A European Mission
Tags: European Union, Germany, Progress, Timothy Snyder, Europe

The flag of the Council of Europe, later adopted by the European Union

I started working on this blog two months after I moved from Texas (USA) to Germany. Since I announced my planned departure, I have been bombarded by the obvious and understandable question…why?? Afterall, I had many great friends in Texas (including an amazing best friend), earned a good salary in a company with amazing coworkers and supervisors where I both contributed and felt appreciated, I thrived in the sunny Texan weather, and had a good thing going with a splendid lady. Then why dedicate time and effort to learning German then start anew across the pond? I was going to write down the answer here but I remembered a short video by the historian Professor Timothy Snyder, which summarized well many of my core beliefs. Overall, I recommend consuming everything you can put your hands (and eyes) on from Professor Snyder, for he is both a great human and intellectual. The link of the video is below but I provide the transcript here as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLQbVA712jo&feature=share

The opening quote in German reads: “ Europeans have the best standard of living but they suffer from a mood of pessimism and downfall. How do these two things go hand in hand?”

Prof Timothy Snyder:

“I guess first of all, I would point out that: being happy isn’t necessarily the goal in life, it might just be that it is normal for there to be a contrast between objectively having a good life and subjectively asking the big questions and worrying about the big things.

And I tend to think that the answer to this problem is not worrying about happiness, but the answer to this problem would instead be giving Europeans some kind of a goal. So in other words, I don’t think what is missing from Europe are the objective conditions of happiness, pretty much everywhere you look it is a better place to live than the USA or anywhere else. I think what is missing actually is the thing which makes both happiness and unhappiness meaningful; that is a sense of where things are going. The striking thing about Europe today, is not that people are unhappy, the striking thing about Europe today is that people have zero imagination about the future. That for me -if you wanna talk about the Untergang [Doom in German]..that is the Untergang, not our mood, who cares about our mood, who cares about your mood, who cares how you feel…really, the real Untergang is the loss of a future. For 250 years since the Enlightenment, Europeans have been very good in thinking about possible futures, and now suddenly in the last 10 years or so, they’ve stopped cold and the future has disappeared entirely. I think that is the real problem. And I think that the way for Europeans to feel better, would be for political discourse to shift from the direction of all the things that we are vaguely afraid of, into the direction we can change the world. Or to put it in a different way, I don’t think it matters to people that they have the best living quality in the world, I think there is zero Europeans who wake up and say ‘you know what darling, we have the best living quality in the world, we live so much better here that people in Pakistan or New Zealand’, I think no European says that. I think what people want to have is some sense of where things are going, I think that is the crucial thing, not so much the best living quality in the world but rather a sense of achievement, it is not that we live better but we could make the world better, for me that is the big missing opportunity, because Europe broadly speaking actually could lead the way in addressing all of the major problems we face in the 21st century, the capabilities are there and even the policies are often there, and the big issues such as global warming, monopoly, and digital human rights, Europe has taken the initiative, but no one thinks about that as responding to or overcoming a big challenge, and I think that might be the way things have to turn, to say being part of Europe is not just about having a longest vacations or the best sex or whatever, but being European is being part of this larger entity which is actually facing down challenges and making the future different and better than it might have been.”

Splendidly said by Prof. Snyder! In short, I too believe in European norms and institutions, and as Prof. Snyder puts it elsewhere, the European Union is the best answer we have come up with (to date) to the question of “what to do after empire?”. In contrast, most of the other major players on the world stage are still operating as empires: The US mainly militarily, China an empire through debt with militarism here and there, and Russia’s constant attempts to undermine democracy wherever it can is second to none (with the US being a close contender for that matter). I am not painting a rosy picture of the current condition of the EU, as it indeed needs a lot of reform to get out of its current limbo, and into the direction of either more Europe (hopefully) or less Europe. However, the progress that has been achieved (and the dire state of current alternatives) leaves me some room for optimism.

If I can summarize how I hope to conduct and to have conducted my life is as a campaign against both complacency and cynicism. Russian media would want you to believe that all leaders are the same and all the shades of corruption and tyranny are the same black. Tax evasion or biased media is in no way, shape, or form comparable to annexing neighboring territories, oligarchy, and assassination of political opponents and journalists. So when I say that Europe and the European Union can serve as a role model, I don’t mean that things are perfect there, but that when tyrants say you should just obey them as the way they do things is business as usual in the rest of world, when they say that then one has another model of governing to point and aspire to. Ultimately, I want to be a part of the European project that can serve as a role model for other world nations and also help alleviate some of the most pressing challenges facing human civilization.

