when nothing seemed to stop the armored cars, an ex-comedian, who has become president shocking everyone with an anti-system party, had the unconsciousness of making a plea to the resistance. This is what could have changed the story whose outcomes are not predictable. Among the heroes by chance of Kiev we can find again the meaning of what we really are.