Starting point: Values and reality – the dialectic of enlightenment

Describing the world as it is, does not prevent us from imagining the world as it should be. Often, a contradiction is constructed between the two perspectives. A good example is Herfried Münkler’s book about a disintegrating world order with a prognostic ambition, published in 2023 when few imagined Trump’s return as a real alternative (Münkler 2023). The book is explicitly programmatic in its ambition to describe the world as it was and is, and to dismiss questions about how it could, might or should be. Normative issues are not addressed, and thus alternatives disappear from history and future thinking. On this basis, the author expresses his ambition to make a forecast of what the world will look like and outlines a world order based on five major blocs: the United States, Europe, China, Russia and India. The Pentagon has a bipolar dimension with the United States and Europe against China and Russia, with some uncertainty about where India will end up.

The point here is not to note that developments under Trump took a different direction a few years after Münkler made his forecast. This is a situation that every forecast risks ending up in, as the future is essentially unpredictable due to the constant emergence of new elements that change the familiar patterns that repeat themselves. The criticism here concerns Münkler’s rejection of visions and alternatives. Münkler’s prediction of a US-European bloc in a bipolar pentagon is today proving to be precisely the daydream he wants to reject. His prediction was also a vision. The true historian deals with reality as it really was and, on that basis, makes predictions about the future through trend projections, while visions of alternative futures are made by daydreamers. This distinction does not hold up, and the irony is that Münkler himself demonstrates this. The argument here is that the distinction between wie es eigentlich gewesen, the mapping of reality, does not take place in a value-free space, that the selection of facts is value-based, and that value-based thinking about the future is part of reality. The argument is also that it is possible to have a public conversation about values and reality in an objective and intersubjective manner, and to see the future as alternative futures, rejecting the insane rhetoric surrounding concepts such as false truth and faked facts that have accompanied the ravages of Trumpism. This is different from blind faith in the future as trend projection without values.

In a dark time marked by revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the romantic poet and bishop Esaias Tegnér wrote in his poem Det eviga (The Eternal) that the strong shape their world with the sword and that rumours of their strength fly like eagles, but that ‘what violence may create is precarious and short-lived, it dies away like a storm wind in the desert.’ The right, the true and the beautiful were the contrasting values that stood for eternity. Of course, no one today takes Tegnér at his word, either that violence is a brief interlude or that the right and the true endure. But like a dream in turbulent times, the poem was real. It expressed a need to imagine an alternative world. It therefore belongs in the discussion about how things really were. When it comes to the true, the right and the beautiful, these are values that cannot be defined unambiguously and definitively, but must be filled with substance, and that substance is often controversial and changes over time. But as containers to be continuously filled with content, they exist. The normative is part of reality.

Until very recently, there was relative agreement on this in the Western world. Democracy was a definitive form of government with institutions and norms for transforming conflicts into compromises, balancing minority rights and the legitimacy of majority decisions within a normative framework that was as important as the institutions within that framework. There were criteria and ideals of objectivity, but also an understanding that the objective and the true could be seen from different perspectives and, in that sense, were not absolute. But they were fully usable for public debate. The different views formed the basis for the debate. They both united and divided the public. Ultimately, it was about belief in the Enlightenment and in modernity as progress. Democratic theory is normative theory

After two world wars and the Holocaust, there was, of course, an awareness that the values of the Enlightenment were not always followed and that there were periods when they were thrown overboard. Enlightenment philosophy painted an ideal picture. The idea of progress could also lead to developments other than industrialisation for ever better living conditions. Industrialisation was based on the exploitation of people and the plundering of raw materials in poor countries through colonialism and imperialism. In Hitler’s Germany, the railways, which were a cornerstone of prosperity-creating industrialism, provided transport services to the gas chambers. This was not an automatic, predetermined consequence of industrialism, but the result of human decisions and actions. It should be added here that democracy and prosperity did not automatically follow industrialisation either but were the result of human conflicts and struggles that were based on and led to decisions and actions.

Although the downsides of industrialisation and modernisation were well known, they came to full expression in the First World War, with the Holocaust being an absolute zero point tending towards minus 273 degrees. Three generations later, and in the wake of further genocides, the shock effect has worn off. It is difficult to mentally transport oneself back to the years around 1945, when more and more of the Holocaust became public knowledge. In 1947, the German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno, who were in exile in the United States, published Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was a revised version of a text they had already circulated among friends and colleagues in 1944 under the title Philosophical Fragments (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947). The question they addressed was how the Enlightenment could have failed to such an extent that it had been turned into its opposite, how what the answer to myths and superstition was once had been transformed into a new gigantic myth under intertwined names such as fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis, the culture industry and mass consumption did not lead to the emancipation of humanity, but to its subjugation, resulting in totalitarianism and new forms of barbarism and social power in a development to which conventional theory had no answer. According to Marx, the contradictions of capitalist society between the conditions of production and the productive forces would be resolved through world revolution. The liberal market economy, once associated with individual autonomy and competition between private entrepreneurs, had instead of world revolution ended up in a centrally planned system of state power and capital concentration. The hope for social revolution had resulted in fascism, National Socialism and Stalinism. As Jürgen Habermas noted, critical theory, as developed in the wake of Marx, had nothing left to appeal to when the productive forces and the relations of production had entered into a highly toxic symbiosis instead of breaking the chain that held them together (Habermas 1982). Horkheimer and Adorno spoke of the regression of reason when National Socialism developed into something resembling the very forms of superstition and myth from which the Enlightenment had emerged as a result of the belief in historical progression, in the idea of progress. The Enlightenment ultimately bit its own tail.

Horkheimer and Adorno saw one reason for this derailment in the mass culture surrounding industrially produced cultural products, films, radio programmes and magazines, which homogenised thinking and manipulated mass societies into docility and passivity. Radio was a mass medium that did not allow listeners any opportunity to respond, as was the case with the telephone. Listeners were no longer subjects but passive recipients exposed to authoritarian messages with the same programmes from different broadcasters. One thinks here of the Third Reich’s propaganda machine under Göbbels. One could add that a levelling nihilistic tendency was embedded in the pattern that spread far beyond Hitler’s Germany and long after the Holocaust. Against the backdrop of the digital revolution and the power of algorithms, we seem to be facing a version 2.0 of what Horkheimer and Adorno described.

Horkheimer and Adorno link the failure of the Enlightenment project to anti-Semitism, which they saw as a reaction to the inherent contradictions of capitalism and bourgeois society. The Jews as a general scapegoat were a projection of feelings of alienation and powerlessness in the wake of mass cultural levelling. Those who harboured these feelings, unable to confront their causes, externalised them by identifying a representative physical object that could absorb them: the Jews. The persecution of the Jews was a symptom of the unresolved contradictions and pathologies of modern society.

There is a pessimistic undertone to The Dialectic of Enlightenment. But the book does not describe a negative teleology and is not an expression of deterministic thinking. The authors see critical theory as an opportunity to respond to the excesses and risks of derailment of the Enlightenment. There is room for action, however large or small, through radical criticism of the implementation of Enlightenment thinking and the social conditions that lead to its excesses. The future is essentially open. Here, one could add that the basic critical idea is built into the Enlightenment project itself, pace Kant.

The dark Enlightenment: appalling theoretical humbug

As for the scapegoat theory, religious anthropologist René Girard took the ideas in directions quite different from critical theory. Girard was the mentor of tech oligarch Peter Thiel, who in turn is a kind of philosophical-religious mentor to Vice President Vance (Stråth 2025 a). Girard linked the scapegoat to mimetic theory. Man is an imitative figure. Imitation has an anthropological character. Everyone’s competition with everyone else to become equal ends in everyone’s war against everyone else. Only the scapegoat can restore peace and order. But like Adorno and Horkheimer, Girard was not a determinist. The desire to imitate does not necessarily mean that humans are naturally evil. In principle, humans are good because of their extreme openness towards others, the other side of the drive to imitate. Imitation also means learning from others and sharing. Life is a learning process. The idea that humanity is hereditarily violent is as impossible as the claim that it is hereditarily good, writes Girard. If violence and war were driven by biologically determined drives, humans would be unable to restrain aggression, which they are not.They are neither evil nor good, but both. In the anthropology of the devout Catholic Girard, one sees the irresolvable tension between humans as the image of God and as apostates.

