Crisis of Ideas and Elections
The fall or, to be more exact, September, is a time of elections in Europe (not to be confused with the European Union). It suddenly became clear that not only Ukrainian elections can be said to be setting pace for public events far outside the country in the nearest future. It suddenly turned out that everything was not going the way it was expected to, that it was impossible to easily plan all things for many years ahead and view the elections as just the mechanism of fulfilling what was agreed upon.
Undoubtedly, as soon as in a few days the election campaign in Germany will be hitting the headlines all over Europe. The results will show such a not-so-unimportant thing as the development prospects for the European Union and NATO. Germany is a shining example of how fast the declared ideas (of a “center-left Europe” in this case), as well as other things, can be forgotten. What is going on in today’s Germany, perhaps for the first time in the past few years, is a standoff between the leaders, personalities and concrete political figures rather than between ideologies (Schroeder’s market-oriented social democracy and Stoiber’s conservatism with a “human face”). Germany, which gave post-war Europe the figures of Adenauer and Kohl, is aware today that time has come to have a new leader of the same caliber. The only problem is not to make a mistake when making the choice. Ideology quite unexpectedly receding to the background, it becomes all too obvious that traditional policies of the 90s have just exhausted themselves.
The necessity to have a leader who could knit a nation together is also high on the agenda in Serbia and Montenegro. In both cases people hope to break the vicious circle of never-ending losses, problems, and conflicts and want to forget recent wars and return to the once normal everyday life. Presidential elections in Serbia can demonstrate either the incorrectness of the calculations made outside the country or the emergence of new opportunities for all. Parliamentary elections in Macedonia can also vividly show if EU and NATO prescriptions can give a result where problems have been accumulating for ages on end.
The results of elections in Slovakia will determine whether that country will be invited in November to join NATO and whether the talks on its EU membership will end in the nearest months. What is more, the point is not whether or not the elections will be democratic but what results they will bring, i.e., whether or not Vladimir Meciar will be prime-minister — which in fact runs a bit counter to the declarations made in Brussels and other Western capitals. The behavior of the EU and NATO leadership with respect to the Slovak elections will allow drawing quite a few conclusions about sincerity, expediency, and rationality. Meanwhile, it is not so much the elections themselves as their assessment by the West that will make a direct impact on European security, EU prospects, and, accordingly, the short-term prospects for Ukraine. It remains to recall that, in spite of Mr. Meciar’s party gradually losing its rating, he himself remains Slovakia’s most popular politician — therefore, that country experiences the same acute problem of leadership.
In all probability, only elections in Sweden will be a calm and predictable affair. But even this is not altogether certain: as the EU is expanding, it becomes all too clear that the very process of European integration demands that forces capable of transgressing the traditional boundaries of current thinking should emerge on the political arena.
2002 elections in many countries appear to pose, for different reasons, the same problem: overcoming the crisis of traditional ideas. For the Le Pen phenomenon, the problems of Austria, and the victory of Silvio Berlusconi occurred only because politicians are unable to offer citizens anything new as the world is changing before our eyes. The crisis of ideas, the crisis of leadership can have quite dangerous consequences for the attempts to keep intact the cozy nook of “good old Europe” with all that this implies, the attempts to dodge responsibility that the processes of globalization require. Unless there are new ideas, it will be hardly possible to stem the flow of differences between the US and Western Europe, in which nobody is in fact interested, and to achieve stability in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. These new ideas cannot be implemented without new leaders.
