The Open Society and the Gods That Return

It is nearly ten years since former German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Europe’s borders in September 2015 in a gesture of boundless openness that now marks the unravelling of liberal society. This two-part series examines Islam, multiculturalism and migration in Europe and the forces reshaping the continent’s future.

PART - 1

Trust, civility and cohesion are eroding in Europe, leaving a vacuum into which old forces may once again flow.

Angela Merkel taking a selfie with a Syrian refugee.

I recently chatted with a Dutch acquaintance about cultural differences. He outlined his Calvinist ‘guidelines’ to me, and I told him about my secular Lutheran ones. We wondered why our societies are so polarised and seem to be losing their ability to compromise and show forbearance. For this to happen between people at all, it requires the assumption that the other person ticks similarly to oneself. It presupposes a common ‘we.’ This is the trust bonus that is necessary to open us up, lower our fear threshold and create the basis for a reasonably relaxed coexistence.

But this only happens if we assume that we will encounter a positive response in case of doubt. This is easier for us in culturally homogeneous contexts than in ethnically diverse ones. We are tribal animals that instinctively tend to associate ourselves with a group that appears similar. But as long as the respective ‘guidelines’ are reasonably compatible, external differences like skin colour or gender hardly play a role. It becomes much more difficult in a multicultural context where coexistence has to be renegotiated every day and no one feels at home anymore.

What Aydan Özoğuz - the Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader who served as Commissioner for Immigration, Refugees and Integration in the third government of Chancellor Angela Merkel - once heralded as a model for the future is rarely peaceful, but rather characterised by mistrust and latent hostility. Anyone who has ever lived in such a society knows this.

Trust is the magic word for civility, the essential ingredient that makes fear-free coexistence possible in the first place. This is precisely what the German and European ruling elites have been systematically ignoring for years, even though they would do well to take it to heart. In democracies, legitimacy is not based on denunciation, censorship and exclusion but on trust.

Civility is fragile. Incidentally, one can also call it ‘culture’ because it is a learned skill. Not everyone has access to it or knows how to appreciate it. In this respect, it makes a difference how and where someone grew up and what values they internalised in the process. Unlike in Syria or Afghanistan, Europe has achieved the miracle of uniting clans, tribes and principalities into larger entities that have developed a sense of belonging based on common customs, language and destinies over the last few centuries.

This has created a unique socio-cultural milieu that has given rise to, among other things, what is known as ‘civil society.’ However, this milieu has long been under existential threat because the people who are supposed to manage it and protect it from invasive dangers are deliberately creating these dangers by upholding multiculturalism and promoting mass migration from Islamic cultures. This is overwhelming for many native Europeans. While the elites are systematically dismantling their traditional commonalities, an increasingly aggressive competition is taking place at the grassroots between the young, conquering, masculine immigrant culture and the ageing, feminised European culture. As a result, the goals of the European leadership and the basic needs of average Europeans are drifting further and further apart. The elites dream of globalised multiculturalism. They despise regional and national impulses as backward, while the natives realise that the large-scale social experiment of culturally alien immigration is at their expense and that they are on the losing side. Elites and the population have not been pulling in the same direction for decades. The locals want to limit migration. The elites feign understanding, but push for immigration.

As it becomes increasingly obvious that they no longer represent the interests of the population, their credibility is evaporating. Instead of correcting themselves, they seek to manipulate perceptions of reality and resort to moral and legal blackmail. The more their legitimacy erodes, the more repressively they react to anything that is critical of migration and conservative. They still have the power to interpret events and control the mass media and cultural institutions, but discontent is growing because the indigenous population is beginning to realise that their own future is at stake. Meanwhile, Islamic immigrants have long since challenged the status quo.

In 2019, Catholic philosopher Russell Ronald Reno came out with ‘The Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West’ in which he predicts the end of the ‘Open Society’ as famously formulated by philosopher Karl Popper. Reno argues that it is incapable of meeting the basic needs of the population and responding appropriately to the challenge posed by ‘Closed Societies.’

This creates a void that robs it of its raison d'être, while fatally threatening the freedom it supposedly represents. Sooner or later, this vacuum will be filled: either peacefully or violently. Reno sees the emergence of the Open Society as a consequence of the traumas of the 20th century.

After the carnage of two World Wars, the West committed itself to Popper’s ideals in order to create peaceful, prosperous communities with open borders, free from ideology, nationalism, intolerance and religious hatred. This was supposed to push back the ‘strong gods’ who had previously caused so much suffering, war and violence. Accordingly, open borders, open markets, diversity and tolerance were promoted. For a while, this worked brilliantly. But the project gradually went off the rails, acquiring dogmatic traits and turning totalitarian by itself. At the same time, the intellectual and spiritual emptiness produced by the forced transformation is becoming increasingly painful.

The Open Society has dissolved traditional bonds, identities and feelings of belonging. Without the experience of family, closeness and community, however, very few people develop a sense of responsibility and solidarity. Social impoverishment not only drives individuals into isolation but also destroys the glue that holds societies together. It threatens their core existence because increased uprooting on the one hand and culturally alien parallel societies on the other are hopelessly overwhelming communities that have long been fragile.

But although this excess of openness is meeting with ever stronger resistance, the established forces are clinging to it desperately. They perceive any criticism of their ‘consensus’ as a threat and denounce it as ‘reactionary.’ When nationalist undertones emerge, they immediately paint a terrifying picture of fascism. In fact, according to Reno, they are merely fixated on the past because the threat of fascism is their only raison d'être. In truth, the rise of populism does not reflect a thirst for dictatorship, but rather an urge for self-assertion, fuelled by fear of foreign infiltration and totalitarian structures. Few people wish to be isolated individuals in a homogenised, multicultural mass; they seek belonging - a homeland and a shared sense of purpose. For those in power, such backward-looking nonsense is irrelevant. They consider their model of openness, tolerance and progress to be the only true one. They ignore the fact that this model has increasingly unpleasant consequences for those who are forced to accept it.

In the long term, this state of affairs is untenable, says Reno. For him, the open society has won itself to death. The void it has left behind cries out for content. It calls for ‘strong gods’ and sooner or later they will return – either as good spirits and a healing inspiration, or as a destructive force that sweeps away everything that exists. We still have the chance to strengthen the forces that appeal to the heart and mind and build on our better traditions. But the longer Popper’s epigones try to violently hold back the powerful gods, the more they invite the forces of darkness, thereby bringing about the very disaster they sought to prevent.

(The author is an historian and novelist. He is currently working on a book on Germany’s migration crisis. Views personal.)