LAST week, the so-called far right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won 44% of the vote, causing concern and even alarm among the German and European Union (EU) establishments. For years, they have tried to marginalize the party only for it to continue growing.
For many in Europe and the Western World, the AFD is not just a political party; it is something primal reasserting itself.
Since the fall of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), and even before that, Western Europe has framed its interests in abstract universal terms, such as liberal values, human rights or the rule of law. This is in contrast to many countries outside the Western World which framed their national sovereignty in terms of raw self-interest, occasionally with the hint of ethnic or even religious chauvinism.
That is not to say European countries have never been chauvinistic in diplomacy or international relations, but they always framed their actions as serving a higher abstract ideal. This tendency arose from the traumas of the two world wars, and was the physical manifestation of the phrase “never again.”
This tendency was further subsidized by the American military and an era of relative peace that began in the 1990s.
Peace, wealth and subsidies allowed the Europeans to create institutions that were based on utopian assumptions. Those assumptions believed in the end of history and rejected all strains of European self-interest, which in turn lead to technocracy, offshoring and mass immigration. The AFD and other European parties like it, oppose all that, asserting that European self-interest – in whatever way it is defined – is valid.
Still, the AFD’s victory is not an outright majority, and it’s worth mentioning that the Nationalist party in Sweden failed in the latest elections, but who knows how things change in the future. The more the European establishments try to subsume European concerns and issues beneath layers of abstraction and technocratic humanism, the more intense the pressure will build.
This is because the Utopian European system built after the end of the Cold War cannot continue in a world which is returning to Great Power Competition./PN