 Against this backdrop, it is difficult to understand how Girard has become a reference point for the peculiar front of reactionary ideas that frames and inspires Trumpism in the United States and radical right-wing movements far beyond the United States. In a short, concise article, literary critic Ijoma Mangold has summarised Thiel’s bizarre worldview, libertarian and reactionary, without any conflict of objectives between them, inspired by but distorting Girard (Mangold 2025). Girard’s mimetic desire does not mean that people primarily strive for material imitation where what they strive for has intrinsic value, but rather that they desire what others desire because others want it. We are talking about fashion trends. Desire is insatiable and a strong social driving force. Therefore, for Girard, the source of violence is not differences but similarities between people. Mangold mentions the example of China. In 2007, the year before the neoliberal collapse, everyone saw how China had become increasingly similar to the West through globalisation and assumed that the world had therefore become more peaceful. Girard warned that China’s adaptation was, on the contrary, the beginning of a violent rivalry. Girard was originally inspired to develop his theory by Shakespeare and the tragedy Romeo and Juliet, in which the relationship between two equal families ended in deadly hatred. But it was not through the literary history of Shakespeare, but through the algorithms of social media that the theory would be implemented. There, comparisons with others multiplied at an accelerating pace, as did the tendency to do not because one wants to, but because others do and in order to impress others. Physical desires are about utility. Mental desires are about identity. Thiel understood early on how to capitalise on a basic human instinct and invested in Facebook. Social media is a profitable identity industry, where identity crises and conflicts arise when everyone is equal without distinction from others.

But despite huge profits, Thiel despises the human drive to imitate, which prevents independent thinking and originality. His attitude is somewhat ‘armoured and Teflon-like, as if he did not want to let the levelling thoughts of others get too close to him’ (Mangold 2025). Competition is only for losers. The true innovator builds a market that he or she dominates as a monopolist. Only the simple-minded expose themselves to profit-reducing competition with similar products. Nietzsche’s superman rises above the competitive struggle of desire and takes Girard’s theory in new directions. In Thiel’s view, universities are places of mental conformity. Against the backdrop of the global situation, more voices are calling for some form of world government as the only salvation from the threat of nuclear destruction or total climate collapse, e.g. a revamped UN. For Thiel, this would be a totalitarian solution. Totalitarian in undue competition with Thiel’s totalitarian monopolism, one must add. But he refuses to see his own monopolism as totalitarian. A world government would be the Antichrist, the figure who, according to the Bible, precedes the apocalypse, a figure whom frightened people throw themselves into the arms of simply because he promises peace and security. Supranational organisations are anathema to Thiel. He combines his belief in the beneficial effects of monopoly for technological avant-gardism with his belief in eternal life made possible by technology rather than any divinity. Cryopreservation and algorithmic bio-enhancement are the means to eternal life. But not as a mass remedy for everyone, only for the chosen few, the techno-oligarchs with superhuman traits, capital and knowledge, whose genes must be passed on to planet Earth or in a spaceship for neocolonisation. As a self-declared Christian, he believes in the resurrection of the flesh. Therefore, according to Thiel, who seeks to be both a literal Bible-believing Christian and the most radical advocate of all for technological progress, the deep freezing of the body is necessary in order to be able to be completely revived in the future in the spirit of Christian teaching. The dark thinking in the fog surrounding Peter Thiel, who is indeed a supporter of dark enlightenment, works with contrasts (Mangold 2025).

Thiel’s goal is to destroy democracy, which has led too many people to think freely and caused chaos. Democracy is free competition, in stark contrast to Thiel’s monopoly fantasy. Evil – democracy, the Antichrist – began with the Enlightenment. Thiel is waging a war against the modern Enlightenment project. What he calls dark enlightenment is a counter-revolution with ideals from a pre-modern era where autocracy reigned. Thiel brings to mind Joseph de Maestre (1753-1821) and his defence of l’Ancien Régime against Enlightenment ideas and thoughts about the counter-revolution.

How should we understand Peter Thiel’s fascination with Girard? René Girard (1923-2015) attracted some academic attention with his 1972 book La violence et le sacré, which is an anthropological analysis of religious narratives about sacrifice and violence in archaic societies. The period under investigation ends at the time of the biblical Gospels. Archaic violence arises because people desire things that others possess. This desire leads to a levelling conflict, everyone against everyone, which ends with a scapegoat. Killing the scapegoat restores peace. Girard followed up with a second book (Girard 1978), a discussion with two psychologists about mimetic violence, violence resulting from man’s tendency to imitate, which he established as an anthropological category. Girard became a respected anthropologist and a member of the Academie Française in 2005, but in the 1990s, when Peter Thiel came into contact with him, he was more of a lone wolf who drew strength from swimming against the tide as he explored how everyone else was swimming with it. Since the 1970s, the social sciences had belonged to the postmodernists and poststructuralists, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida and others, the main figures in what was called French theory. Girard sought to distinguish himself from them. The title of Girard’s 1978 book was Les choses cachées. It can be compared to Foucault’s Les mots et les choses on the order of things in 1966, the hidden things versus the order of things.

A flood of podcasts and shorter and longer articles has emerged in the wake of the intensified Trumpism of 2025 with the aim of searching for Girard’s intellectual influence. Cultural critic and journalist Andreas Bernard succinctly states that the hermeneutic energy in the search for meaning in Trumpism is understandable but futile (Bernard 2025). There is no intellectual connection between Girard on the one hand and Thiel and his protégé Vice President Vance on the other, only an affective link, the identification with the struggling loner. This image appeals to Thiel’s self-image as a monopolist fighting a solitary battle at the forefront of research. Thiel makes Girard a universal explainer of the world and sees himself as a universal improver of the world. In 2022, Thiel’s Imitatio (sic) foundation made a documentary film about Girard, Things Hidden, which resembles a portrait of a cult founder with spherical background music and eulogies from companions about Girard’s unique significance for the human sciences in the late 20th century. Thiel himself asserts that the master has the key to God’s plan for history. There are no substantive links between Girard and Thiel’s corporate philosophy, with the latter’s contempt for competition and praise of monopolies. Perhaps Thiel also sees himself as an instrument of God.

Stanford anthropologist Paul Leslie belonged, along with Peter Thiel, to a reading circle of students who sat at the master’s feet at Stanford in the 1990s. In a recent article (Leslie 2025), he describes how Thiel later gave a completely new twist to Girard’s ideas, hijacked Girard’s openness about the future on the theme of good and evil, and brought him closer to thinkers such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, Spengler with his thoughts on the decline of the West after the First World War and ideas about a nationalist and anti-democratic conservative revolution as a remedy, Schmitt with his friend-enemy theory as an anthropological category and with the position that political power is the ability to declare a state of emergency, Strauss with his concept of esoteric writing, how philosophers can hide dangerous truths by writing in a veiled and coded manner for the initiated and inviting readers to read between the lines. In Thiel’s application of Strauss, an elite can push through uniform decisions without public debate. With Schmitt, Thiel transforms Girard’s mimetic ideas with an open outcome into fateful decisionism.

In summary, Peter Thiel is a charlatan who approaches the social sciences with bricolage as his method. He identifies a great thinker to identify himself with and makes the thinker even greater in his advertising for him, because then he himself also becomes greater. Protected behind the thinker, he then builds his own interpretative framework by freely linking the thinker to figures who do not really belong in his company.

When Vice President Vance seeks to apply the scapegoat theory in the election campaign, it becomes cruder and more direct. On CNN, Vance claims to have first-hand information that Haitian immigrants are stealing dogs and cats from the white population of Ohio to eat them. He has no evidence, but when pressed, he defends himself by saying that if he has to make up stories to get the American media to pay attention to American suffering, then he will do so (CNN 2025). One should not exaggerate the significance of an example like Vance, but it is nonetheless an illustration of how quickly and easily the scapegoat is activated. After Girard’s death, Thiel enlists the help of his ideological spin doctor Curtis Yarvin as they seek to secure the succession after Trump with the vice president as crown prince.

