THE 2024 YEAR IN REVIEW: Europe has run out of time. The Continent is doomed to never awake from its torpor.

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order … and disorder

[ The fourth and final of my traditional end-of-the-year essays ; there is a link to the first three at the end of this post ]

29 December 2024 — Here is why it is so hard to imagine an optimistic future, and why I remain a pessimist, a skeptic. Although I prefer the moniker “realist”.

God is a million times more difficult to imagine than the devil. We find horror, evil, chaos, destruction much easier to describe in detail than the details of the good, true and beautiful. That’s because the good and the beautiful are improbable, while the destruction is probable, indeed almost certain.

This is the law of entropy: that everything in the universe is running down towards uniform gray disorder and chaos. Everything wears down, runs out, breaks down, and levels out into flat sameness. The universe is titled towards this low bottom, as is our imaginations.

Except there is an exception to the way entropy works. If we accelerate the run downhill, that is if we increase chaos and waste energy locally, we can – in the right circumstances – build up a chain of increasing order right in the midst of universal decreasing order. I call this anti-entropy, exotropy.

One example of this exotropy is life. Life keeps going and keeps evolving by accelerating the creation of entropy outside of it while life decreases entropy within its realm making everything ever more complex. Like a magnifying glass that focuses sunlight into an intense beam by creating a shadow of no-light around it, ordered life endures by creating disorder around it. That wasted energy is dissipated in very familiar fashion as death, destruction, failure, fear, evil, crime, disasters – all of which we can easily picture. It is easy to imagine because it is a well worn path and highly probable.

On the other hand ordered, living systems are highly improbable. Life may be common in the universe but every specific example of it is unlikely. Flowers might be common but this particular species of flower is improbable. You and I are highly unlikely. The universe could roll its dice a trillion times and another one of you or I will never happen. As Kevin Kelly (he and I share the same birthday) likes to say:

All of exotropy is improbable.

The challenge in trying to imagine something good that has not existed before is that in order to do so you have to go uphill against the downhill force of entropy. Quoting Kevin further:

While entropy is a broad and certain path, everything about the good is narrow and unexpected. This makes it very very difficult to specify beforehand, almost like predicting the exact sequence of a million tosses of the dice. The weird thing about life and minds is that they are not random, but they are as unpredictable as random.

All life-like, or exotropic, systems exist along a narrow path. Their existence is highly unlikely, and therefore highly difficult to predict. It also makes them highly difficult to describe before hand. Which is why we find it highly difficult to imagine optimistic futures. We have no trouble describing in very good detail catastrophe, destruction, extinction and the end of the world because these are inevitable states. But we find it near impossible to imagine a plausible, beneficial, supportive, desirable future because any of those specific futures are highly improbable. That is the nature of all good things: in a true cosmic sense they are unlikely statistical outliers.

Today, this moment, was a statistical improbability a year ago. Yet here we are. Life is a long unbroken chain of the improbable, which, despite the odds, will probably keep going.

But to imagine it we have to be comfortable in imagining the improbable, and maybe even the ridiculous. If someone told us the future 100, 200, 300 years from now, we would not believe them because it would sound improbable, as improbable if we traveled back 100 years to tell them what our lives were like. So we have to get better at believing in the improbable.

And Europe faces the improbable.

Brendan Simms, Professor of the history of international relations at the University of Cambridge and a dynamite historian, in his most recent book, uses Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard“ (1958) to illustrate Europe’s present woes.

The great unification processes of the late 19th century in the U.S. and Europe inspired some of the world’s most famous authors. In 1886, Henry James explored the triangular relationship between a Confederate War veteran from Mississippi and two New England feminist abolitionists in “The Bostonians“. Fifteen years later, Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” chronicled not only the downfall of a Hanseatic merchant family, but also the enduring chasm between north and south in Germany.

If both Henry James and Thomas Mann were writing relatively close to the period they were depicting, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” was written nearly a hundred years after the event. It is nevertheless considered a classic account of the Italian Risorgimento, examining it through the Prince of Salina, a Sicilian aristocrat in his mid-forties who grapples with the forces unleashed on the island by the collapse of the old Bourbon Regime in 1860. And the film version by Luchino Visconti (1963) is still one of the most powerful pieces of cinema ever created.

“The Leopard” is an extraordinarily ambivalent and complex work of art, but from the historical and political point of view, it is dominated by two themes.

First, there is the tension between continuity and change. The Prince, initially loyal to the King in Naples, is persuaded by his impetuous young nephew, Tancredi, that he should embrace the revolution and in so doing neutralize it: “Unless we ourselves take a hand now,” Tancredi famously warns, “they’ll foist a Republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change“.