So that is about Europe, but why Germany specifically? I remember many people asking me, well if you don’t like living in the US, why not move to Canada, Singapore, Switzerland, the Netherlands, or New Zealand? Well…It is a matter of personal taste but for me (if I am allowed a bit of an exaggeration here), living comfortably in a country that exerts minimal influence on the world, is almost the definition of hell to me. Remember Prof. Snyder’s point above that “being happy is not necessarily the goal in life”? Being a part of a country, say like the Netherlands, would be considered being “part of the European project”. However, maybe part of me hopes that I can exert myself, stretch my current abilities, and manage to play a role in shaping the politics of my new home. And which is the most influential country in the EU, whose main political figure was called “the leader of the free world” upon the election of Donald Trump? You guessed it, Germany! It is no surprise that many of both the successes and failures of the EU are attributed mainly to Germany, so for better or worse, what starts in Germany changes the EU. On a more personal note, some of Germany’s positions put an “anti-cynicism” smile on my face: the role of Germany during the 2015 refugee crisis, German ban on arms sales to Saudia Arabia in the aftermath of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the huge investment from the German government (i.e., Tax Payers) into solar energy, which set market forces into motion and eventually led to the worldwide drastic reduction in costs of solar panels we see today…just to name a few examples.

While the idea of erecting a role model (be it Germany or Europe generally) resonates with me, turns out it is not such an original idea after all. I was quite delighted to run into this letter from Garibaldi (one of Italy’s “fathers of the fatherland”) to German unification pioneer Karl Blind, regarding the potential role of a unified Germany in the 19th century as a world leader/role model (sadly things end up playing out very differently):

“The progress of humanity seems to have come to a halt, and you with your superior intelligence will know why. The reason is that the world lacks a nation which possesses true leadership. Such leadership, of course, is required not to dominate other peoples, but to lead them along the path of duty, to lead them toward the brotherhood of nations where all the barriers erected by egoism will be destroyed. We need the kind of leadership which, in the true tradition of medieval chivalry, would devote itself to redressing wrongs, supporting the weak, sacrificing momentary gains and material advantage for the much finer and more satisfying achievement of relieving the suffering of our fellow men. We need a nation courageous enough to give us a lead in this direction. It would rally to its cause all those who are suffering wrong or who aspire to a better life, and all those who are now enduring foreign oppression.

This role of world leadership, left vacant as things are today, might well be occupied by the German nation. You Germans, with your grave and philosophic character, might well be the ones who could win the confidence of others and guarantee the future stability of the international community. Let us hope, then, that you can use your energy to overcome your moth-eaten thirty tyrants of the various German states. Let us hope that in the center of Europe you can then make a unified nation out of your fifty millions. All the rest of us would eagerly and joyfully follow you.”

Let’s leave the outside world for a second and turn our gaze a bit inwards with the same question…why? What is wrong with leading a somewhat decent life with a good career in a place that feels like home? Why the aspiration for more change on a much grander scale? To put it in the least glorified terms…maybe I just despise “waste”…wasted efforts, time, and resources. It is the twin sister of my instinct for order that makes me want to make the volume of the TV an even number or better, a multiple of ten! I just want to see the world in the best possible order with the least amount of “waste” to get us there. People who know me would describe me of being contrived or scheming, a title that I wear proudly on my chest! As an existentialist, I believe it is up to us and only us to forge our path in this world, we are getting no helping hand from a god nor would the vibrations of the universe help us achieve our goals somehow. If one considers this idea with some seriousness, the simple implication is “things won’t get better unless you make them”. Order is not the natural state of the universe and one shouldn’t expect things to just fall in place. Of course it wouldn’t be a piece of writing from yours truly if I didn’t drag Nietzsche into this. To quote a passage I really enjoyed from Laurence Lampert’s An interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

“ The historic responsibility to bring an end that gruesome rule of nonsense and chance that has been called ‘History’ till now differs from the responsibility assigned to man by Hegel or Marx, because it is not the case that the world has been unfolding as it should, or that the best order is being actualized by History.

Superintended by neither a spiritual nor a materialistic dialectic, human history is subject to mere accident and the accidents that governed the appearance of the present imperil the future. Zarathustra and his disciples are not permitted the luxury of mere observation; because they have on their conscience the whole future of mankind, they must intervene.”

I leave you with a hopeful wish about the man and woman of the future from Nietzsche himself:

“This man [sic] of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; … this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness — he [sic] must come one day.”