Adorno and Horkheimer saw how the Enlightenment culminated in a gigantic myth with a scapegoat as its unifying force. With Thiel and Vance as its standard-bearers, Girardism has become Trumpism and ended up in a mythological tangle with a scapegoat called migrants, which brings to mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis and conclusion that Trumpism must be attacked with critical reason.

The tech oligarch’s and his spin doctor’s Christian-pagan hodgepodge forms the basis for a frontal attack on Europe’s canon of values at a time when European thinkers are devoting their energy to building national canons of values around a glorious past. The tech oligarch’s jumble of ideas brings to mind the fanaticism surrounding the thousand-year kingdom almost a hundred years ago. From the nihilism that is thought to follow the total destruction of the value system, the kingdom of artificial intelligence will emerge. The utopia is frightening, but the apocalypse that precedes it is even more so.

From the smoke of incense swinging surrounding the dark enlightenment, the tech oligarchs’ self-confidence and hubris grow as AI takes over the initiative. What does it do to our personalities when we ask AI for help with more and more things, such as searching for information, writing a letter, making a purchasing decision or asking for relationship advice? AI becomes our constant advisor and companion in everyday life, and eventually we don’t dare do anything without asking AI. Anxiety and uncertainty spread when only AI can give us confidence. This new weakness opens the door to political and other forms of seduction. At the same time, the techno-oligarchs’ contempt for their fellow human beings grows, as they no longer see them as fellow human beings but as simple-minded consumers with a herd mentality. The paper Algorithmic Rule explores the risks of the algorithmic revolution (Vinge & Fjaestad 2025).

The market myth, the middle ground and the scapegoat

The market myth was a myth because the market is not at all self-sustaining, as the neoliberal globalisation narrative claimed. The market in the narrative was kept going by economic forces, obscured by the myth, with the power to redistribute resources from the bottom up and spread the belief that everyone could be part of the economic upturn that would follow. Thomas Piketty has shown in great detail how the number of billionaires, a concept that did not exist in 1990, grew almost exponentially (Piketty 2013, 2015; Piketty & Sandel 2025). Piketty’s formula is r >g, rent greater than growth, meaning that the return on capital grows systematically and continuously more than labour income and economic growth, with the result that the rich become richer in relation to the rest of the population. The market was not the invisible hand that Adam Smith spoke of in his description of a society built on agriculture, crafts, small-scale industry and trade in a colonial world. A century after Smith, the market increasingly became the stifling hand of the financial industry and capital concentration. It became the forum for unbridled speculation that led to global crises in 1873, 1929 and 2008. Perhaps the most revolutionary change in the wake of the crisis of the dollar and the Fordist production regime in the early 1970s was the liberation of financial markets from national control. That control was an important part of Keynesian policy. The liberation was preceded by an intensive campaign by the large global commodity-producing corporations, which began as early as the 1960s and accelerated in the 1970s. They began to describe themselves as multinational or transnational. The aim was to make financial flows for exports and imports internal company transactions beyond the control of the state (Stråth 2023: 24-56).

During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan pursued a policy of deregulating the financial markets as a means of finally leaving the crisis of the 1970s behind, a crisis that had begun with the dollar’s decoupling from gold. The dollar was now to be revamped through free financial markets and soon became the engine of the global economy once again. The new gold of its own accord, in the absence of alternatives, one might say. After the fall of the Soviet Union, all inhibitions were lifted. Capital movements and currency trading became free and subject to profitable investment and speculation. This liberation undermined Keynesian demand stimulation and tied the hands of governments, as the examples of François Mitterrand and Ingvar Carlsson in the 1980s show (Stråth 2025 b and Stråth 2025 b). Excessive government debt drove up interest rates on government loans and put pressure on their currencies. The market decided what was excessive. Margaret Thatcher described the situation with the magic words ‘There Is No Alternative’ (to the market). She came to this conclusion as an admirer of Friedrich Hayek’s theory of freedom. There is no small historical irony in her linking the concept of freedom with the position that there are no alternatives, but the irony disappeared in the euphoria of the times. After the end of the Cold War, the market became a fetish that determined the scope of government action without any questions about who the market was and who determined the conditions for politics. The market was simply the Market to which governments had surrendered power.

During the 1990s, all governing parties became neoliberal. The Social Democrats, with Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder as their reference points, the conservative parties from Thatcher to Angela Merkel (in the 2000s), and even the liberal parties of Western industrial societies with a social dimension in their profile became neoliberal avant-gardists. Keynesian distribution policy disappeared as a regulatory instrument. It was this distribution policy that constituted the line of conflict in politics, which both divided and was the starting point for the search for compromises. Majority decisions kept the political debate going, but they were combined with compromises in that the interest-driven parties to the conflict gave up their maximum demands. Majority decisions could be challenged in the next election. No one spoke of a political middle ground. During the Cold War, the communists on the left were relatively isolated, even though a reformist left distanced itself from the Stalinists and sought contact with the Social Democrats. On the right, there was not much to the right of the moderate conservative parties, the antagonists of the Social Democrats in distribution policy concerning public welfare such as social insurance, education, health care and communications. Politics was ideology- and interest-driven and concerned policy conflicts.

The technocratisation and professionalisation of politics away from interests and ideologies, which Peter Mair dates back to the 1960s (Mair 2013; cf Stråth 2025 b), and which continued with the parties becoming vote-maximising election campaign machines without long-term visions beyond the next election, meant that the French Revolution’s division of the political field into left and right lost its contours and began to dissolve as everyone sought to maximise their votes. 

In the happy 1990s, market euphoria was hegemonic. But beneath the euphoria, significant social marginalisation was taking place, which had already begun during the decline of Fordism in the 1970s. New types of labour markets emerged, global wage-depressing production chains with proletarianisation and weak interest representation in their wake. The 1990s were a time of individualisation and privatisation of responsibility. The individualisation of responsibility away from the public sphere meant significant privatisation and outsourcing of functions in education, healthcare, social integration, employment services and communications. Beneath the surface of market euphoria, there was a creeping marginalisation and segmentation of the labour and housing markets, accompanied by a decline in public responsibility. The development was creeping because those who did not feel part of the euphoria of the 1990s largely lacked representation of their interests and opportunities to articulate them.

In politics, entrepreneurs began to appear alongside the established parties. The best example is Silvio Berlusconi. The debate was about success and an emerging populism about tax breaks and other ‘freedoms.’ However, against the backdrop of globalisation, more nationalistic counter-movements also emerged, such as Jörg Haider in Austria in 1986 and the Sweden Democrats in 1988. Jean-Marie Le Pen had already been around since 1972 with the Front National in France, which now appeared less and less like an isolated phenomenon.

The left moved away from redistribution policy – according to the market myth, there was nothing to redistribute, and the financial and currency markets were clear if political leaders sought to argue the opposite – to identity politics, which would later be called woke, but the neoliberal orientation remained. Keynesianism was a closed chapter. The right wing maintained the neoliberal market belief that everything would be better for everyone if the state stayed out of the way. The right wing traditionally had no problem with the state. People still talked about the right wing without dividing it into moderate conservatives and the ultra- or populist right, even though the extreme parties had begun to form, as the Austrian and Swedish examples show. The right wing traditionally thought conservatively and nationally. Change would take place in moderation and the framework was the nation state. The national was dissolved in the looming global market without borders, and the hegemony surrounding the neoliberal narrative was revolutionary in its message that everything old and national should be done away with. Like the Social Democrats, the Conservatives submitted to strong ideological contradictions when the political conflict over distribution and privilege became general submission to what was said to be the dictates of the market. They sought to resolve these contradictions in the vote-maximising and alternative-free political centre, where everyone jostled for position and conflicts of interest and ideology were toned down under neoliberal hegemony.

