Not all that long ago, Europe was a beacon of liberal idealism. One memoir recalls it as an era “comfortably saturated with confidence in the unfailing and binding power of tolerance and conciliation”. The economic system seemed obviously preferable to barbarous alternatives.
Those words could describe the spirit of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. They were written in the 1930s by Stefan Zweig, reflecting on the optimism of late 19th-century Vienna from the perspective of a Jewish émigré whose world had been destroyed by murderous nationalism. Zweig took his own life in 1942.
He never saw fascism defeated. He couldn’t have imagined a renaissance of liberalism in the second half of the 20th century so complete as to attain a pitch of complacency rivalling the one he remembered from his childhood. Now momentum is with the nationalists again.
Victory for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the region of Saxony-Anhalt over the weekend is not the biggest electoral prize won by a far-right party in Europe in recent years, but it is one of the most shocking because it is Germany. No country had more to learn from history if it wanted to immunise its democracy against extremism. None pursued a more systematic programme of inoculation.
The word for it is Vergangenheitsbewältigung – hard to say and tricky to translate, meaning roughly coming to terms with a shameful past. There is no excuse of ignorance about the AfD’s rise. It is a knowing repudiation of atonement.
The party flirts with Nazi imagery and embraces racist definitions of nationhood, seeking to deport Germans whose credentials it sees as biologically improper. It is extreme enough to induce squeamishness in Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally (RN). She has spent years carefully cultivating respectability and is leading the polls ahead of next year’s presidential election.
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