The Specter of Fascism Returns To Haunt Europe
And why we should all be concerned.
Europe is seriously coming apart.
Far more than any other part of the world, Europe is going through something of an identity crisis, which is almost likely to have profound global ramifications.
When you think of the fact that the last century ended the way it began — with war and genocide — then you start to realize that this particular continent, more than anywhere else, is on the brink of another seismic shift in the twenty-first century.
And what exactly might this be?
Fascism.
For a brief period in the aftermath of the second world war, it seemed that the continent which gave the world philosophy, socialism, free market capitalism had awoken to the damage that it had wrought on the rest of the globe and seriously sought to make amends; Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer created the EU, thus setting the template for greater integration among member states and the reduced possibility of military conflicts.
But this counted for very little when a number of countries in Eastern Europe began to engage in conflict in the 1990s. These wars led to the balkanization of the nation states which came into being at the end of the first world war in 1918 and America, once again, was…