Such was the situation when the world’s financial markets collapsed in a speculative bubble that burst in 2008. There was great uncertainty about how to react when the market, which had been claimed to be self-regulating and functioning best without political interference, collapsed. When political leaders and professional economists sought historical reference points, they quickly landed on Black Friday in October 1929, which paralysed the global economy and led to the Second World War when paralysed governments had no powerful response to unemployment and allowed the crisis to develop its own momentum. That development had to be prevented at all costs. The huge losses of wealth following the crash in September 2008 were met with massive financial interventions to rescue credit institutions from bankruptcy. The political recapitalisation effort using tax revenue and borrowed capital was enormous. Government debt skyrocketed. The International Monetary Fund estimated the cost of the collapse at USD 4 trillion, based on calculations of exchange rate losses on securities (IMF 2009; Shiller 2012). The crisis spread to the euro crisis in 2009, triggered by Greece’s financial situation.

It was now that the silenced masses of globalisation’s losers were activated by new political entrepreneurs, movements and parties that began to thematise the nation in opposition to global markets. Alternative für Deutschland was formed in 2013 as a party to take Germany out of the euro cooperation. It was against this backdrop of frustration that a new myth emerged about nationalism, autocratic paternalism and an illiberal community, in contrast to the neoliberal market, as the path to social cohesion. The myth of the dark enlightenment was spiced up with various conspiracy theories. The shift towards nationalism gained further momentum with the refugee crisis in 2015, which radicalised nationalism and the distinction between inclusion and exclusion. Now the myth of the nation had its scapegoat, resulting in the erosion of asylum rights and refugee policy. The distinction between the foreign and the familiar became more aggressive and classic European values were suppressed.

Since 2010, a European right-wing populism has emerged with fluid boundaries to more extreme variants and fascist ideals. Nationalism is booming. Authoritarian leaders are emerging with paternalistic offers that appeal to people and say they are illiberal, which became a new word in the debate. The liberalism they distanced themselves from was not classical Enlightenment liberalism but neoliberalism. The temporal connection between this development and the collapse of the financial markets and the neoliberal narrative in 2008 is clear, but much remains to be researched about the deeper sociological and social psychological contexts. Sociologist Cas Mudde formulates the sequence of events laconically and aptly: Right-wing populism in Europe is illiberal democracy’s response to undemocratic liberalism (Mudde 2021). By undemocratic liberalism, he refers to the neoliberal break with the social liberalism of the welfare states and the complete reversal in the direction of redistribution. Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel emphasises not only a growing gap between the winners and losers of the neoliberal project, but also that those who have risen to the top of society believe that their success is entirely their own doing and that they therefore fully deserve what the market has rewarded them with. The corollary is that those who have failed to climb the ladder have only themselves to blame and do not deserve any help. Social solidarity is breaking down (Sandel 2021, 2022).

Thomas Biebricher conducted an in-depth analysis of the international crisis of conservatism that followed the establishment of a nationalist far right in Europe (Biebricher 2023). The idea of a political centre changed direction. The centre ground of neoliberal lack of alternatives and vote maximisation, where all the major parties from social democrats to the moderate right had gathered, changed shape. The moderate right saw it as its task to maintain the boundary to the far right and nationalism by defining itself as the new centre-right, but became increasingly drawn into the far right’s problem formulations and language. Biebricher shows how the problems thereby increasingly came to be about cultural struggle rather than social and economic policy. The culture war costs nothing, unlike social and economic substance politics, which makes it attractive for political conflict. In addition, it has the peculiarity of being absolute, much more difficult to compromise on than social and economic policy, where compromises are reached by all parties stepping back from their maximum demands and everyone both winning and losing something. Cultural policy is therefore more polarising. Overall, the gravitational pull seems to be shifting problem formulations, language and descriptions of reality towards the far right, while the parties in the so-called centre field to the left of the moderate right appear helpless. The moderate liberal-conservative parties are torn between the woke politics of the left and the radical desire for change of the far right in the form of a culture war, where the concept of cancel culture shifts from an accusation against the left to an accusation against the right. The left is losing ground in the culture war, and the question is what the moderate right, which is in crisis, too, will do. There are clear signs of a shift to the right in the search for a stable majority.

In the new scenario, policy is concentrated on immigration policy, which is easily linked to the culture war. Immigration is a proxy issue representative of a number of other political problems. Both the culture war and immigration policy take on a right-left dimension, with left-wing culture being lumped together under the concept of ‘woke’. Even though moderate right claims to want a firewall against the populist and extreme right, it is being drawn into a joint culture war by the right against ‘woke’ and for the radicalisation of immigration policy. The initiative in this culture war lies with the right, with a profile that in the 1930s was called völkisch, with Germany as the arena. The left is losing its former initiative in what has become a delaying battle to preserve as much as possible, in other words, a conservative battle from the left.

Right-wing populism questions parliamentary democracy. Illiberal paternalism with bottom-up authority emphasises democracy under a strong will that distributes fairly and puts an end to strife and division. An ideological proximity to völkische ideas in German history seems clear, but that does not mean that all supporters are Nazis or fascists (Amlinger & Nachwey 2023 and 2025). Rather, they are driven by great frustration over parliamentary democracy’s transfer of responsibility to a fetish called the market and listen to those who promise improvement through a nation that distances itself from immigrants. And believe in them.

Europe shares this development with the United States, regardless of Trump. In the United States, it has led to Trump rather than Trump leading to it. Democracy is eroding from within under an increasingly unbalanced language driven by emotions rather than rationality and reason, qualities and values that were once cornerstones of the Enlightenment but have now lost their prestige and credibility. The digital revolution with social media has fuelled mimetic levelling attitudes. Imitation is more intense. Democracy cannot deliver, they say, and the idea is spreading rapidly.

In 2015, Syria, with its Russian-backed regime’s war against the population, provided the catalyst for this development in Europe: the flow of refugees to Europe. Refugees have become the answer to the parliamentary debate’s repression of policy conflicts, scapegoats and surrogates for all other difficult social problems. There is no language that can get us out of the current situation. Without a convincing counter-narrative to today’s emotionally charged rhetoric focusing on the refugee and migration issue as the biggest problem, there is a significant risk that scapegoating will put an end to democracy and bring to power strong leaders who claim to represent the will of the people and promise orderly conditions.

A social crisis was what triggered nationalism, fascism, Nazism and the scapegoating of Jews during the interwar period a hundred years ago. Three generations have passed since then and few remain who remember. The new divisions between friend and foe since the 2010s are driven by frustration over the loss of faith in the market and the discovery that money for politics was available, but only to save banks. A couple of decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crowning glory of the neoliberal narrative, states began to build walls at or near their borders again, not only in Europe, as Wendy Brown has shown in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010). It is in this context that the myth warned against by Adorno and Horkheimer has returned. It is no longer the Jews who are held responsible for all problems and all evil, but immigrants as an abstraction with concrete content. It should be emphasised that the immigrant myth has not yet reached the intensity of anti-Semitism and has not permeated society as massively. But the political culture war is playing with fire. The problem is shifting ever more rapidly from immigration as such to immigrants themselves. They bear responsibility not only for their own situation but also for all kinds of other social problems. Individual immigrants become a collective abstraction in figures and quotas. Rejection and repatriation, remigration, are the words of the day; the further to the right, the more hostile the vocabulary, but the language and the formulation of the problem are shifting as a whole. The ‘global elites’ and “cosmopolitans” are seen as abstractly responsible for the neoliberal collapse, much like ‘capitalism.’ The concepts serve as enemy images, but the world’s richest people do not work as sacrificial lambs or scapegoats. Immigrants, on the other hand, do so very well.

The warning that echoed from 1929 to the decision-makers in 2008 triggered political action to prevent a development like the one at that time. But after the bank bailouts, government leaders found no more money and lost their grip on developments as they forgot the social and economic substance policies that would prevent a repeat of the 1930s scenario. Their lessons from the 1930s crisis were far too selective. Instead, the culture war reinforced the centrifugal forces, and the problems of the 1930s are back in many respects. This is not to say that history is repeating itself, but neither that the future is particularly bright if nothing is done to prevent the nationalist trend. Words are not enough.

