{"id":8625,"date":"2019-11-13T05:21:06","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T13:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=8625"},"modified":"2019-11-13T05:30:08","modified_gmt":"2019-11-13T13:30:08","slug":"europe-needs-another-cultural-revolution-but-who-would-lead-it-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=8625","title":{"rendered":"“Europe needs another cultural revolution. But who would lead it?”, The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andre Wilkens, Europe Now, Berlin Wall, 13 Nov 2019<\/p>\n

In 1989 artists, writers and rock bands defied the status quo and energised the people. We need to recapture that spirit<\/em><\/p>\n

Europe needs another cultural revolution. But who would lead it?<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"V\u00e1clav<\/picture><\/div>
\u2018Artists and cultural workers disobeyed, they challenged, they offered hope and strength and energised people. V\u00e1clav Havel went from dissident playwright to Czech president.\u2019 Photograph: Lubomir Kotek\/AFP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/header>\n
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I\u00a0<\/span><\/span>was an East Berlin student in 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev visited the GDR and warned our leaders that if they didn\u2019t change, they would be overrun by history. Theatres and churches became pop-up platforms for real democracy. Rock bands played the anthems of change and stopped caring about state censorship. Half a million people took over Alexanderplatz in Berlin in a show of extraordinary courage and optimism. I was filled with hope and anxiety. And then the Wall came down: the defining moment of my life. I knew then that nothing was impossible; that hope had won. Europe<\/a>could reunite in peace.<\/p>\n

Over the next three decades I would become a practising European citizen with a British-German family living in six different European countries. All was good.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to 2019 and my feelings of hope and anxiety are strangely familiar. A new kind of polarisation threatens the gains of European cooperation. Unacceptable levels of inequality erode the fabric of our societies; gaps of understanding and trust divide citizens and those they perceive as elites.<\/p>\n

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Shortly after the excitement of the 1989 revolution, an arrogant sense of the end of history set in. What else did we need beyond fine-tuning the wonderful twin-engines of capitalism and democracy? The collapse of the Soviet empire happened in the heyday of neoliberal capitalism, bringing with it aggressive privatisation, the rolling back of state regulation and, praise the lord, shareholder values. This neoliberal medicine was prescribed for the former communist countries in the form of economic shock therapy, which produced mixed results but was always accompanied by rocketing levels of inequality.<\/p>\n

I guess for most Easterners, myself included, copying the western way of life seemed good enough for a while. But a copy-and-paste revolution is not a real revolution.<\/p>\n