At least on the surface, it seems as if the Prince’s bet pays off. The revolutionary zealots of Garibaldi are soon replaced by the polished Piedmontese officers of the new united Italian army. The inhabitants of the Prince’s summer holiday retreat at Donnafugata welcome him back as if nothing had changed. Tancredi marries the daughter of the wealthy upstart mayor Don Calogero and goes into politics.

Second, “The Leopard” exposes the failure of Italian Unification. Lampedusa shows it to have been basically a takeover of the south by the north. The Piedmontese envoy sent to persuade the Prince to become a senator in the new united legislature refers to the happy “annexation” before hastily correcting himself to “union” while the Prince himself predicts that it will “simply mean Torinese rather than Neapolitan dialect, that is all”. Unification was also maimed at the start by the mendacity of the liberal nationalists who simply binned contrary votes in the referendum on unification. In the film, the announcement of the cooked result becomes farcical as the off-key band keeps on breaking into Don Calogero’s platitudinous speech.

Professor Simms notes:

The enduring relevance of The Leopard to Italy is obvious. Nearly 175 years after unification, the country remains fundamentally divided between north and south, and more so than any other European country. The Mezzogiorno — as the south of the country is often called — still lags far behind the more developed north. A major contemporary political party, the Lega, formerly Lega Nord, has espoused secession in the past. No wonder that The Leopard is a set text in Italian schools.

It is with respect to Europe as a whole, though, that the book resonates most powerfully today. Before we can understand why, we need to come to a better understanding of the author’s beliefs and intentions. The cynical phrase about things changing so that they can stay the same was certainly Tancredi’s belief and the Prince’s hope, but it reflected neither Lampedusa’s own programme, nor what he was trying to convey about the nature of the Risorgimento. It has been widely misinterpreted.

The author despaired not only of the Sicilian aristocracy from which he descended but also of the island as a whole. We know from his excellent biographer David Gilmour that Lampedusa was no reactionary, but an Anglophile Whig. He dearly wished that his ancestors had grasped, for example, the possibilities opened up to them by the British-brokered Sicilian constitution of 1812. He wanted nothing more than for his countrymen to wake from their torpor and join what he called in the novel “the flow of universal history”. Visconti captured this inertia well with the two great scenes which bookend his film: the lengthy opening recitation of the rosary, so rudely interrupted by news of Garibaldi’s landing; and the interminable dance sequences, a kind of aristocratic rosary, at the end, punctuated by gunshots marking the execution of some now redundant revolutionaries.

It was, in fact, the Prince himself who delivered the most devastating indictment of Sicily’s failure to progress. Surely, the kind if naïve Piedmontese envoy asks, “the Sicilians must want to improve”? The Prince replies that “the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery”. Their “pride”, he continues, is merely “blindness”. What Sicilians want from politics, the Prince says, is “sleep and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them”. That is why, he explains, the island had always been a “colony” and, we intuit, always will be.

Unsurprisingly, “The Leopard” shocked Lampedusa’s aristocratic relatives when it came out, and outraged wider opinion in Sicily. The book was clearly an indictment of the island and its history. Leonardo Sciascia, then Sicily’s greatest living writer, bitterly attacked it on those grounds. If he later recanted, then only because he had come to agree with Lampedusa.

The author did not believe that things did not change. They plainly did, even in the novel. The Prince’s power, and that of his class, slips away in myriad ways. He himself acknowledges in a famous exchange with his confessor, Father Pirrone, that the nobility has merely secured a stay of execution, not developed a viable strategy for long-term survival. In due course, Mussolini plunged the nation into a catastrophic war, which Lampedusa alludes to only in passing, in an aside about the Pittsburgh-made American bomb which later shatters the palace in which the ball took place.

When Lampedusa was writing in the 1950s, the latest conquerors of Sicily had been the Anglo-Americans who landed on the island in 1943, booted out the Nazis, and blasted his childhood home in Palermo to pieces.

Europe today is Italy yesterday (and today). The continent, Henry Kissinger lamented back in 2019 at a policy event, had “checked out” and was making neither a sufficient financial nor an adequate intellectual contribution to the common defence. If it persisted in this stance, Kissinger also warned, the continent would end up as a “strategic appendage of Eurasia”, of the Sino-Russian cartel — in effect a colony. And that is exactly what Europe has become.

Kissinger could easily have expanded the indictment. This who know their modern European history well know all of these points:

• At the time of his remarks, the European Union was attempting to run a common currency without a common state or even a common economic policy, causing a sovereign debt crisis which nearly destroyed the euro.

• It had created a passport less common travel area … without properly securing its external border, resulting in an unprecedented migration crisis.

• Meanwhile, the continent was rapidly losing its economic edge to the Indo-Pacific.

