HBO recently televised The Man in the High Castle, a novel by Philip K. Dick in which he outlines an alternate line of history, where the Nazis win WWII and occupy Europe and parts of the US. The protagonists of the novel have the gut feeling that something is wrong with history.
They trace the break between their parallel reality and the line of real history to 1933, when president Roosevelt was assassinated, leading to the continuation of the Great Depression and US isolationism. Through the documentary footage of the mysterious Man in the High Castle, they become aware of the existence of another reality in which the Nazis lost the war and people live under democracy and freedom.
What's wrong with reality?
Reading the daily news, I can’t help but to have similar feelings. Is there something wrong with reality? Did something happen that diverted us from the “real” line of history? Does another Europe exist somewhere, somehow, which is on the track towards a stronger union, with less austerity and more social and economic cohesion, with more openness and solidarity?
If this other Europe exists, its leaders surely responded to the financial crisis in another way than in our reality. They kept the crisis under control without following the austerity doctrine. They tamed the anxiety of their people so that the crescendo of the populist Eurosceptic right could be avoided.
The UK is not to contemplate a "Brexit" and does not face a new era of isolationism. Southern Europe is not paralyzed by the iron chains of austerity forced upon it by wealthier nations, but is instead supported by a bold, Marshall Plan-like intervention.
Politicians like Viktor Orban, Robert Fico and Jaroslav Kaczynski, with their increasingly authoritarian and xenophobic agendas, do not dominate the eastern part of the EU. The Schengen Area is not threatened by collapse; the gap between the core and the periphery is bridgeable.
The other Europe invests more in social and health innovation and less in repressive law enforcement measures. Public enemy number one for the other Europe is inequality, not migrants.
But what about the migration crisis? Well, a strong and united Europe, with the help of a more determined United States, might have prevented the escalation of the crisis in Syria and blocked Russian expansionism in the first place. It would face a migration wave anyway, but its response to it would be different: more support to UN agencies to maintain humane conditions in refugee camps outside Europe, finding a consensual solution to share the burden of incoming refugees among member states - less fear-mongering and more interventions to support integration in general.
The future we want
It is unlikely that the line of history can be altered with a single event, such as the assassination of a president. History is not a deterministic chain of events; the future depends on how people see the future. The problem is that too many people lost sight of the vision of a Europe that was destined to bring more freedom and well-being in our lives - and accepted another vision of the strong nation state that protects us from the threats of the outside world.
And this vision externalized the EU as part of this hostile outside world, a weak and corrupted system ruled by a bunch of bureaucrats with no democratic legitimacy.
Does another Europe actually exist in an alternate reality? It doesn’t matter. What really matters is whether we Europeans can believe that it could exist. If we can, this vision has a future.
