Europe’s imagology
Europe’s current elites still live in what can be called a “narrated world,” a reality facilitated by institutions, consultants, and public relations machinery. Narration replaces analysis; virtue replaces vision. For three decades, European societies were told that history had ended and that globalization would dissolve geopolitics. The illusion produced intellectual disarmament. For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine or China weaponized trade, the continent was shocked, not because these events were unforeseeable, but because they contradicted its preferred narratives. Strategic communication cannot substitute for strategic comprehension.
This reminds me of the triumph of imagology, as described by Milan Kundera decades ago. I’ve written about the concept many times here; this is Kundera’s 1990 quote:
For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.
From that first link, a remedy of sorts is offered:
To recover agency, Europe must first articulate what it stands for beyond comfort and regulation. The starting point is intellectual: to acknowledge that the new Cold War is not a metaphor but a structural reality. The DragonBear will not dissolve through diplomacy, and America’s patience is not infinite.
Next, Europe must translate awareness into capacity by linking industrial and defense policy, incentivizing capital investment, and embedding innovation within security planning. Dual-use technologies, from AI-driven tools to quantum encryption, should define the next generation of European deterrence.
Finally, Europe must reform its leadership class. Institutions that cannot prioritize or exercise agency will never produce strategy. Renewal will come only with a generational shift, led by those who understand that freedom is not merely inherited, but must be safeguarded, defended, and sustained.
… Without a guiding vision, Europe oscillates between moralism and denial. It preaches multilateralism to a world of blocs, advocates dialogue to adversaries who weaponize it, and confuses consensus with strength. The outcome is strategic drift and irrelevance.
Because the US, like Europe, participated in both WWI and WWII, I think we tend to underestimate how different the US and European experiences were in both wars. Both originated in Europe and much of the damage done was accomplished even before the US entered. The number of deaths in Europe were on a different scale, the physical destruction phenomenal and widespread, the suffering far greater. Even the UK, which was never invaded and conquered, endured a great deal of destruction both physical and economic. In many ways, I don’t think Europe ever has recovered, and this even affects younger generations that experienced nothing of the war.
America only started to lose its confidence with the Vietnam War, and although the left has pushed the idea of shame onto Americans it hasn’t quite taken. Trump is hated by the left in part because he refuses to deal in American shame, but instead invokes American pride.
I don’t see Europe taking the advice offered in that article – at least, not western Europe. Eastern Europe, having experienced life under the Soviets, was forced into accepting reality over imagology to a greater extent.
Yes to all this, and also: Europe must discard the idea that importing an alien culture (Islam) without requiring assimilation to existing European behavioral standards is feasible. Eastern Europe is farther along in recognition of this reality.
Giving suggestions/advice to Europe on what it must do (or might consider doing) in order to survive or even—gasp!—flourish is not going to be very effective if Europe’s elites do NOT wish it to survive, at least not in its traditional/current form.
The question then is, how do the “governed” feel about not surviving (or not surviving in its current form)?
It would seem that the elites are doing practically everything in their grim repertoire of national subversion (or “evolution”—make that “transformation”) to prevent the “governed” from having any real say in the matter.
I guess we’ll have to see what the next elections in several key European countries will look like, assuming those elections won’t be suspended, delayed, truncated or manipulated for reasons of “national security” and/or “to protect DEMOCRACY”…
This was a very worthwhile read. Dan D had linked to it in the Trump/Europe post. Very thankful for Neo and the commenters.
Both originated in Europe and much of the damage done was accomplished even before the US entered.
True enough concerning WW1; but not WW2. The destruction of German cities, the ongoing apocalypse in the Eastern European Bloodlands and the Soviet Union, reached its zenith after America entered the war in December 1941. Remember, the Wehmacht’s advance across Ukraine culminating in the Battle of Stalingrad took place in 1942-43, and the systemic pulverization of German cities by Allied bomber fleets was ratcheting steadily upward during the course of the war, finally causing the collapse of the German economy in the spring of 1945.
