On Ivan Krastev’s “3 Versions of Europe Are Collapsing at the Same Time.”
My commentary below is not an informed critique. It is not a takedown. It is not an opposing op-ed. It is a Facebook rant, copied and pasted verbatim here, written breathlessly and without context on a lazy and self-serving Sunday evening characterized by cynically skimming articles from major foreign policy outlets.
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“I’ve always held that people are inherently selfish, insular, and tribal. Nearly all outlooks seem to fit an Orientalist one. The emergence of this outlook only depends on when, exactly, “othering” becomes acceptable. I’ve had supposed anti-statists, outright anarchists, and hardline liberals repeat a variety of similar tropes. Perhaps my favorite comes from a family member, who suggested with sincere and earnest legitimacy that we might “put the Sufis in power” because the Shia and Sunni populations haven’t been doing so well.
So you can imagine my non-surprise when Foreign Policy publishes this outlook, from an editorially centrist perspective, on what the author believes to be the impending downfall of Europe.
His argument is that migrant policies enacted by European leaders in 2015 strained national systems to a breaking point in what was “Europe’s 9/11,” thus setting off a chain of events which calls into question the future of globalization and the ideological liberal world order.
You’d think such an article would start off with a broad overview of the refugee crisis — that perhaps the author might qualify his outlook by citing displacement from fiercely fought wars in the Middle East. the Assad regime’s wartime policies, after all, were principally responsible for the largest scale of population displacements since World War II, in a systemic effort which forcibly displaced 15 million people, or 70 percent of the country. This is, without even touching on the other upstart conflicts across the past decade, a historically anomalous effort which has caused a historically anomalous displacement.
Yet the author mentions… None of this. He doesn’t take care to mention warfare in the Middle East. He doesn’t take care to mention civil strife throughout Asia. He mentions Syrian refugees, ostensibly the causal factor of his entire argument, exactly one (1) time — in the context of European outlooks on the collective European identity.
People are selfish. Even the virtuous cosmopolitan elite appear to be shamefully tribal.”
Jett Goldsmith