Culture war against distribution policy: German Swedish examples and European perspectives

Germany’s highest court is the Constitutional Court, based in Karlsruhe. It is one of several anchors in a power balance structure where legislative, executive and judicial institutions balance each other to prevent a repeat of Weimar. So far, the system has worked well and no one has seen a threatening Americanisation. In Karlsruhe, legal arguments have taken precedence over the political/ideological orientations that judges carry with them rather than represent. Differences in this regard have been seen as a strength that has anchored the law in society by reflecting its diversity. Until 2015, half of the 16 judges were appointed by an election committee in the Bundestag (the other half are appointed by the federal states). Since 2015, the appointment process has continued in the committee without any change in procedure or practice, but the decision is made in the plenary session of the Bundestag in a secret ballot requiring a two-thirds majority of the votes cast. The purpose of the change was to create stronger democratic support, which, as an unintended and probably unforeseen effect, led to increased politicisation of the issue.

When the Bundestag was to elect three new judges in the summer of 2025, everything seemed to be going as usual until the days before the vote. Then a shitstorm broke out on social media and the moderate conservative CDU/CSU representatives were inundated with a flood of messages aimed at discrediting one of the three candidates on the list of nominees with claims that she was in favour of abortion in principle until the moment of birth and that she had plagiarised her thesis. She was one of two candidates proposed by the Social Democrats (SPD) in a rotation system developed as standard practice. A large number of CDU members were influenced by the avalanche of hate speech behind which the right-wing radical digital news portal Nius stood, but it was not difficult to conclude that the far-right AfD was also involved. The party leadership had to pull the emergency brake and stop the vote. In Germany, abortion is in principle prohibited but, after consultation, is not punishable until the 14th week of pregnancy. The only thing the defamed candidate had said on the abortion issue was that she could envisage legalising the arrangement that was criminal but not punishable. The accusations of plagiarism were unfounded. The SPD saw no reason to withdraw its candidate, and the CDU found it difficult to distance itself from the positions to which the smear campaign had led them.

Now, one might think that a lawyer who wants to decriminalise what is already exempt from punishment has a point, but in the heat of a culture war, it is an unforgivable transgression of established boundaries. Discord grew between the coalition partners, not so much between the leaderships as within the party groups. If a handshake is not valid, why should we… The next controversial issue will be the receipt… The taken aback Chancellor Merz carelessly muttered about a conscience vote, a method that, if applied more widely, would lead to parliamentary chaos and bring to mind the era of the proto-political parties. The leadership’s grip on their groups is loosening and the difficulties in finding compromises are growing in an atmosphere of mistrust. But does all the commotion really matter? Surely a dispute over a judicial appointment cannot lead to a government crisis?

The governing parties were unable to break the deadlock they found themselves in. The candidate herself helped them by withdrawing her nomination. As a self-appointed sacrificial lamb, she made a solution possible and was met with sympathy but did not create peace. A mixture of shame and suppressed anger spread from parliament into the media debate. It had all started when the emotional storms of the culture war moved in the other direction through the smear campaign on social media to the heart of democracy, parliament. No one is immune to the emotions of the culture war, which are constantly being recreated. The issue was much bigger than anyone had initially realised. It was about losing trust.

The last coalition government in Weimar, which represented a democratically elected majority, fell due to disagreement over a 0.5 percentage point increase in unemployment insurance expenditure in the state budget. The inability to deal with this disagreement opened the door for Hitler. It was a material issue that was easier to compromise on than cultural issues, which tend to be regarded as existential. One might say that the material issue was subordinated to the cultural war about a Volksgemeinschaft in the early 1930s. Without exaggerating the historical comparisons, it can be said that in today’s Germany, every government crisis in what remains of the political centre brings the AfD one step closer to government power. It is worth noting that the AfD is classified as anti-constitutional and thus right-wing extremist, with reminiscences of Nazi ideas, and in opinion polls it is on a par with the CDU, and clearly ahead in eastern Germany. Still rather unarticulated sentiments within the CDU/CSU see a coalition in that direction as the least bad option in a difficult parliamentary period. If politics is about cultural struggle, they find their identity there rather than among the woke supporters on the left. The inability to resolve minor issues has consequences far beyond what they are worth. Politics is losing its grip on the situation, pressured by mass society’s heated opinions in conflicting directions. Minor issues become symbolic issues and catalysts for strong tensions, constantly threatening to trigger parliamentary crises. This is what both the 2025 judicial election and the 1933 unemployment benefits show.

It is interesting to compare the parliamentary situation in Weimar in 1933 with that in Sweden at the same time, which was suffering from high unemployment, too. Lars Trägårdh (1993) did just that in a brilliant doctoral thesis at Berkeley, which he wrote around 1990 during another period of great upheaval, but unlike ours, it was a time of strong optimism and faith in the future, a time when people believed that the crisis of the 1930s and the world war that followed were history with no relevance other than being just that: history. He describes how, at the same time as the last German government before the era of presidential governments fell on the issue of unemployment in Sweden, a coalition government was formed through horse-trading over unemployment benefits and milk prices, which marked the beginning of over 40 years of Social Democratic government. The innovative feature of the thesis was not only the comparison itself, but also Trägårdh’s search for an explanation in the way the language was mastered, rather than, as in the conventional historiography of the time, in social and economic structures that were assumed to be more feudal in Germany and more peasant-based in Sweden, which would explain the different developments. What visions of the future did the crisis of the 1930s trigger, and in what language were they formulated? Folk som i folkhem (people as in the People’s Home) suggested a pragmatic solution to a conflict over distribution, a compromise between vested interests where the ideologies that legitimised those interests were flexible in line with the compromise but retained their power to guide long-term thinking. Volk, as in völkisch and Volksgemeinschaft under a Führer, expresses a completely different story about the obsession with community and submission to the community’s leader. Both developments were reactions to the same crisis of the 1930s, with mass unemployment, pragmatic but mobilising policy for a solution to a major problem, and a cultural struggle for community based on exclusion and a scapegoat who was defined out of the community in an excessive emotional mobilisation of the population.

It is an irony of history that Lars Trägårdh led a major investigation into a Swedish cultural canon in 2024-2025 on behalf of the centre-right government supported by the Sweden Democrats (SOU: 2025). Behind the initiative, one senses a nostalgic longing for the building of a successful nation in contrast to today’s crisis. In Trägårdh’s case, this longing may refer to the welfare state that disappeared after the crisis of the 1970s. But this approach overlooks the fact that the welfare state was not built on a cultural canon, but on substantial social and economic welfare policies of a new kind. The welfare state culture and identity followed. It was not the other way around.

At a time when a strong trend throughout Europe and the United States is working to transform liberal democracy into autocratic illiberal democracy through cultural struggle, until very recently an oxymoron, but now a political programme, it would be important for the salvation of liberal democracy to move away from the uncompromising nature of the culture war, with or without a canon, in favour of economic and social distribution policies, including an active integration policy for immigrants, with a view that transcends national boundaries.

Like the German judicial example, the Swedish cultural canon shows attempts to transfer the parliamentary conflict over policy and distribution to a culture war that does not require large financial resources. It does not solve the underlying problems that have led to the current anxiety about the future, frustration, anger, fear, resignation and general disorientation in the Western world since 2008. The culture war reinforces these feelings instead of counteracting them. In Germany, in Sweden, in the United States, in Europe. The culture war is potentially dangerous. Sooner or later, the culture war will find its scapegoat. The contours are already fully visible.

When listening to the culture war debate in today’s United States and Europe, it is as if we were still in the time of sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies when he published his standard work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Tönnies 1887). In the industrial society that was in the process of establishing itself, he saw a development away from community and towards society. In community, people defined themselves in relation to other people individually, with religion, for example, as the connective tissue. In society, people came together on the basis of interests and a belief in rational solutions. Society had a stronger conflict dimension and its points of reference changed ever more rapidly. Tönnies noted the development towards society, but he was sceptical and had bad premonitions. The community offered nostalgic therapy, but Tönnies also saw that its time was over.

60 years after Tönnies’ thesis, the categories were united in the social community of the Western welfare states after the failed attempt to create a Volksgemeinschaft. With the welfare state, Sweden became a model for the fusion of society and community through interest-based policy. Cultural legitimisation followed the policy-based conflict of interests and compromise. Now, another 60 years after the fusion of Tönnies’ opposites, it is a matter of a cultural struggle for a new folk community that distances itself from the social idea of the people that was, society as cohesion, under the demarcation of folk community as völkisch. Our time remains within Tönnies’ conceptualisation, but developments are moving in the opposite direction, from society to community. Culture war distracts attention from the conflicts and compromises of policy, away from the negotiating civil society towards a new community where order prevails. But as a democracy?

