Making Your Own History

Europeans Rediscover What Democracy is For

Budapest Celebrating Viktor Orban’s Defeat April 12,2026

I’m a Canadian who lives in Europe-- Vienna actually-- and I’ve long been married to a European, who is Hungarian. What happens here in old Europe matters to me. I get cranky when Americans scoff that Europe is nothing but a ‘museum’, when the Chinese proclaim Europe is nice to visit, but no longer a serious player and when the Russians predict Europe will fall back in disarray when the first Russian bayonet probes its fat belly. I want these hegemons to be wrong. For some time now, however, the three of them, each for their own reasons, seem hell bent on taking revenge on Europe. How Europe breaks free of their contempt, how it makes itself matter again, is an existential question for the whole continent.

America, once dominant, has turned against its European allies while covering its disorderly retreat from NATO and its wider role as a provider of global public goods, by bombing Tehran and overthrowing the regime in Venezuela. China, the challenger, is wrecking Europe’s manufacturing base with a ceaseless surge of cheap goods while it prepares to challenge American primacy in Asia. The third hegemon, refusing to accept its own imperial decline, has been sucked into the deathtrap of Ukraine, but Russia has learned the new arts of drone warfare from its opponent. If President Trump is foolish enough to allow President Putin to salvage any kind of victory from the Ukrainian charnel house, a free Europe will be in peril.

For two generations after 1945 Europeans, faithful to the heritage of Grotius and Kant, believed that international law could keep the superpowers under control, in the same way that the European project of pooled sovereignty and law helped the continent to leave nationalist fratricide behind. For a time, international law, guaranteed by the two superpowers, seemed to have brought peace to Europe. When Russia and America signed the Helsinki Accords, they formalized American protection of Western Europe and Russian domination of the peoples of the East.

Eastern Europeans understood the old ‘rules based international order’ for what it was, as the ratification of the division of Europe into two imperial spheres of influence. So now that this order has collapsed, it would be a mistake to mourn its demise.

In a moment of rupture, what matters to Europeans is that they regain agency, the capacity to shape their own future. Having lost its empires after 1945, the construction of a united Europe became its strategy for recovering the power to control its destiny. The high-water mark of a united Europe, the Delors era of the late 1980s and early 1990s’s coincided with the decade of American unipolar dominance. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Eastern Europe regained its freedom, Europe enjoyed the first period since before 1914 when it was united from the Irish Coast to the Russian frontier. It was then that Europe believed its alliance with the United States relieved it of the burden of determining its own history. Today what strikes fear in the chanceries of Europe, and anger among citizens is that Europe is finding itself a spectator of world events.

Europe can’t afford to be a plaything of the three hegemons. If it succumbs, it will cease to be free, and it will cease to be democratic. The purpose of democracy everywhere is to prove to citizens that they are not prisoners of fate and can use power to shape their future. If citizens of Europe feel nothing their parliaments decides matters, people stop voting; if their children grow up thinking ‘life is elsewhere’, they will leave and the European economy will stagnate.

The same is true of my home and native land. If young Canadians become convinced that all the decisions that matter are taken elsewhere, in Washington, Beijing or Moscow, Canadian democracy will become an empty shell.

So on both sides of the Atlantic, back in Canada and here in Europe, the future of democracy in middling countries depends on acting now to remain masters of their own house in a global economic system dominated by lawless hegemons.

Today, strengthening Europe’s capacity to act as one requires national politicians to start putting continental interests ahead of their protectionist national agenda. Europe’s economic wise man, Mario Draghi, insists that the key to Europe’s economic future is a European capital market, with the capacity to aggregate the sums necessary to compete with China and America. So far, his proposal has not prevailed over the old game of protecting national champions and national markets. In Canada too, there are speeches aplenty about eliminating the country’s internal trade barriers and creating a single Canadian economy, but so far fine speeches have not been translated into action.

The same reluctance holds back a common procurement strategy to provide Europe with the weapons for its own defense. Recovering agency also means mobilizing Europe’s huge savings pool and channeling Europe’s own resources into investment projects which give Europe access to the technologies of tomorrow and jobs for young Europeans. These young Europeans must feel their own futures are there to be built in this continent’s start-ups, incubators and labs.

Europe can’t be in control of its destiny if its energy systems depend on Russian, Middle Eastern or American oil. Generating Europe’s own electricity with nuclear and renewables is much more than a climate strategy. It is central to Europe’s capacity to go its own way.

Strategies to improve European competitiveness and security are vital for restoring the legitimacy of national democracies. Europe cannot control what the predatory hegemons may do, and none of them, in any case, is coming to Europe’s rescue. But Europe has the wealth, the power and the technological capacity to be master of its own house.

European elites are waking up to this challenge, and they shouldn’t doubt the capacity of Europe’s ordinary citizens to rise to the challenge. Barely a month ago, Hungarians in my wife’s country decisively rejected a regime that for sixteen years had fought the European project to a standstill and had mired the country in corruption and clientelism. Budapest experienced a night of joy when ordinary Hungarians rediscovered themselves as agents of their own history. The cry from the young Hungarians thronging the streets was ‘Europa! Europa! Europa!”

Victories like this create the national will that makes possible a Europe that can defend itself, compete with the hegemons and give their children a future to believe in. But the battle is not yet won. Orban may have lost an election, but elsewhere in France, Germany and the Netherlands, populist politicians of the right are still offering programs that preach the fantasy of nations going it alone, walling themselves off from the people, ideas, technologies and values that come from outside their borders. Democracy everywhere depends on who wins this argument in the years ahead.