COMMENT: War against the west

Orbán is right about a few countries at least. The leader of Poland’s governing party, Jarosław Kaczyński, believes that groups backed by Soros want “societies without identity.” Liviu Dragnea, who leads the ruling party in Romania, goes further, saying that Soros has “financed evil.” What Soros is in fact financing in Romania are education programs, international scholarships, and NGOs helping to clean up the environment.

Indeed, Soros might be described as the personification of “the West” as defined by Kolnai. He is everything that nativists and anti-Semites hate: rich, cosmopolitan, Jewish, and a liberal dedicated to what Karl Popper, yet another child of Jewish origin from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, called “the open society.”

When the enemies of the open society were threatening Europe during the 1930s, there was at least a powerful counter model in Britain, and especially the U.S, bolstered by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Victims of continental European totalitarianism could still find refuge in that “West,” and even those who couldn’t still knew that fascists and Nazis had formidable enemies in London and Washington.

We now live in a very different world. Britain has turned its back on Europe, rejecting the internationalism of the EU, and imbibing the poison from politicians who think that immigration is an existential threat to national identity. And then there is Donald Trump’s election as U.S president, which Orbán has called a new opportunity – “a gift” – for Hungary. Indeed, Soros emerged as a villainous cosmopolitan conspirator in the propaganda of Trump’s own campaign.

Trump’s views on immigration – those incoming “rapists,” “terrorists,” and so on – have provided a huge moral boost to the enemies of the West. His “America first” approach, Islamophobia, support for torture, and attacks on the mainstream media are being used by anti-liberals and autocrats worldwide to justify closing their borders and crushing “enemies of the people” – with violence if need be.

In this political climate, the counter-model to the closed society is withering. The West, as defined by Kolnai, does indeed face an existential threat, but not from immigrants, Islam, or NGOs financed by Soros. The most dangerous enemies of the West are people who often claim to be saving it, such as Orbán, France’s Marine Le Pen, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Kaczyński, and Trump.

There is, however, one hope in Europe that would have astonished Kolnai, who published his book the same year that Hitler’s soldiers marched into Austria and Czechoslovakia. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, may have made serious mistakes, notably in the way Greece was treated by the EU, but she has also been the staunchest European champion of liberal democratic ideas. We can only hope that Germany, the former Land of Heroes, holds firm in the latest war against the West.

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Ian Buruma, Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College, is the author of Year Zero: A History of 1945.

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Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2017.
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