The West’s Schism Over Liberal Values

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/west-liberal-values.html

Version 0 of 1.

PARIS — Early this month, on the day after President Trump announced his intention to end the Dreamers program for young immigrants in the United States, the European Court of Justice issued a very different ruling on the other side of the Atlantic. Dismissing the objections of Hungary and Slovakia to the European Union refugee relocation program, the court upheld the European Commission’s legal right to request all member states to take in a prescribed number of refugees, as it did at the height of the migrant crisis in 2015.

Both decisions touched on issues rooted in Western liberal values: human solidarity, openness toward those looking for a better future, diversity as an asset. For the first time since World War II, these values have come under attack in the West. Not from hostile foreign powers. Not from domestic fringe elements or extremist political movements, which we have come to see as a testimony to the pluralism of our democracies. This time, the assault is coming from within and from the top — from democratically elected leaders.

Only a few of them. But enough to draw a line between two camps within the Western community, now divided by fundamental contradictions.

On one side is an illiberal axis embodied by President Trump in the United States and by two leaders in Central Europe: Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. This axis has gone on the offensive against migrants, open borders, multiculturalism and multilateralism. What only a year ago still looked like a risky swerve from a deeply ingrained democratic culture, or a knee-jerk reaction to the omnipresence of “political correctness,” now appears to be a joint, methodical, determined effort to undermine pillars of the liberal order and install a different set of values.

Alarmed by this development, another axis is taking shape around two European leaders: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France. If Ms. Merkel was reluctant to inherit the mantle of leader of the free world that Barack Obama tried to pass on to her on his last visit to Berlin as president, she has since been emboldened both by the entrenchment of illiberalism and by Mr. Macron’s victory over the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in May. Together, the French and German leaders can now lead a two-pronged counteroffensive to preserve what they see as the legacy of the Enlightenment.

They are now convinced that what we are witnessing with politicians like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kaczynski goes beyond populism. The American president’s tirade at the United Nations on Tuesday promoting a ruthless international world order based on national sovereignty and unilateralism could only reinforce their suspicion.

In both the United States and Poland, the illiberal offensive reached a turning point this summer. It is no coincidence that Mr. Trump chose Warsaw as the only stopover in Europe on his way to the G-20 summit meeting in July in Germany.

For the embattled nationalist Polish leadership, at odds with Brussels over its refusal to accept refugees and its disregard for the rule of law, this show of support was a godsend. A few days earlier, at a party conference, Mr. Kaczynski had raised an extremely sensitive issue that in Europe is assumed to be settled: reparations from Germany for the immense losses it inflicted on Poland in World War II. In his mind, this was linked with the controversy over the refugees.

“We never invited them to Europe,” he said, in an implicit jab at Chancellor Merkel. “We have a moral right to say no. Our Western critics should remember that the Polish people were the first to rise against the Nazis. Doesn’t history give us some moral rights? Poland never renounced this compensation.”

The scene was set, and President Trump did not disappoint his Polish hosts. In Warsaw, he delivered what was supposed to be a historic speech about the defense of the West and its civilization. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” he said. “Do we have confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”

Over the summer, several events showed that “the West,” its “civilization” and its “values” could mean different things. When Mr. Trump implicitly endorsed neo-Nazi and racist violence in Charlottesville, Va., it was a shocking transgression. When the government in Budapest put up anti-migrant billboards illustrated with the image of the Hungarian-born American Jewish financier George Soros, it broke a taboo. When the Polish defense minister accused Germany and France of trying to “erase” the losses suffered by Poles from “the memory of Europe,” he struck at a foundation of the European Union, which is built on reconciliation over millions of deaths from a monstrous conflict.

To Prime Minister Orban of Hungary, immigration is a “poison” that increases the risk of terrorism. Campaigning in October 2015, Mr. Kaczynski warned against resettling migrants, who he said had carried diseases like cholera to the Greek islands and dysentery to Vienna, “all sorts of parasites and protozoa.” For Donald Trump, when he too was on a campaign trail in March 2016, “what Merkel did to Germany is a shame, it’s a sad, sad shame.”

In contrast, President Macron, while far less bold on this issue than the German chancellor, reminded French ambassadors gathered at the Élysée Palace in August that welcoming migrants was “a human duty, a question of dignity and loyalty to who we are and what we believe in.”

The way countries approach the refugee situation is just one example of the widening gap in the West. There are others: on climate change, on the interpretation of history, on democracy. Ms. Merkel, who is heavily favored to win re-election on Sunday, is known to have finally decided to run for a fourth term the day after Mr. Trump won his election. The German and French leaders have increasingly voiced their differences with the illiberal axis since the summer — Ms. Merkel more understated, Mr. Macron more lyrical, but both definitely on the same page. This month in Athens, the French president described Europe as “one of the last havens where we collectively continue to harbor a certain idea of humanity, law, freedom and justice.”

“Is there any other continent with such a commitment to freedom, democracy and the social balances that hold us together, to this reconciliation of justice and freedom which are at last combined?” he asked, adding, “In Europe today, sovereignty, democracy and trust are in danger.”

President Macron did make mention, in that speech, of “the other side of the Atlantic.” But both he and Chancellor Merkel are painfully aware of the limited leverage they have over Mr. Trump’s dumbing down of American leadership and distorted views of Western values. Poland and Hungary are different: As members of the European Union, they accept being part of the last haven of those values. If the Old World is left alone to defend the legacy of the Enlightenment, it can only do so united.