Rejuvenating Europe: Genesis, Doom, Futurity

by Márton Békés

Márton Békés envisions Europe as an open-ended possibility — a project of many peoples whose civilizational heritage centers West and East, North and South — but one whose fate is tragically sealed if it remains trapped in outdated frameworks instead of embracing continental horizons and staking out its own role within the emerging multipolar world order.

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Europe will become an “old world” in both the literal and figurative sense if it remains trapped in the dilapidated, ill-fitting frameworks bequeathed by the twentieth century and if it fails to set out into the twenty-first by opening space for its nations to flourish and, through them, autonomously shaping its own future.

Europe is the only continent that is as much an ideal as an area defined by geography. The idea of Europe is a synthesis between East and West, North and South – just as its surface stretches from the shores of the Atlantic to the edge of the steppe and from Nordic skies to the Mediterranean sun. Europe is therefore at once the ancient and the yet-to-come; the land of conservatism and revolution, tradition and innovation, Gothicism and modernism, the archaic and the futuristic. She is as much the offspring of Apollo as of Dionysus, infused by the spirits of both Odysseus and Faust. Dynamic stability, moving equilibrium, organic construction – this is our own Europe!

The Genesis of Europe

Europe is home to a hundred indigenous peoples, most of them descended from the great Indo‑European and Eurasian tribes. In their lineage and language, as in their genetic and cultural patrimony, they include Balts, Dacians‑Thracians, Illyrians, Celts, Hellenes, Latins, Germanics, Slavs, as well as Finno‑Ugric, Turkic, and Caucasian peoples. Or they trace their origins to prehistoric populations peopling the continent before these arrivals, such as the Basques, the Etruscans, and the first settlers of Corsica, Crete, and Sicily. Since the Bronze Age – through the Iron Age and the early Middle Ages – the tribes that settled in Europe mixed with one another, absorbed neighboring ethnicities, organized themselves into communities, and set out on the path toward forming larger and ever more distinct peoples. Every modern European nation emerged historically from the fortunate crossing of multiple tribes; the Europeans are therefore all kin, a kinship consecrated by their long coexistence. Europe is equal to the great family of its indigenous peoples.

Over millennia, successive waves of migration, the struggles of settlement and state‑building, the adoption of Christianity and its division into Eastern and Western branches (and, within the latter, into further confessions), and the transformation of tribes into peoples and peoples into modern nations have fashioned Europe into a cultural, historical, and political whole of extraordinary complexity. Its hallmark is a natural plurality which, conversely, forms an organic unity. To divide it from within (through chauvinism) or to dissolve it from without (through multiculturalism) are equally grave offenses against Europe’s spirit, tradition, and heritage. Europe belongs to Europeans.

The Doom of Europe

Europe was first weakened, bled out, and irredeemably burdened by the two fratricidal world wars of the twentieth century. Then, during the half-century of the Cold War, it was occupied and partitioned by two post‑European empires: its Western half becoming an appendage of American liberalism, its Eastern half of Soviet communism. The process of Western European unification begun in the 1950s, extending in breadth and depth after the Cold War and the Central and Eastern European transitions, did not realize the ideal of a Europe of nations. Instead, it championed the project for a United States of Europe favored by local networks of globalist financial and political elites.

The deeper and tighter the Brussels integration became, the less remained of Europe’s original spirit — of the distinctive character of its nations, of member‑state self‑determination, of national sovereignty, and of the continent’s strategic autonomy. Although the European Union encompasses only about half of European countries in a narrow sense (broadly speaking, some 50 countries share Europe’s territory, of which only 27 are EU members), its political mechanism, institutional logic, and policy course inevitably shape the fate of the continent as a whole. Europe has existed for millennia; the European Union may not survive this present decade.

Over the final decade of the twentieth century – and even more over the past quarter‑century – the EU has increasingly become a centralized European federation of global liberal democracy. Over the course of this centralization, individual nations are to be melted down; the boundaries of sex, marriage, and family blurred; states consigned to oblivion; and, on top of all this, new settlers are to arrive, resulting in a kind of multicultural “open society.”

This brave new world, however, bears little resemblance to Europe’s pristine virtues. What has already been realized is more than alarming and hard to reverse. The democratic will of nations is impeded by administrative, legal, and regulatory means; freedom of speech is curtailed; tried‑and‑true institutions that undergird social cohesion (Christianity, the family, national identity, state sovereignty) are deliberately weakened; immigration from outside Europe produces ethno‑religious enclaves that can become hotbeds of crime, Islamist fundamentalism, and terror. It is increasingly evident that the so‑called “Great Replacement” is less a conspiracy theory than an actual practice.

