(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Once upon a time, Adam Holm was one of the prominent TV hosts of the Danish news magazine Deadline. Here he stood for a thorough, substantial style in which he often seemed to draw on his background on historians. Always serious, factual interviews. In his way, it was sad that Holm stopped as a TV host, but the good thing about that story is of course that he has now been given time off for other projects. And one of the first results of this time is the debate book End station Europe – a collection of interviews with interesting characters who all have a heart in the European project. The votes count both Russian exile writers such as Mikhail Shishkin, the Swedish journalist Göran Rosenberg as well as the French philosopher and media darling Bernard Henri-Lévy. In other words, a journey through the continent with visits from selected intellectuals.
The train as a metaphor. Before we get to these voices, however, we have to roll past Adam Holm's own introduction, which mostly (and this is a recurring feature of the book) resides in a train metaphor. The notion is that Europe as a continent is running off track, and that this is due to both external pressure – immigration and relations with Russia and the US – as well as pressure from within, expressed in increasing polarization, increasing divide between rich and poor, a return of patriotic currents, xenophobia and a declining trust in Europe as a community.
Similar train metaphorics and symbols have been emerging in the Danish press lately. Thus, some time ago you could read an article in the Weekendavisen about how the natoges can finally be interpreted as an expression of how we as Europeans distance ourselves from each other and no longer want to get along. The Danish media Zetland also jumped on train stories – and just as Adam Holm does in the introduction, they link the sharp decline in inter-rail travel with the European crisis. For the uninitiated, it can be said that interrail is a youth ticket that gives access to train journeys across the European continent – thus the opportunity to get to know its European neighbors without spending too much coin on it. Cheap flights and more adventurous young people, who would rather go to Burma than to Bulgaria, have put a big stick on the wheel of this kind of train journey and thus perhaps breathed into the ongoing erosion of the European community.
Can the populist parties actually be a democratic sign of health?
The question, though, is whether the euphoria has ever been there? This perhaps inflated premise throws Holm on the field in his introduction, and then follows the many conversations that seek answers to where the crisis consists and how we get out of it.
Dangerous dehumanization. Several of the thinkers, and perhaps especially Adam Holm himself, adhere to today's equality with the interwar years, where ideological confrontations, high-rationality, and anti-democratic approaches became more and more visible. However, we must be careful to believe that history is just repeating itself. For example, British military historian Antony Beevor points out that the black-and-white opposition between democracy and fascism was far more strongly drawn in the interwar years, whereas today we see only a limited popular support for radical ideologies. By contrast, Beevor believes that what we should fear most is the increasing dehumanization by which we view people who are not like us.
The relationship between Europe and the mighty neighbor Russia is a recurring theme. A full interview with Nobel laureate Svetlana Aleksijevich only touches on the European to a small degree, but by staying with Russia and the Russian mentality, the conversation draws some interesting points about the European in an interesting way. Aleksijevich outlines, among other things, how the Russian identity is largely founded kampen as a phenomenon that also contributes to the desire to be part of a large country; a desire that has the effect of trumping the desire for freedom, which can otherwise be said to be part of the European mentality.
The night trains can finally be seen as an expression of the fact that we Europeans no longer want to get along.
However, the desire for freedom is challenged in the European community, several of the thinkers let us know, pointing in particular to Hungary and Poland as countries where freedom must give way to a particular mix of Christianity and nationalism, which is at the same time fiercely exclusive.
Belief in the Enlightenment. The range of voices is enriching and wisely made. However, one could sometimes miss a voice that actually questions whether we need a European community at all in our time, for that foundation seems to all the thinkers. Holm asks good, elementary questions and is also good at coming up with the confrontational Rasmus Opposat considerations, which often provide access to fruitful answers. This happens, for example, in the interview with Göran Rosenberg, in which Holm tries to mobilize an argument that the populist parties may in fact be a democratic sign of health.
Instead, we miss follow-up questions, which is probably a hindrance to the book's form, which consists solely of questions and answers. In some ways, it is pleasant to avoid the annoying reporting elements and pseudo-considerations on the part of the journalist with which interviews may be obstructed, and the structure also gives us the feeling of being a direct witness to the conversation. On the other hand, reading 150 pages with a similar question-and-answer structure is also a little tiring and monotonous.
However, one leaves the book with an almost old-fashioned feeling of being enlightened. In this way, the work mimics one of the most important anchors of the European world: the belief in enlightenment and science as a viable path towards a better and freer world.
