Europe’s identity crisis, lost amidst the resurgence of fascism in the United States and Russia

The Americans and the Russians. So many promises and such disasters. Even in the mid-twentieth century, being European meant very little in the wake of those two political and military catastrophes. It seemed as though we Europeans lacked even a clear and solid identity. Europe was the theatre and the front line of the Cold War between the two military and nuclear superpowers, which, however, were also – or so it seemed – the exemplars of two new and younger social, cultural and political anthropologies. The European was a spectator, albeit an interested and committed one. A spectator who, however, no longer possessed the moral and material right or authority to speak with definitive and valid authority on his own destiny.

When Kennedy, in the heart of Europe and on the border dividing the two great adversaries and enemies, uttered the famous phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner”, it seemed as though he were bestowing a gift not only on the Germans divided into two states – East and West, the Germany of individual freedom and the Germany of so-called social justice – but also seemed to allude broadly to Europeans, who might thus all have said: “We are Americans”. With that phrase, the burden and honour of upholding the entire cultural tradition of the West fell upon the shoulders of the United States and its citizens. Then, in the 1980s, Gorbachev raised hopes of a ‘social-democratic’ Russia, whilst Reagan envisaged an America finally less obsessed with issues of nuclear supremacy. Once again, Europeans were spectators to a turning point that affected them without allowing them to play a leading role.

I’ll briefly recap this history, reflecting on what has happened in this dreadful 21st century. Europe is now reflecting on the possibility and necessity of self-defence, because it no longer knows what to expect from the Russians led by Putin and the Americans under Trump. So here’s the thing: having believed they were inheriting centuries or millennia of Western culture, wrested from a Europe no longer worthy or capable of managing and representing that culture, what do today’s Americans and Russians represent to us? The disaster has occurred: not only have Europeans proved incapable of defending themselves on their own against the forms of fascism they themselves produced in the first half of the last century, but now the Russians and the Americans have produced new forms of fascism. Europeans can certainly not rejoice at having stripped the Americans of the crown of freedom and the Russians of their rather implausible crown of social justice: two mythological and ideological myths that many continued to believe even after the racial scandal in America and the Stalinist totalitarianism – followed by Putin’s fascism – in Russia.

In such a situation, we Europeans and we Italians have lost part of our very identity: we no longer know what to be, or whether we still count for anything politically. Sadistic and voyeuristic madness is a clear symptom of psychological imbalance. What can one say? Global drug trafficking and both individual and organised crime have been thriving and are on the rise everywhere in the world, including, for that very reason, in the heart of what some still consider ‘civilised Europe’.

There is no longer any real Italian society or social life; Italians are all too often "over the top" or "out of their minds" and boast about it. And in the United States? And in Russia? Where does a society of truly free, responsible and secure citizens still exist? People prefer to resort to war; they fear it and prepare for it. Not knowing what else to do.