• In the field of security, Europe was not only failing to mobilize against Vladimir Putin’s ambitions but actually deepening its dependency on Russian energy through the construction of a second pipeline through the Baltic Sea.

Since then, the situation has deteriorated further. Even Putin’s full-scale attack on Ukraine, though it produced the biggest European response to date, did not lead to the necessary sea change.

In fact, some European countries like Germany are beginning to retreat from the strong stances they adopted at the outset. Olaf Scholz’s much-heralded Zeitenwende has thus joined the long list of turning-points at which German (and European) history failed to turn. Scholz’s government wanted to change things just enough so they could stay the same.

In security terms, most of Europe is still little more than an American colony, completely dependent on US military protection. But as the war in Ukraine reaches its denouement and President-elect Donald Trump threatens to withdraw, or at least re-negotiate, the American defence umbrella, the Continent needs to wake from its deep Sicilian slumber. But it will not.

If Europeans really want things to remain halfway the same, in other words to maintain their standard of living, security and territorial integrity, they will have to make some very far-reaching changes.

They have neither the political will nor the levers or institutions to do that.

As British and American observers, including Professor Simms, have repeatedly pointed out there are basically two options:

1. Europe can form a full political union rallying the entire resources of the Continent on the lines of the United Kingdom or the United States.

2. Alternatively, the Continent can re-configure itself as a looser confederation of sovereign nation-states each of which is truly committed to its own and the collective defense through Nato.

So far, Europeans have done neither, not because anyone is stopping them, but because like The Leopard‘s Sicilians they prefer the rest of oblivion to the effort of action.

Neither the election of Donald Trump, nor the dire situation in Ukraine will rouse Europe from its torpor. As Russia advances, Europeans will recite interminable rosaries about the need to “step up”, but they will not undertake the necessary fundamental reform.

Europe’s vanity is stronger than its sense of strategic squalor.

As Professor Simms notes:

Like Lampedusa’s Sicily, the Continent thinks itself already perfect, and certainly far superior to its Anglo-American lecturers. But the idea that Europeans just have to change a little so that things stay the same is an illusion. While the continent sleeps, things are changing, and will continue to change, just not for the better.

Europe is destined to be an observer, not a player, and will be subject to the whims of Russia, China and the United States.

And, no, Europe’s problems are not all external, but very much internal, and self-generated, by creating an over regulated, sclerotic economy incapable of maintaining present living standards let alone raising them. It isn’t Europe being too disunited that’s the problem, it’s being far too united in following Commission diktat to geopolitical irrelevance. Had Europe stuck to the original idea … a free trade zone of sovereign states devoted to free market principles, the price of entry being an iron-clad commitment to mutual defense … it would not be in the position it is today. Enough of that “ever closer union” bullshit. They don’t want or can or need to be that close. This prescription would given them the leisure and luxury to contemplate the historical and cultural reasons for their being together in the first place.

And surely the best illustration of the complacent, asleep, EU aristocracy is another scene in the movie version of The Leopard, at the magnificent ball. The ball scene features the most incredible fabrics on clothes and furnishings, the most magnificent feasting on Italian food, etc.

But then we follow The Prince, magnificently played by Burt Lancanster, as walks from the luxury of the glittering ballroom to a room at the back of the palace – filed with dozens of overflowing piss pots on the floor, and absolute squalor.

I do not believe that ever before in Europe’s history have we ever had such a uniformly incompetent set of cowards, posers, grifters and nonentities in our halls of power. We have no Principi di Salina, no Tancredis. We have feckless and useless posers.

And they are unable to grasp, unable to truly appreciate the nature of our present world, and more brutal world to come.

Please read on …

The ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus wrote that “war is the father of all,” and it has certainly formed much of the modern world. Although the fundamental nature of war has not altered over the centuries, constant change, innovation, and adaptation have repeatedly reshaped how wars are fought in the West. Revolutions in military practice cannot be separated from larger social developments in areas like logistics, finance and economics, and the culture of military organizations.

In “The Dark Path“, Williamson Murray argues that the history of warfare in the West hinged on five revolutions, which both reflected the social, political, and economic conditions that produced them and in turn influenced how those conditions evolved. These five key turning points are:

1. the advent of the modern state, which formed bureaucracies and professional militaries

2. the Industrial Revolution, which produced the financial and industrial means to sustain and equip large armies

3. the French Revolution, which provided the ideological basis needed to sustain armies through continent-sized wars

4. the merging of the Industrial and French Revolutions in the U.S. Civil War; and

5. the accelerating integration of technological advancement, financial capacity, ideology, and government that unleashed the modern capacity for total warfare.

It is a most ambitious work of synthesis, but the book shows how the world continually re-creates war – and how war, in turn, continually re-creates the world.

