Europe in a State of Denial

Abstract

The European political class as a whole is in a state of denial. Polarization between ideologically different political parties tends to occur in an ever narrowing circle of political views and solutions. There is a clear difference between parties that defend rights and parties that attack rights (in the case of the far-right), but is this enough to distinguish the left from the right? It will certainly not be enough to face the two great challenges that question to the limit both the relationship between humanity and nature (the impending ecological catastrophe) and human coexistence (artificial intelligence). The circle of the politically possible has narrowed and within it the political class pushes itself to mark differences that, in fact, are more rhetorical than real. The denial lies in accepting this state of affairs as an inevitability. The immediate cause of the qualitative reduction of politically addressable problems and the consequent expansion of unapproachable problems is the war in Ukraine—the war itself, its continuation and possible expansion. But the continuation of the war is only the latest episode in the rivalry between the United States and Europe as global centers of capitalist accumulation. From the 1970s onwards, the United States realized that its undisputed hegemony in the world economy ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. 29 Issue 2 | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2023.1217 | jwsr.pitt.edu