The period spanning 1944 through the end of the war in Europe in May 1945 and in Asia in August 1945 may well be reckoned the worst overall (i.e., globally) in human history in terms of the scale and extent of destruction and loss of life.
The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End by Robert Gerwarth is especially relevant concerning the issues associated with the lingering effects of the two world wars on Europe and Europeans.
https://www.amazon.com/Vanquished-Why-First-World-Failed/dp/0374282455
IrishOtter:
That’s exactly why I wrote “much” rather than “most.” Most of the damage obviously was done after the US came into the war. But much was done prior to that.
I think that many Americans are ignorant of history, particularly young ones. But even those who are somewhat aware of history (who are not history buffs, but not entirely ignorant) are unaware of the extent of the damage and carnage prior to the US entry into WWII, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia.
I don’t mean that to refer to you. I know that you are very aware of the history.
@neo: In many ways, I don’t think Europe ever has recovered, and this even affects younger generations that experienced nothing of the war.
Bingo!
Consider further, that before WW 1, Europe was the summit of Western Civilization. After WW 2, devastation.
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And wasn’t it a long way down?
Wasn’t it a strange way down?
–Leonard Cohen, “Dress Rehearsal Rag”
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The scars of history explain more than the history books.
Well , the price of my lunch at the deli keeps going up, but everyone I know who wants a job has a job. From which I infer that it would be crazy for the Fed to loosen monetary policy now. How’s that for grounding in lived reality?
neo:
I didn’t mean my comments as a critque of your post. Rather, my intention was to expand on the subject.
For sure, many Americans, especially the young ones, are ignorant of history. But I will say that in my travels through Europe I have found that the same goes for the younger generations (multiple) of Europe as well. Their knowledge of history tends to be very narrow, and ideologically freighted to a much greater extent than is the case with Americans. For that reason their ignorance is all the more . . . uh . . . ignorant. Young Americans will tell you straight up they don’t know a given historical fact; Europeans will tell you what they think they know but don’t, not really. In my experience, at any rate.
It’s over. The Left tries to hold it off but it’s over
And of course to top it all off, what do the Muslim immigrants know or care about what happened to Europe in 1914-1945 or in 1914-1989 (when the USSR fell). They don’t know, don’t care, much like the parasitic wasp larvae that is injected into the insect or spider host. To the Muslim immigrants the host’s only purpose is to feed them and die. Except of course there is only one host (western Europe). The Poles have no intention to be the hosts to the Muslims. The Danes are catching on. The rest of western Europe, not so much.
Great changes are coming!
‘Narrated world’ and the Kundera passage….I often think of something a wise executive said to me many years ago:
“When you’re running a large organization, you’re not seeing reality…it’s like you’re watching a movie where you only get to see maybe one out of every thousand frames, and from that you have to try and figure out what’s going on”
If this is true of running large organizations, it’s also true…even more true, I would argued…if the citizen and voter in a large and complex society. And that gives the people who choose the viewable frame an enormous amount of power.
om…”And of course to top it all off, what do the Muslim immigrants know or care about what happened to Europe in 1914-1945 or in 1914-1989 (when the USSR fell)”
Antoine de St-Exupery on the passwords and the barbarians:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/74612.html
With the exception of the Dutch, Europeans are smaller than Euro-Americans. My sister, studying in France in 1973, noted that French men are small.
The writer Denise McAlester speaks of women and strong men. Mostly, she looks to muscle, not necessarily personality. Although, from what she said of her spell as an exchange student in Germany (given her age, that was probably around 1985) that she found German men frail, I got some vibes that it may also have been personality. She said, because of this,, she was always on edge until they were getting ready to go home and she was among her “burlier” American classmates. And she could finally “relax into her feminity”.
My wife and I worked with exchange students for more than twenty years. We didn’t send the linebackers. Our average guys were “burlier” than their European counterparts?
But consider the casualties of WW I and WW II. The culling of the breeding stock, millions of young men, of the upper half of healthy and capable gone.
Is it possible a certain macho has left the European personality/culture/politics?
When the widow maker whistles, it can’t mean nothing.