The culture war creates contradictions. Policy about economic and social substance is also based on contradictions, but it is easier to compromise by giving and taking. Parliament becomes the centre of politics where compromises are hammered out. It is the work that Max Weber describes as drilling into thick boards. It is the work that no longer works. It seems that the boards become thicker and harder the longer you drill. The culture war is simpler but more dangerous because it is more fundamental and takes place outside parliament, which is nevertheless drawn into it. It is a kind of escapism from great responsibility but with great risks of destroying political systems, especially if the escapism operates with scapegoats. Policy on the big issues, with clear positions on, for example, financing and (re)distribution of resources, demands much more of political leaders than the culture war. Despite this, and precisely because of this, the argument is clear: politics must return to the big issues of the day, and the contradictions that exist must be exposed in order to find compromises on them: climate and environmental issues, immigration issues in the context of ageing populations and labour shortages in Europe, as policy issues, not as identity and cultural issues, trade issues in a protectionist era, pension and healthcare issues when the elderly are living longer, etc. If these issues are viewed as a management of what was and is, without any real alternatives or resources for problem-solving, the conflicts will take over as a culture war.

Europe in the shadow of Trump’s USA and nationalist culture wars

Trump is pure culture war, naturally with strong American interests at its core. After European leaders’ humiliating grovelling to Trump at the NATO meeting in The Hague in June 2025 (Stråth 2025 b), the next demonstration of subservience came a month later when the President of the European Commission turned up at the Trump Turnberry golf course in Scotland on a Sunday to hear Trump’s decision to impose a 15 per cent tariff on European goods. It was clear in advance that the EU would be unable to muster any countermeasures whatsoever, no counter-tariffs, no digital tariffs. A great deal, declared Trump, the owner of the golf course and host of the insulting spectacle. Unlike in The Hague, the EU was unable to encourage Trump with a real king to talk to, touch and admire. But that didn’t matter. At home, Trump was king himself. On the golf course, there was no one to appease, just a decree to listen to. The fear that Trump will leave NATO remains deep since The Hague, and that fear characterised the lack of reaction to the tariff deal, which had nothing to do with an agreement. Von der Leyen did not call the deal magnificent, but sitting upright on a chair, with her hands on her knees and a frozen smile, she nevertheless described the submission as a deal. It was the best that could be negotiated, they said in Brussels, which beneath the official surface was deeply frustrated and paralysed, a dangerous combination. Just as great as the fear that Trump will leave NATO is the fear of one’s own helplessness.

That the EU’s highest representative, representing 27 countries with 450 million inhabitants, was forced to accept Trump’s submission on a Sunday at his own private golf course in the United Kingdom, the country that left the EU, was a meeting to Trump’s liking. ‘No one can be satisfied with this result, but it was the best we could achieve,’ declared German Chancellor Merz on behalf of most EU governments. To this, it must be said that the EU achieved nothing. It was assigned. The EU quietly accepted what was a clear violation of world trade rules and all conventional diplomacy. However, not everyone shared Merz’s assessment. It was a sad day, commented the French head of government on the meeting in Scotland. A union of free states that had come together to defend their values and interests had decided to submit, he wrote on X. Sousmission, submission, is the name of a novel by Michel Houellebecq about how the entire political class, through collective failure, paves the way for an Islamic politician to become president. In France, people understood the analogy and that it could also apply to the United States. But Europe as a whole does not dare to think that far ahead.

A month after the meeting at the golf club, Donald Trump welcomed Vladimir Putin to Alaska with honours and a red carpet. Trump promised peace in Ukraine in the near future. In the days that followed, a selection of European leaders flew to Washington to be briefed on the peace plan at the White House. They believed in the plan and wanted to sell the visit, the fact that they had been received and informed at all, as a sign of European strength, that Trump took them seriously. No one questioned the fact that they were not allowed to be in Alaska for the discussion of a matter of European destiny. Shortly after their return to Europe, the plan turned out to be hot air, which is not to say that Trump did not believe in it. But Putin was like an eel in Trump’s company, and Trump did not want to realise that. The visit to the White House was not a sign of strength but a hopeless attempt to cling to a man who had shown in every way that he was not a reliable partner. It is an illusion to believe that Trump has a strategy, unless it is to confuse and create unrest. He has goals of American greatness and imperial power around the North Pole and in the Pacific, and of a Nobel Peace Prize. But the path to achieving these goals is as erratic and impulsive as his customs policy.

Extremism expert Peter Neumann and TV journalist Richard Schneider have titled their newly published book Das Sterben der Demokratie (The Death of Democracy) (Neumann & Schneider 2025). They examine right-wing populism in Europe and the US and find a trend from liberal to illiberal democracy and autocracy. They talk about a right-wing populist plan to transform Europe and the US. They trace its origins to the financial market collapse of 2008, which led to the bailout of the banks but, in the long term, to stagnating and eroding infrastructure in communications and other public services, which in turn triggered feelings of loss of control, conflicts over distribution and general unease. In this context, the migration issue has become a catalyst that has channelled responses towards identity issues. The authors recommend that forces wishing to preserve liberal democracy take control of the migration issue by de-emotionalising it from identity politics to policy on resources, economic policy on the distribution of resources, and policy on physical infrastructure, which would meet with a great response from populations who want practical solutions rather than cultural conflict. They propose clear boundaries against right-wing populists and an offensive in terms of political education and civic education, where the stakes are made clearer instead of pursuing pseudo-politics in a twilight landscape between liberal and illiberal democracy.

The trend in the European Parliament and elsewhere in Europe is for the moderate right to abandon the middle ground of no alternatives and seek to create a new one by defining itself as the centre in relation to the far right and redefining the others in the middle ground as the left. The result is a culture war between the woke left and right-wing nationalism. The moderate right is seeking to raise its profile through cultural policy against the woke movement, while at the same time claiming to defend what it calls a firewall against the far right. In this culture war, the moderate right is being drawn into the language of the far right on issues such as refugees. The far right has the initiative, and the moderate right is being dragged along. Policy issues raise questions about financing, which in turn raise questions about the redistribution of resources. The culture war is an escape from these issues, a leap forward that costs nothing and ultimately costs everything.

On what remains of neoliberalism’s unchallenged middle ground, social democratic and green parties vegetate with a declining voter base in the absence of confrontation on distribution and environmental issues. Political scientist Philip Manow describes this development as a de-democratisation of democracy (Manow 2020). If there is any direction in the behaviour of the centre-left parties, it is that they are gravitating towards the cultural struggle of the moderate right and the far right, with the left performing a balancing act between defending woke culture and fighting the far right, increasingly using the language of the far right. Democracy is corroding from within.

Neumann and Schneider’s clear language encourages us to think further along their lines. The American-European front for illiberal democracy could be met with a stronger Europeanisation of the economic and social policy struggle for liberal democracy: a Europeanisation of economic and social policy for a social market Europe, with Delors’ work on a social Europe and Draghi’s report as reference points (Stråth 2025 b). A European-coordinated offensive with a programme for distribution and environmental issues and other issues such as immigration and infrastructure, the labour market, education and research, e.g. a European railway system worthy of the name and European digital sovereignty in relation to the United States. A concrete example in this direction is the European Commission’s €800 billion ReArm Europe package, an action plan to strengthen EU security, where security policy goes beyond the military dimension (European Commission 2025). However, it must be clearly stated that money alone is not enough. It must be the starting point for a political plan and governance of the kind developed by Mariana Mazzucato in Mission Economy (Mazzucato 2021; cf Stråth 2025 b). A European offensive that develops policy-based compromises and solutions instead of getting drawn into the culture war on the right.

