Europe is a not a city upon a hill

The old America is gone. Our ally and, if we are honest, protector of many decades, a country which we believed could defend shared values of liberal democracy and freedom, has disappeared. In its place stands a broken thing, a fertile garden of disturbing conspiracy theories broadcast from the nation's television channels and legislative chairs, where the right to violence has become sacrosanct and a creeping religious fundamentalism is sinking its claws into the private lives of every adult and child. From forging the principles of the European Enlightenment - reason, democracy, individual freedom - into a state, America is now taking swift strides back into our dark ages. The 'city upon a hill' has been sacked. 

In this world, Europe has been left to continue the fight. To defend the values of liberal democracy and an international order based on rules and human rights. 

In this role, it is impossible to say that Europe is perfect or that it faultlessly embodies the values that we claim to believe in. The truth is that Europe is an imperfect representative. The treatment of migrants from outside of Europe, whether crossing land borders into the Balkans, traversing the Mediterranean or even attempting the relatively short journey across the Channel, has often been nothing but shameful. Desperate souls are harrassed and punished for the Kafkaesque crime of failing to take legal routes which do not exist. Meanwhile those European citizens who try to help them are routinely criminalised or blamed for deaths whose responsibility can only lie at the feet of those who write our border policies. 

Even internally, Europe has been wracked by nationalist populism for much of the past decade. Enlightenment values have suffered as these political movements have won seats in Parliaments, entered governments or upended constitutional orders through referendums. And even if predictions of total European disintegration and of a collapse back into old divisions have not come to pass, there have been marked successes for nationalist populism - not least in the cases of the UK's exit from the European Union and in Hungary's growing willingness under Viktor Orban to obstruct and sabotage the EU from the inside. 

And yet the promise of our values does not lie in perfection but in perfectibility. Even in the face of real problems and real failures, Europe can still claim to be a place of progress. Far from being the rule, Hungary has become a growing exception in the region, as many of its neighbours have gone through waves of liberal, moderate and anti-corruption parties gaining ground and even kicking out incumbent populist parties. Whether in Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovenia or Slovakia, recent elections have shown an enduring strength to the defenders of individual rights and the rule of law. 

Women's bodily autonomy is not a point of political debate in much of the continent (though there are some notable exceptions). LGBT rights have generally continued to advance and certainly the threat of a reversal is nothing like what these groups are facing on the other side of the Atlantic today. Our education systems also retain much more integrity compared to the alarming rise of politicised interventions in America, where bans on books and certain topics of discussion have been brought in to 'protect' children from the supposed dangers of understanding race or gender

Meanwhile in Ukraine the fight is more than metaphorical. Along Europe's Eastern border, Ukraine's brave people have been giving everything to hold off Russia's unjustified invasion, enduring even when confronted with massacres and war crimes of the most savage kind. In their very real struggle to preserve democracy and freedom in the fact of authoritarianism, Ukraine both defends and embodies Europe's values at their best. 

It is thanks to this continued willingness to move forward, to push back against regression, that Europe stands as the best hope for liberal democracy. Of course, Europe is not entirely alone - there are other real bastions of liberal democracy scattered around the world, like New Zealand or Japan. But even so, none have the global weight and influence that Europe does. To the extent that the burden of upholding the liberal international order can be borne by anyone other than the United States, it is Europe's responsibility. 

Europe cannot and will not be a replica of the United States. We cannot mimic the shining city upon a hill, the glorious example to the world. Europe is too involved, too compromised, too messy, too exposed. Europe lies at the bottom of the hill, down in the trenches. There is mud on its boots and dirt under its nails. But if nothing else, we can keep alive that ideal of perfectibility, which is nothing less than the promise of human progress.