The empty runway
Why Europe can no longer tell its own story.
The empty runway
Why Europe can no longer tell its own story.
Douglas Murray describes in The Strange Death of Europe what he calls "existential tiredness": the feeling that the story has been told, that the civilization built over centuries simply exists, like a building that needs no maintenance. It is a peculiar condition. Europe has more prosperity, more peace and more individual freedom than at any point in history. And simultaneously there seems to be a fundamental inability to articulate what it all serves.
In the Dutch context, this inability has a long history. Potgieter wrote in 1841 his Jan, Jannetje en hun jongste kind as an indictment of the complacency of the Dutch bourgeoisie. "Jan Salie" became the symbol of a nation resting on its laurels, living off the interest of previous generations without adding anything itself. It is tempting to dismiss this analysis as nineteenth-century rhetoric, but the parallels with the present are uncomfortably precise.
A culture that defines itself primarily in terms of what it is not, not intolerant, not old-fashioned, not exclusive, creates a vacuum. That vacuum must be filled. And in the absence of a binding narrative, of a shared purpose, people reach for what is available: consumption as identity, brand as meaning, price as value. The empty catwalk of Demna's Gucci debut was the unintended portrait of this.
The question is not whether this is a problem. The question is what an adequate response would be. Not a return to a fabricated past, not the nationalism that pretends there was once a golden age that can be restored. But also not the current state, in which every attempt to formulate what Europe stands for is dismissed as nostalgic or exclusionary.
What is needed is a language that distinguishes between pride and arrogance, between heritage and exclusion, between direction and rigidity. That language does not yet exist. Developing it is not the task of politicians alone. It is a cultural assignment that begins with recognizing that the runway is empty, and that we ourselves must fill it.
Sources: Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe (Bloomsbury, 2017); E.J. Potgieter, Jan, Jannetje en hun jongste kind (1841).
Source: Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe (Bloomsbury, 2017); Potgieter, Jan, Jannetje en hun jongste kind (1841)