The task is to save democracy in Europe by breaking free from what looks like an iron grip that Trump’s USA has placed on the EU, but which, if we dare to see reality, is Europe’s panicked clinging to a USA that no longer exists. The EU must let go and renovate itself. The EU is a community of destiny heading for its demise, with or without the US in NATO, if it continues like this. With its submission in trade policy, the Union has made itself vulnerable to blackmail by not fighting back. The EU has had nothing at all to counter Trump’s arbitrariness and excessive demands. The signal to Trump that the EU does not have the will to stand up for its own interests, or even the will to define them, is fatal. Active EU leadership would have been required to coordinate these interests in a stance against the US’s massive attack on world trade rules and to prepare Europe for a situation without American support in security policy. EU leadership is, of course, dependent on the willingness of EU leaders to hand over power. Jürgen Habermas criticised how inhibiting Olaf Scholz was as chancellor in this regard (Habermas 2025; cf Stråth 2025 a). Friedrich Merz and Europe’s other heads of state are continuing in the same vein with their excessive ambition not to offend Trump. The American president has been given an acronym because he always chickens out: taco. European leaders are also chickening out in their short-sighted national considerations, unwilling to see the bigger European picture. The reactions to the tariff dictate have emboldened Trump, confirming him as a dealmaker in his own eyes. Trump’s real trade policy goal is likely to be to eliminate the EU’s weak regulation of digital corporations.

However, it is not enough to make demands on Europe’s political leaders. In order for them to be able to respond to these demands and shape a new EU, the cultural struggle that is taking place in the member states must be translated into economic and social policy in the sense of Neumann and Schneider. The conditions for a new EU must be based on the political foundations of the member states, where the cultural struggle must disappear. This is about a new political self-understanding, a new identity. With cultural struggle as the content of politics in the member states, the hands of EU leaders are tied. The cultural struggle will drive the EU apart and risks becoming the basis for an ultra-right international that could possibly link up with both Trump’s USA and Putin’s Russia.

In this context, it must be clear that the identities of industrial society with and against the concept of class, which after more than a hundred years of revolutions and world wars culminated in the Keynesian welfare states in a small part of the world, are gone and cannot be recreated. On the other hand, social injustices and the unequal distribution of resources remain in old and new forms, which must be considered globally rather than nationally. Neoliberal attempts to build a new identity around the global market and financial society resulted in a global precariat in new types of just-in-time production chains and in a gigantic speculative bubble that burst and transformed the neoliberal elites, the ‘cosmopolitans,’ from figures of identification to objects of hatred.

Human beings cannot live without identity. If you have it, as an individual and as a society, you don’t need to talk about it. Before the 1970s, identity was a concept in mathematics and in psychoanalysis, a new science since the 1920s. But the concept did not exist in political debate. It is when you lack identity that you start talking about it. At present, attempts to create identity are mainly directed at the nation, driven by ideas of national greatness in the past. This makes the world dangerous. A pattern from a hundred years ago is recognisable. To get out of this situation, the EU member states must end the culture war and, as before the neoliberal interlude, begin to pursue economic and social policies. They must unite around Europe, a new Europe, the Europe of good Europeans, as Nietzsche wrote about. Identity will follow and disappear as a problem.

With Trump, not only the US but also Europe is losing its moral power. The global South is turning to China as a unifying force that offers hope for the future. Chuan Jianguo has recently called the Chinese the United States, the country that makes China great. The United States has imploded morally, but Europe is also slowly losing steam. The EU will also make China great if it does not quickly distance itself from the United States instead of subordinating itself.

The refugee issue, with its potential to create the scapegoat of our time, has European solutions and agreements such as the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and the border protection agency Frontex, but there is no European solidarity or strong support for them. CEAS and Frontex actually reinforce the scapegoat idea. European solutions would require European solidarity around refugees and asylum seekers, but this does not exist. Unworthy conditions in refugee camps and harsh, not to say life-threatening, pushbacks at the borders, inadequate integration measures – all justified by the argument that ‘otherwise even more refugees will come.’ This argument rings hollow at a time when Europe is simultaneously lamenting a shortage of labour, and it hollows out Europe’s values.

What now, Europe?

Another Eurafrica

Europe is the continent with the world’s oldest population (Eurostat 2025). Fewer and fewer people in the labour market are facing an increasing number of pensioners. According to Eurostat, the proportion of people over 80 will increase from 6.0% in 2021 to 14.6% in 2100. The proportion of the population over 65 will increase to 31.3% during the same period. The reason for this is increased life expectancy and reduced fertility. The proportion of the population of working age is shrinking, while the proportion of pensioners is increasing. By taking into account the movement between different age groups, Eurostat calculates a dependency ratio between pensioners and people of working age. The figure for the EU for 2024 is 33.9% and is estimated to be 59.7% in 2100. If we also add the proportion of people under the age of 15 who will be supported by the working population, the ratio will be 56.8% in 2024 and is expected to rise to 83.9% in 2100. This development suggests dramatic changes not only for the labour market but also for pension systems and other social security schemes.

In stark contrast to ageing Europe, where an ever-smaller proportion of the population will have to support an ever-larger proportion, Africa is the world’s youngest continent. More than 60% of the continent’s population is under the age of 25. Africa’s population is expected to increase from 1.4 billion today to 2.5 billion in 2050. The labour market is supplied with 10-12 million new young people every year (UN 2024). Unemployment is high, especially among young people, and education is inadequate. The big question for the future is whether Africa’s growing youth population is a ticking time bomb or a resource for labour markets in and beyond Africa. Either way, Europe will be affected, but the question is whether Europe can do anything to influence developments and steer them towards the latter option in order to defuse the bomb. Individual governments are holding talks with individual governments in Africa, and there are contacts between the EU and its counterpart, the AU, although the African Union does not have anywhere near the EU’s capacity and the degree of supranationality is lower. However, there is a lack of large EU-initiated projects to politically transform the threat into an opportunity and the opportunity, through creative politics, into a new and different relationship between Europe and Africa. There is a potential for large projects relating to education and the labour market, but also green energy.

Instead, relations are characterised by the issue of migration, and the major problem is defined as keeping people from Africa (and Asia) out of Europe. A wet blanket of suspicion and hostility towards immigrants has settled over Europe (Kohlenberger 2025). Immigrants have become a weapon in the culture war, and the risk, as repeatedly pointed out in this text, is that this weapon will become the new scapegoat for solving complex social problems in a simple way. The United States is ahead on this point. European contacts with African leaders are largely about persuading them to build camps where asylum seekers and economic refugees can be turned away. The method is the mafia’s pizzi.

Clearly, immigration cannot be free. It must be controlled in order to guarantee standards in terms of income, housing, education, cultural offerings, etc., as was the case when labour was recruited for the piecework and assembly line industries of northern Europe from unemployment and agricultural work in southern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. That model disappeared with the Fordist production regime in the crisis of the 1970s. Immigration was profitable for industrial mass production, which became mass consumption in the welfare states. But profitability required costs for the integration of the workforce. Of course, there is no possibility of returning to that time and its conditions. Immigration at that time was mainly an intra-European issue, and training for industrial jobs was relatively simple. But as a model for how the immigration issue can be organised rather than spontaneous, and entails costs for successful integration, that period remains an important reference point to link to. The costs of successful integration are an investment in the future.

Multiculturalism was the neoliberal invention to avoid costs. Everyone would develop their own cultural environment with great tolerance for diversity, as well as great tolerance for growing differences in social standards and the emergence of a new proletariat outside the labour market agreements. The homogeneous labour markets of industrial society became segmented. The ideological concept of diversity, with its idea of both cultural mixing and cultural distinctiveness, much like the neoliberal global village, became in practice segmented parallel societies. The cost-free multicultural project ended in immigrant ghettos across Europe, hand in hand with a new low-wage proletariat in sectors such as healthcare, sanitation, construction and agricultural work in irregular labour markets run by complex shell companies with difficult-to-control responsibilities and a lot of black money. Of course, multiculturalism was not cost-free. The multicultural approach was full of drawbacks that showed the costs in completely different places than before, not in the state budget. Ghettoisation, gang crime, school problems, proletarianisation in labour markets that were difficult to oversee. It is this situation that is now being turned against the immigrants themselves in the form of a culture war.