In truth, Europe’s malaise stems from a global problem: enforced homogenization. This is not only the combined effect of globalization, technological change, capitalism, and consumerism, but the intensification of the egalitarianism born of the Enlightenment, the ultimate realization of which is especially detrimental to Europe’s native diversity – intellectually, culturally, and politically alike. The result is visible in the decline of European cinema, the demographic transformation of cities, and the spread of anglicisms. The cancelling of European culture gained impetus after World War II; the continent’s Americanization accelerated after the Cold War and, through globalization, has advanced in great strides lately compounded by alienation tied to migration. Homogenization or diversity, artificial leveling or natural plurality – that is the question of our time.

Throughout history, it was invariably the cooperation of strong European nations that produced a strong Europe. It is no surprise, then, that enfeebled nations turn out a Europe whose agenda is at once bureaucratic‑technocratic and globalist‑progressive – economically uncompetitive, technologically outdated, demographically declining, culturally stagnant, and procedurally slow, cumbersome, and paralyzed.

A further problem is that in today’s multipolar world – now visible on the twenty‑first‑century geopolitical horizon – Europe, and even more the European Union, is unable to participate with intellectual imagination and practical capacity. Having earlier subordinated itself to the United States, it now behaves like an abandoned, aggrieved lover who quarrels with everyone besides its former partner.

In the emerging multipolar order, Western civilization will be one pole among several. The question is whether Europe will be part of it – and if so, with what role. The issue is complicated by the fact that neither “Amerope” nor “Eurabia” is an option, while “Eurasia” remains an open question. The Eurocentric world order will certainly not return; yet Europe must clarify its position amid the ongoing transformation brought on by the fundamental change of the world order.

Having monopolized the definition of “Europeanness,” the EU currently lacks an independent continental vision. It tries simultaneously to defy the United States diplomatically, China economically, and Russia militarily, while its once‑strong countries cannot compete with the rising middle powers of the Global South. Nothing captures the bleakness better than the fact that the European Union, formerly a “peace project”, is buying American weapons on American credit while signing an unfavorable tariff deal with Washington.

The Futurity of Europe

Europe can be neither a continent‑wide museum nor a colony of other continents. For the rebirth of its ancient ideal, it needs a brand‑new conception – and nations whose identities remain intact even as their mutual cooperation becomes effective. For the sake of the future, we must understand that equality among peoples does not mean sameness, and European unity does not mean centralization.

Europe’s renewal springs from the force of its native ethno‑pluralism, which simultaneously leads back and propels forward – toward an ancient future. Everything is good in its proper place; one for all and all for one, as Europe’s familiar mottos put it.

Amidst the multipolarization of the world order, Europe must first rediscover its original self and then find its place in a new world order of the Großraum-based multipolarity. It would be logical for Europe to begin multipolarization at home, through harmonious cooperation among its nations. We envision a continent that realizes the Europe of peoples, nations, landscapes, and regions – where the nations of the North, South, West, East, and Center represent themselves as equals in a common forum. In this way, Europe’s traditions of empire (ancient and medieval times) and nation‑state (modernity) come into synthesis, raised to a higher plane where freedom and duty, competition and cooperation, tradition and technology presuppose one another. The synergy of Europe’s nations is its most important renewable energy.

Across natural spaces that both divide and bridge, this Europe links Eurasia via the Urals and the Caucasus; North America via the Atlantic; and Africa and the Near East via the Mediterranean. In so doing, it can help shape the world’s largest contiguous continental heartland.

Europe’s strength has always been its capacity for renewal – replenishing itself with new energies, fresh ideas, and vigorous initiatives. Europe’s renaissances, reformations, and revolutions never emerged from nothing, and they yielded positive results only when they did not lead into nothingness.

The great return – a twenty‑first‑century European ricorso – is a heroic, if realist endeavor. It does not seek to revert the Old Continent to some earlier phase (be it 1789, 1914, 1945, or 1989); in any case, this would be both impossible and undesirable.

Rather, it is the renewal of Europe from the virgin spring of its origins, so that it might live on, in the most modern forms, in accord with the unspoiled essence of its antiquity. This will be a Europe that is, in Hegel’s words, “at once the oldest and the newest.”