Von der Leyen's statement sends shivers down your spine, like the clang of a tombstone being laid: "Europe can no longer be the guardian of the old world order, of a world that is gone and will not return." Bam!
Look, it's always good to be told straight (it wasn't exactly a bombshell), but when a political leader proclaims so emphatically that a world will never return, you start to think she's playing at a self-fulfilling prophecy and has just washed her hands of some guardianship responsibilities. Because if that world is gone, what's her fault? Be that as it may, the President of the European Commission made us watch an era of history pass by feet first. To put it in the words of a stand-up comedian: "International law is dead, Europe is dead, and I myself am not feeling particularly well this morning."
If this world is gone, what will return? In other words, if international law will no longer be protected, what is the alternative? Mandatory conscription? States without public healthcare or education because we're all going to spend money on missile defense systems? The peseta? Ration books? The suspension ofhabeas corpusWill our children laugh at the movie? Goodbye, Europe!, just as we laughed with Goodbye, Lenin!
Has it taken us a tremendous amount of effort to get here (two thousand years, to be precise), and now the invention is finished? I refuse to accept that we'll let it slip away so easily. Do we lack the will to defend the machine, and instead they're buying the engineer's funeral? As a piece of graffiti on a Buenos Aires street said many years ago: "Enough with realities, we want promises!"
