A few days ago, I had the opportunity to address members of the European Parliament. Many of the things I said will sound familiar to regular readers of my column, but I believe I was able to deepen some of my thoughts, and would like to share them with you here.
Revolutions make for fascinating case studies in hindsight. We like to imagine them as eruptions of grand philosophical discontent, the oppressed masses rising against an unjust order in the name of some great principle. And there is always a philosophical dimension lurking in the background. But the spark that actually ignites a revolution is often far more mundane than historians care to admit.
The winter of 1788 was the coldest in France in 300 years. The harvest was catastrophic. There was genuine hunger in the country by the spring of 1789. At the same time, France was bankrupt, having spent itself into ruin financing the American Revolutionary War — a morally admirable decision that left the treasury empty. The proposed solution was higher taxes, which then, as now, enjoyed precisely zero popularity. Inflation, the threat of increased taxation, and a population whose daily existence was becoming materially worse: These were the conditions that made the storming of the Bastille possible. The February Revolution of 1917 operated on the same principle. Its slogan was not “Workers of the world, unite” but something considerably more basic: “Bread and peace.”
For those who inhabit the higher echelons of European society, concerns about electricity bills and the price of bread may seem remote. They are not remote for a significant portion of the population. And the conditions are deteriorating. In Germany, new taxes are being proposed while energy infrastructure faces disruption on multiple fronts. With the Strait of Hormuz crisis constraining global oil flows and attacks on Russian energy infrastructure potentially removing 40 per cent of Russian export capacity from the market, a significant inflationary shock is heading toward Europe in the coming weeks. This is not a prediction requiring sophisticated modelling; it is arithmetic.
The comparison Europeans hear most frequently is with the 1930s — the spectre of fascism, the return of the far Right. This comparison has its uses as a political weapon, but as historical analysis it misses the mark. The more accurate parallel is 1789 or 1917: Societies in which the economic contract between rulers and ruled is breaking down, and in which the institutions that hold nations together are losing their capacity to do so. What holds many European countries together today is not national solidarity, not shared identity, not cultural cohesion. It is the welfare state. The postmodern neoliberal dream was that cooperation would be sustained by economic interest alone. You do not need to share a language or a culture with your neighbour; you need to do business with him. If he prospers, you prosper, and there is no reason to fight. This was the foundational logic of the European Union, and to a certain extent the logic of globalisation itself. The problem is that this arrangement works until it does not. When the economic bargain ceases to deliver, what remains to sustain solidarity?
One of the great promises of Western civilisation was social mobility — the idea that a child born at the bottom could, through talent and effort, rise to the top. This required certain preconditions, chief among them access to quality education. In a school in Graz, Austria’s second-largest city, five out of 170 pupils have German as their mother tongue. The headmaster attends parent-teacher evenings with a bodyguard — the school janitor, reassigned to a dual function. These five Austrian children will not receive a good education. Their teachers cannot teach because the classroom has become a space for language remediation rather than learning. The promise of social mobility is being withdrawn from the very population it was designed to serve, and the discomfort this generates is migrating steadily from what was once considered the political fringe toward the centre of European societies.
The distinction that matters here, and that the political class refuses to acknowledge, is between evolution and transformation. All societies evolve. Germany today is different from Germany in 1925, which was different from Germany in 1825. This is natural, and no serious person objects to it. But what is occurring across much of Western Europe is not evolution. It is transformation — a fundamental alteration of the composition, character, and self-understanding of entire nations, undertaken without consultation and defended with the argument that change has always happened. The argument is technically true and substantively dishonest. A man who ages and grows and changes over decades remains recognisably himself to his family. A man who undergoes involuntary surgery to become someone else does not.
The Left is effective at framing transformation as mere evolution, at insisting that societies have always changed and that resistance to change is reactionary. But the framing contains a logical contradiction that is rarely examined. The same voices that demand more diversity simultaneously insist, when diversity produces friction, that all people are fundamentally the same. If all people are the same, diversity is a meaningless concept. If they are genuinely different, then the character of a society changes when its composition changes. Both propositions cannot be true at once, and the refusal to choose between them is not sophistication. It is incoherence.
Conservatives have spent decades making one critical error: The belief that winning elections is sufficient. As long as voters choose the right party, the argument went, politics will take care of the rest. Culture, universities, media, the institutions that shape the next generation and determine the terms of public discourse — all of these were left uncontested. The consequence is that positions which were entirely mainstream 40 or 60 years ago are now treated as evidence of extremism. The positions did not change. The Zeitgeist shifted so far that what was once the centre is now classified as the fringe. Whether European societies can correct this imbalance before the economic and cultural pressures produce something more dramatic than electoral shifts remains, to put it mildly, an open question.
The revolution that never comes