Stefan Zweig's beautiful book The world of yesterday. Memoirs of a European Remember and evoke, in 1941, when Nazism was on the verge of winning the war it had provoked, how much better the world was before the Great War, fascism, communism and Nazism, when there was faith in progress and humanity. Are we beginning to think like Stefan Zweig? Have we been so disoriented in recent weeks that we feel the vertigo that everything we had believed in will be frowned upon or even banned and persecuted?
My answer is that, if we do not pay attention, we are on the verge. The change in the mental framework caused by the imperial rulers, once the United States has come to be led by the promoter of a coup against the oldest great democracy in the world assisted by capricious characters with the applause of more than half the world, has left us in a state of shock. We need to rewind all the principles and decide which are the fundamental ones in an emergency situation. The statements of the president of the world's largest economy and military power cannot be dismissed, especially when one sees how quickly he is moving from words to actions. We have discovered how great his power is and how easy it is to bypass all constitutional protections against arbitrariness. The bicameral majority combined with the overwhelming majority on the Supreme Court give him carte blanche to do almost anything he wants, and what he wants hurts.
Trump wants to seize new territories, spread the wings of the American imperial eagle, control the external spaces of the United States. A visit to the monument to marine In Washington, it is a reminder of how imperialism and nationalism are one and the same. And what is true for the United States today has been true for every other empire in the world. In recent times, anyone who has behaved in this way has been disqualified from the international political arena, but now the US president says he will do it as many times as necessary.
Trump has started trade wars. This was already done in the wake of the Great Depression and the measures became a boomerang that ended up turning against whoever had launched it. The same could happen, but the damage it will do will leave wounds that will not heal well. He has also implemented administrative reforms that we find unacceptable, and he does so against one of the thinnest central (federal) administrations in the world. The bulk of federal public money goes to military spending, and this will not be reduced but increased, as already happened with President Reagan and his criticism of federal public deficits in the Carter era. He came in and multiplied them without any problems since everyone believed in his rearmament program to definitively surpass the Soviet Union. The same could happen with Trump.
He has threatened to cut contributions to international institutions, as he did in his first term, and clearly wants to dismantle the United Nations system, which he sees as no positive element, only "meaningless" barriers to his ambitions and those he believes the US should have.
All of this has clear objectives. One of them is to stop having responsibilities for military protection in Europe. And perhaps he is right that the current system had been too comfortable for the Europeans and that it is now their turn – it is our turn – to take full responsibility for their own defence and to deploy a more convincing foreign action.
The left has forgotten that improving the standard of living of its voters is the only objective that can build majorities. This is also the case for the right. Trump has been very clear about this. The succession of crises experienced since 2008 has shattered expectations of unlimited progress. The economic and competitive rise of China and the entire former Third World has dampened the expectations of entire cohorts. Globalisation, which seemed so good for everyone, has turned out to be bad for tens of millions of workers in the rich world. All of this has eroded confidence in the social contract we have provided ourselves with and multiplies the number of those willing to break the fight.
Trump's new world does not shake up the world of yesterday in the same way for the citizens of the former Third World as it does for the citizens of the First World. The latter, increasingly fewer in number, will be seen more and more as a burden of the past. We must now hurry to commit to a new Europeanism that can inspire all generations and all horizons. In the past of the last three or four generations, Europe has been a solution and not a problem. We have no better empire than to defend what can be built within the framework of the European Union. Certainly, many vices must be corrected and more representativeness and efficiency must be introduced, but there is no more stimulating alternative.