The labour migration of the 1960s and 1970s was planned. Recruitment agencies in northern Europe recruited workers from among southern Europe’s farm labourers and small farmers with promises of a better standard of living. Today’s immigration is based much less on demand and more on people fleeing their countries. It is spontaneous, and today’s organisation is more aimed at preventing than enabling. Jobs are not available in the same way for those who manage to get in. War, forced displacement due to natural disasters and long-term changes in the conditions for remaining in the wake of climate change make the whole migration more push- than pull-driven. A black market has emerged for illegal immigrants. Spontaneity and crime are replacing organisation, creating the impression of a politically uncontrolled situation.

The idea of Eurafrica was part of the negotiations on the European integration project, which came to an initial conclusion with the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson (2015) have shown how deeply this idea was woven into neo-colonial ambitions at a time when many believed that decolonisation was the order of the day. The big story in the 1950s was about development through development aid to the colonies that were soon to become free states. Money was transferred from north to south, but development did not really take off, at least not as hoped in the developing countries. Ghana was the first African colony south of the Sahara to gain independence in 1957. In 1965, its leader Nkrumah published a widely acclaimed book entitled Neocolonialism (Nkrumah 1965). The development debate focused on how the North developed the South through aid, but the reality was how the South contributed to the development of the North through unequal terms of trade when raw materials were sold from the South to the North and finished goods from the North to the South. Walter Rodney became an academic spokesperson for the South with arguments along the same lines when he published a classic work of postcolonial historiography: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney 1972). Colonialism was a one-armed bandit, wrote the historian from Guyana, who eight years later was murdered by the independence regime there for his overly radical views on how the new independence should be shaped. The development economists who had led the economic and political debate in the North increasingly lost the initiative to a school that established itself under the name of dependency theory, with Paul Baran, André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein as three of the leading names (Baran 1957; Baran & Sweezy 1966; Frank 1969; Wallerstein 1979. Cf Stråth 2023, chap. 2).

The development economists argued within the framework of the modernisation narrative of state-organised development. Historians described a development in stages up to the industrial breakthrough and beyond, and these stages were thought to apply to developing countries as well, in a general pattern of development. Dependency theorists directed their criticism at the capitalist system in a centre-periphery approach, arguing that modernisation and stage development only applied to the rich world, which became rich through the systematic plundering of poor countries and kept them at that level.

The lively debate on the theme of development or dependency came to an end with the collapse of the dollar and the crisis of the 1970s. The neoliberal response to the crisis of the 1970s bypassed the silenced debate between development and dependency economists with the argument that everyone should be partners in a world market without trade barriers. Structural adjustment was the recipe prescribed by the World Bank and the IMF as the path to development. Budget deficits would disappear through austerity policies and market opening with direct investment by multinational companies in the Third World. It was trade on the terms of the strong, which largely perpetuated the roles of raw material producers in the South and finished goods manufacturers in the North, with continued imbalances in trade balances (Stråth 2023, chap. 5). One of the key words of the new policy, sustainable development, sounded increasingly hollow. Like Delors’ efforts to create a new narrative of a social Europe (Stråth 2025 b), aid also disappeared from the debate. But the gaps between North and South remained.

It is this development that Europe must now address. Europe is entangled in a history that it must look back on critically and learn from. It is a history in which Europe had interests in Africa but much less for Africa. The scenario also includes Trump’s USA, which has largely lost interest in Africa, although it still has an interest in raw materials such as rare minerals, an interest that Trump seeks to realise with imperialist methods in pure 19th-century style, for example in Congo. China’s interest in Africa is much greater and much more sophisticated. Since around 2010, China has been Africa’s largest trading partner and is phasing out tariffs on Africa at a time when Trump is introducing them and closing down the aid agency USAID. China has a visible presence in Africa in terms of investment in infrastructure and trade. China’s goodwill and acceptance of investment and trade are increasing, but at the same time there is a certain suspicion about excessive Chinese dependence.

It is in this context – with the US as a chaotic autocracy driven by emotions and China as a somewhat rational autocracy that represses and expels emotions – that Europe must approach Africa with a well-formulated interest for the continent at least as much as in it. Europe has to deal with an American autocracy that sees the future in a contradictory combination of the Fordist oil economy of industrial society that collapsed in the 1970s and an uncontrolled digital industry that is driving the development of AI into the unknown, and a Chinese autocracy that sees the future more in renewable energy. China has a plan, a long-term plan with a strategy. Dealing with this means not only finding one’s role in the geopolitical world order, but also taking measures to save democracy at a time when it is increasingly being eroded. A transition from cultural struggle to practical politics means placing the issue of distribution at the centre of a planetary perspective and thematising/confronting Piketty’s formula r > g, the most active relic remaining from the belief in the self-regulating global market.

The lack of direction in US politics also characterises European politics. However, the elitist future thinking and planning of the American tech oligarchs is still unmatched in Europe, whose challenge is to shape future thinking democratically while rejecting American elitism, authoritarianism, and disruptive chaos. There are certainly attempts in Europe to shape the future in a long-term and planned manner, such as in Draghi’s report to the European Commission. The question is whether Europe has the capacity to implement it, as a start to reactivating future thinking with the help of democratic policy, while rejecting the populist culture war.

It is within this framework that policy cooperation projects on labour, green energy, rare minerals, etc. could be developed, but by allowing and contributing to the development of Africa as a supplier of finished goods to Europe rather than as a supplier of raw materials. The vicious circle of unequal terms of trade must end. Processing must take place in Africa, and this requires cooperation on education and research that is ultimately on an equal footing. Neoliberal direct investments tended to reinforce colonial structures with unequal terms of trade. The future is about cooperation to jointly develop the digital, energy and e-mobility industries. The starting point here is that Africa is increasingly characterised by a technology boom with start-ups and innovations. Africa today is not the Africa of yesterday, not colonial Africa, the dark continent. Yes, there is still exploitation, slums and hunger, climate disasters and civil wars. But there is also a spirit of change that we can connect with and support. Of course, this development must take into account China’s strong interests in Africa by seeking positions for peaceful coexistence, if not cooperation. This fundamental openness also applies to Asia and Latin America, of course. The basic goal is to reduce poverty, hunger, war and weather disasters in the wake of climate change. The task is about Africa’s self-empowerment in a different way than that implied by the concept of independence in decolonisation. Development in this direction would reduce the pressure of migration on Europe, defuse the whole issue, but at the same time expand contacts and communications in an orderly manner.

Aid never succeeded in changing the existing unequal economic structures, which is not to say that no development took place. But dependency theory cannot be the final answer. The future must be about independence through interdependence on an equal level in relationships that are intertwined horizontally rather than hierarchically vertically. This description may sound like a return to the neoliberal narrative of a single world market around the global village, but that is explicitly not what it is about. Rather, it is about a world community that does not function automatically but through creative politics and international organisations around a renovated UN. But this is a later stage in the vision outlined here.

It is important to start somewhere, to take the initiative in a new direction. Here, a new Eurafrica could be sufficiently concrete and action-oriented. Needless to say, these lines are not about a political action programme, but rather a vision. Without visions of the future, there can be no concrete policies and no alternatives to the threatening mood of doom that easily becomes self-reinforcing.

It is a vision of increased global openness and increased communication at a time that seems to be characterised by geopolitical demarcation and aggressive cultural conflict. It is a vision of Wandel durch Handel, but in a completely different sense than the German-Russian arrangement that, after 1990, was driven by the illusion that it would be automatically managed by the market. The vision must be realised through creative politics.

Ultimately, the claim is that the vision is as important a part of reality as the summary of reality in a geopolitical power struggle with no other purpose than power itself. Without alternatives, there is no democracy. That was the point that the neoliberal market narrative missed.

Translation by DeepL and Bo Stråth from Swedish of the article Bo Stråth, “En världsordning i upplösning. 3. Ett värdebaserat Euiropa i en nihilistisk tid.” Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift Vol 127 Nr 4 December 2025.

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How to quote:
Cit. Bo Stråth, “A world order in dissolution. What now? 3. A value-based Europe in a nihilistic age.” Blog. https://www.bostrath.com/planetary-perspectives/a-world-order-in-dissolution-what-now-3/ Published 18.12.2025.

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