Why Europe will not return to the pre-war era and what new challenges await it
As World War II raged in Europe in the early 1940s, Stefan Zweig’s memoir Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European) was published by a German exile publisher in Stockholm.
Zweig, full of sorrow, describes the "rupture of time" that brought the old Europe to an end in the fury of two terrible world wars.
It is worth recalling that America’s previous withdrawal from the continent created a fatal opening for radical ideologies and hateful propaganda.
Under Hitler and the Nazis, extreme nationalists, glorifiers of violence and racism, enemies of democracy, and ardent supporters of dictatorship decided that their moment had come.
Read more about the dangerous "fracture of time" now confronting Europe and the United States in the column by Joschka Fischer, Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister of Germany (1998–2005): A new reality for Europe: a world with war but without US support.
Where do we stand today? That is the question Fischer raises.
"Russia has not only launched a war of conquest and annihilation against Ukraine but also begun to test NATO’s willingness to defend its airspace with drone intrusions into Poland and Romania, and fighter planes flying over Estonia," Fischer writes.
Still, while US statements of solidarity have often sounded rather weak since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, it would be a mistake to say that the situation is comparable to a world war.
At the same time, he warns that Trump may well fear an escalation of the Ukraine war into a major conflagration, but his approach is raising the odds of precisely that outcome.
"His administration’s policy of appeasement toward the Kremlin and aggression toward European allies has obviously encouraged Putin to push even harder," Fischer notes.
According to him, Russian President Vladimir Putin sees an opportunity to reshape – with Trump’s (voluntary or involuntary) help – the world order in his favor. In Fischer’s view, Europe is the first port of call for his revisionist strategy, because it is militarily weak and indecisive, and it can no longer count fully on America.
Europeans lived well and safely in the world of yesterday, Fischer argues, but we neglected the duties that arose with our growing prosperity. Everything changed when Trump arrived, declaring, in effect.
"The land of the free" is transforming into an oligarchic autocracy before our eyes. The endless flow of decrees from the White House has fundamentally changed America’s place in the world," the former foreign minister warns.
He stresses that a world without a powerful, democratic America would be fundamentally different, and unquestionably worse.
"Like Zweig, I cannot shake off the impression that the sun is setting on us. Something is definitely coming to an end.
My attachment to the idea of the transatlantic West, and to an image of America as a bastion of freedom, democracy, and security, has been deep and lifelong. But that was the world of yesterday," Fischer concludes.