Still from Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse.What should Europe do in order to survive its ‘darkest hour’ ahead of a European Parliamentary election that might deliver a stunning victory for those forces that oppose even the idea of the European Parliament itself? How can progressive intellectuals save ourselves from irrelevance and unearth the ideas that can relaunch values we have taken for granted for too long?
A spectre is, in fact, haunting Europe. Populists and sovereigntists are becoming the nightmare of the traditional European political parties, which are either melting away like the SPD in Germany, the Socialists in France, and the Democratic Party in Italy, or are in great trouble like the CDU in Germany or the People’s Party in Spain.
However, the real threat to those establishments are not movements that are too intellectually empty and too wideranging to present a coherent alternative theory to liberalism and to how the world has been governed thus far. The threat is their own intellectual obsolescence. Not one real idea, not even a small piece of strategy has been put forward so far by what used to be the European élites, by their think tanks, and academic circles. Consequently, any western intelligentsias have lost their footing: no longer can they make sense and communicate the complexity of our world, nor do they offer solutions or even visions of a future in which all can thrive.