But now … the return of total war.

“Every age had its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions,” the defense theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the early 19th century. There is no doubt that Clausewitz was right. And yet it is surprisingly difficult to characterize war at any given moment in time; doing so becomes easier only with hindsight. Harder still is predicting what kind of war the future might bring. When war changes, the new shape it takes almost always comes as a surprise.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, American strategic planners faced a fairly static challenge: a Cold War in which superpower conflict was kept on ice by nuclear deterrence, turning hot only in proxy fights that were costly but containable. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought that era to an end. In Washington during the 1990s, war became a matter of assembling coalitions to intervene in discrete conflicts when bad actors invaded their neighbors, stoked civil or ethnic violence, or massacred civilians.

After the shock of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, attention shifted to terrorist organizations, insurgents, and other nonstate groups. The resulting “war on terror” pushed thinking about state-on-state conflict onto the sidelines. War was a major feature of the post-9/11 period, of course.

But it was a highly circumscribed phenomenon, often limited in scale and waged in remote locations against shadowy adversaries. For most of this century, the prospect of a major war among states was a lower priority for American military thinkers and planners, and whenever it took center stage, the context was usually a potential contest with China that would materialize only in the far-off future, if ever.

Then, in 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The result has been the largest land war in Europe since World War II. The war has reshaped geopolitics by drawing in dozens of other countries (North Korean soldiers are fighting on Russia’s side). The United States and its NATO allies have offered unprecedented financial and materiel support to Ukraine. Meanwhile, China and Iran have all assisted Russia in crucial ways. Less than two years after Russia’s invasion, Hamas carried out its brutal October 7th terrorist attack on Israel, provoking a highly lethal and destructive Israeli assault on Gaza, and then Lebanon, and now Syria.

And all of the conflicts quickly widened into a complex regional affair, involving multiple states and a number of capable non-state actors.

In both Ukraine and the Middle East, what has become clear is that the relatively narrow scope that defined war during the post-9/11 era has dramatically widened. An era of limited war has ended; an age of comprehensive conflict has begun. Indeed, what the world is witnessing today is akin to what theorists in the past have called “total war,” in which combatants draw on vast resources, mobilize their societies, prioritize warfare over all other state activities, attack a broad variety of targets, and reshape their economies and those of other countries. But owing to new technologies and the deep links of the globalized economy, today’s wars are not merely a repeat of older conflicts.

And Europe cannot ignore the fact that every stunt Russia has pulled since the U.S. election is a pre-programmed sequence for “total war” against Europe:

– the cable cutting

– the medium-range ballistic missile attacks

– the destabilization of Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and now Transnistri

At baseline it creates uncertainty, shakes the tree, shows a range of options for escalation. But I keep coming back to Orban’s taunt against Zelensky – “this is the most dangerous point of the conflict” – ie a warning of “escalate to de-escalate“.

But that was surely an echo of His Master’s Voice … while Western governments are refusing to attribute RU blatant attacks.

Why?

Because then they’d need to actually to do something … and Europe is simply unprepared, and unwilling, to do something.

The seized tanker will not only provide evidence of Russia (and potentially China) culpability on cable cutting. It will open a public conversation about what Putin is trying to achieve.

The Russians are attacking the energy, transport and digital infrastructure of Europe. Is anybody not up for stopping them? Nope. In a period where a nuclear armed power is sabotaging vital infrastructure, anyone who thinks we can defend Europe on 2.5% of GDP is kidding themselves

And one last point …

Another feature of the age of comprehensive conflict is a transformation in the demography of war: the cast of characters has become increasingly diverse. The post-9/11 wars demonstrated the outsize impact of terrorist groups, proxies, and militias. Russia plays this game better than anybody else.

Yet European policymakers are going back to the traditional focus on state militaries – particularly given the enormous investments some states have already made in their defenses.

But Russia wants a hybrid war. Easier to wage, almost impossible to defend against.

Prevailing in an era of comprehensive conflict and hybrid warfare requires a sense of urgency and vigilance and, above all, a wide aperture. Europe has none of that. Today’s wars are increasingly “whole-of-society” phenomena. Actions and activities rarely affect just one domain; spillage seems unavoidable.

In all of this I am reminded of a piece by William Hazlitt (the English essayist, social commentator, and philosopher placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell) who said:

The true law of the human race is to move toward progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in that march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.

Our problem in Europe (and America) is that *democracy* is a term now confused and devalued by indiscriminate use, and treated with patronizing contempt. The spinal principle of democracy is gone.

All living organisms are in some degree autonomous, in that they follow a life-pattern of their own. But in man this autonomy is an essential condition for his further development. We have surrendered that every day, on every occasion. We have turned our lives into a chronic illness.

So be it.

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