GLOBSEC,
Bratislava. 14 May. In his famous book Danube Claudio Magris wrote, “History shows that it is not only
senseless and cruel, but it is also difficult to state who is a foreigner”. As the GLOBSEC security policy conference
bustling and bristling around me the high-rollers are rolling up in their
Rollers (well - and inevitably - BMWs these days). Outside the Danube makes its majestic and
serene way. The river runs through
Europe defining both the place and the idea as much as the Rhine albeit with a
sense of the East, a corridor as ever between peace and struggle Indeed, in this new and dangerous age of Machopolitik nowhere in contemporary
Europe’s history has a place more defined peace and freedom than Bratislava. Once on the wrong side of a fearsome border
between liberty and oppression the Cold War was about ten thousand Bratislavas. Today Bratislava is a city of peace on a
river of hope. Will it stay that way or
will history again judge Europe with harsh cruelty?
Last night I made a
remarkable, unremarkable thirty minute journey from Vienna Airport to Bratislava.
As is befitting my lowly station in life
I made the trip not in the back of a luxurious limo but in the back of a
minibus trying (as ever) to explain why we British are not ‘mad’ to French and
German colleagues.
When I was a kid back
in the strategic ice-age of the Cold War when politics and life seemed ever so
sepia-tinted that thirty minute journey would have crossed from one world to
another and would probably not have happened at all. Indeed, the Bratislava border
crossing was so notorious it was a scene in John Le Carré’s spy masterpiece Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Back then the Danube was a tangled metal ribbon
of mine-laden fear and mistrust; a place where trigger-fingers trip-wired the
world for destruction. It was East
glaring at West and the West glaring back.
As Russia seemingly endeavours
again to define its ‘greatness’ through the fear and intimidation it can impose
on other Europeans perhaps the journey I made last night was more pilgrimage
than passage in the hope history really can be changed through partnership and
inspired leadership. Today, Bratislava
is a charming capital of a small central European country that has found its
own place but it is only because big leaders held to big values in the face of
big pressure. Peace was built it did not
simply happen.
This is not just a
lesson for Machopolitik Moscow. Living as I do just down the road from
Brussels the smell of cynical self-interest dressed up as ‘Europe’ wafts daily
over me. To discover ‘Europe’ today one
has to come here and then move east.
Western Europe has become such a ‘whatever’ place; tired of itself,
tired of its leaders and their endless pointless drivel and tired of the false hope
and false ideas so many of them peddle.
‘Europe’ today has
become so IKEA. Instead of confronting
change and crisis little people struggle instead with little flat packs of little
problems hoping against hope that heat rather than light will lead Europe
forward. They spend their time on trying to put together little things that do
not fit very well with screws loose and nuts missing.
Sadly, the ability and
the will of political leaders to see the real issues and act on them are
rare. They simply lack the requisite
vision and courage to confront crises and instead lose themselves in a welter of
self-justifying spin so dense that the distinction between truth and falsehood
is lost in a thousand sound-bites.
Today, the road to
Bratislava is no longer blocked by checkpoints of chastising ideological chill
but it is still pitted with the potholes of short-term, self-interested pretence. The current crisis in which a European
country is again being dismembered by pitiless power has demonstrated that
there can be no IKEA fix. This is a big
moment demanding big leadership.
Therefore, if Europe is
to win its new battle with Machopolitik Europeans must again remember the road
to Bratislava. Europeans must instead
return to the first principles of freedom that in the end made that journey
possible driven the will to defend them.
History is only
senseless and cruel if the politics and strategy that make history are driven
by short-term prescriptions in which the easy politics of the moment trumps strategy
and security. In standing up to Greater
Russia it is time for all Europeans as Europe to stand tall and resist the
precedents of macho power Moscow is seeking to re-establish in Europe. Fail and it will not simply be the poor
people of Ukraine who suffer the consequences.
The very idea of ‘Europe’ will have been demonstrated a hollow, empty lie
– a good-time gamble unable and unwilling to stand up for the very values and
interests it claims as its heritage.
Then indeed history will
be cruel in its judgement everybody will again be a foreigner.
Julian Lindley-French
