There is a growing view in Western Europe that the era of living “by the rules” has come to an end.
It is telling that people speak of rules, not of law—of rules, not of the rule of law.
This is no accident: international law functioned only insofar as it did not touch the main rule—that the security and prosperity of Europeans come first.
“Europeans” here, of course, means the “middle class”, the “new bourgeoisie”. The former proletariat, the former peasantry, have merged into the bourgeoisie in terms of their standard of living. The “social question” has disappeared.
Has it disappeared? Or has poverty simply been outsourced? Is it possible for everyone on Earth to live as Europeans and Americans do? Or does the prosperity of some countries require the uneven development of others?
This is the economic dimension of a more important question: can collective egoism be overcome—more precisely, cluster egoism, an aquarium-like egoism that resolutely defends the right of its own aquarium not to be part of the ocean?
Nowadays, hardly anyone speaks of creating a single humanity with a single government. It is assumed that the ideal system already exists: local self-government, followed by a hierarchy of associations. City, region, country (state)… and then a firm “stop”—“that’s enough”.
One may unite for various specific purposes—a military alliance, an economic union—but one must not unite completely.
This is an entirely new phenomenon in history: the process of changing the political map of the world has been halted, frozen. For thousands of years, states changed their borders, united and broke apart. Now the idea has prevailed that all borders are permanent. Disputes concern only secondary adjustments—mostly the delineation of borders between former colonies of European empires (Pakistan and India, Israel and the Arab states), or between them and their former rulers (Ukraine and Russia).
Why can Ukraine and Poland not unite into a single country—with one electoral system, one body of legislation, one constitution, one president? France and Germany? England and Scotland? Note: not a union of two countries with separate parliaments and laws, but a single state.
There is no answer. Or rather, the answer is intuitively clear to everyone, but it is not quite decent—it is anti-human: such unification might threaten “order”. The established order. Business as usual. And what is this “order”? It lies in language. What is feared is not life under common rules, but a life in which you do not always understand the other because they speak a “foreign” language. Full unification, it is assumed, requires linguistic unity.
This is a completely false idea, and not a very old one. True unity requires not a single language, but a unity in humanity: the ability to value the other as other, not to fear what is unfamiliar—or, more precisely, to fear it but not to let that fear poison one’s life. Indeed, one might not fear it at all.
For now, however, the fear of the unfamiliar (embodied in language) reflects egoism. After all, even spouses, even brothers, speak different “languages”. Yet people manage not to fear this difference. What is needed is to learn not to fear differences in language within a single legal, economic and cultural space. Otherwise, the path of humanity will lead towards ever greater division and mutual hostility.