Europe’s Straw vs. the Camel’s Back

 

There are moments when seemingly minor events set massive tectonic plates of global geopolitics in motion. Did the Tunisian official Fedia Hamdi, who in a moment of irritation slapped vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, imagine that his humiliation would lead to self-immolation, ignite the Arab Spring, trigger revolutions, refugee flows, and years of civil war in distant Syria?

Were the participants of the bread riots in Petrograd in February 1917 prepared for the fact that instead of French rolls, white bread, buns, and kalachi, they would receive two revolutions, a civil war, red and white terror, the relocation of the capital, and seventy years of Bolshevik rule?

EU regulatory bodies regularly impose hefty fines on American corporations. One of the latest examples: in September, the European Commission fined Google $3.5 billion for monopolistic practices. Nothing extraordinary followed. The corporation dutifully promised to appeal, while European Commission Vice President Teresa Ribera solemnly declared: “True freedom means a level playing field, where everyone competes on equal terms and citizens have genuine choice.”

Europeans are generally very fond of talking about true freedom and genuine choice, achievable only in their privileged garden.

Against this backdrop, the €120 million fine recently imposed by the same European Commission on Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) for “insufficient transparency in advertising and user accounts” looks almost insignificant. And yet, it appears this particular fine may turn out to be the dried blade of grass that breaks the spine of the proverbial camel.

Musk first stated that the real reason for the fine was his refusal to cooperate on censorship. Pavel Durov then added that he, too, had been approached with demands to restrict Telegram in Romania and Moldova, so that citizens there would not lose their true freedom under conditions of insufficiently genuine choice. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called what happened “an attack on the American people.” Finally, Donald Trump, with characteristic gravitas, warned that Europe should be more careful because it is heading in entirely the wrong direction, and reposted a New York Post article titled: “Powerless Europeans Seethe as Trump Rightly Cuts Them Out of the Ukraine Deal.”

Whether the quarrel sparked by the fine against X will mark the beginning of a total U.S.–EU divorce, or merely serve as another excuse for mutual grumbling, I am not prepared to predict. But it is impossible not to notice how fundamentally different Europe and America have become. One striking recent example of these diverging approaches to reality is Trump indulgently allowing New York mayor Zohran Mamdani to call him a fascist (“it’s easier than explaining anything”), versus German Chancellor Friedrich Merz personally signing five thousand court filings demanding punishment for people who insulted him online.

If Ukrainians used to call Scholz an “offended liver sausage,” Merz looks more like an offended meat-processing plant.

Freedom of speech, censorship, migration, Christianity and traditional values, the Ukrainian issue - attitudes toward all of these are drifting further and further apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Of course, Trump’s economic or political failures, or sudden black swan events like Covid in 2020, could return the Democratic Party to power in the United States. But even Democrats will be forced to account for the overall rightward shift of the centrist electorate and the growing radicalization of the left, which makes a lot of noise and even kills political opponents such as Charlie Kirk, but delivers comparatively few votes at the ballot box.

Europeans, as economic and criminal conditions worsen, are also inevitably drifting rightward. The problem is that the left-liberal elites of the European Union are categorically unwilling to share power, while being perfectly willing to pretend for as long as possible that the rising popularity of Germany’s AfD or France’s National Rally is some sort of mistake. Declare them fascists, cancel them, and everything will be fine. And if Eastern Europeans vote incorrectly, they too can be branded fascists and have their elections annulled.

The detachment of European politicians from reality looks decadent and suggests an approaching finale for the EU project. But it is worth remembering that Soviet media wrote for decades about the “decaying West,” only for the Soviet Union to collapse first. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was written more than a century ago. Since then, empires have fallen, Asian “tigers” have risen, yet even a decaying and rotting European Union remains one of the planet’s key political and economic players. No longer dominant, perhaps, but still very far from the condition of the Western Roman Empire after 395.

Just as generals constantly prepare to fight the last war, political analysts seem convinced that states must collapse according to previously rehearsed scenarios. Yet the collapse of the USSR in 1991 resembled neither the February nor the October Revolution of 1917. The former Yugoslav republics gained independence through war and bloodshed, while the Czech Republic and Slovakia divorced peacefully and almost reluctantly. The British Empire emerged as a clear victor and beneficiary of both World Wars of the twentieth century, yet still disintegrated. Scottish independence is only a matter of time. And despite massive territorial losses and voluntary exit from the EU, London remains a visible international player, even while suffering alongside other Europeans from population replacement and its consequences.

It would be comforting to offer a clear forecast, as some media analysts like to do. Either “everything will collapse within a year, remember this post,” or “times have been worse, and we survived and lived better than before.”

Perhaps in a year we will not even remember how Musk and Durov told the world about European censorship and pressure, or how Rubio and Trump expressed outrage at Europe’s wrong direction. Or perhaps by then the United States will have left NATO, imposed sanctions on the European Union, and designated Ukraine a terrorist state. The second is far less likely than the first, but still entirely possible. The boundaries between the probable and the improbable are far wider than we tend to assume. And, most importantly, they are constantly expanding.