European democracies are running out of time to turn away from the abyss | Rafael Behr

Far-right parties, Maga ideology and Kremlin money are conniving to suffocate liberal idealism for another generationNot all that long ago, Europe was a beacon of liberal idealism. One memoir recalls it as an era “comfortably saturated with confidence in the unfailing and binding power of tolerance and conciliation”. The economic system seemed obviously preferable to barbarous alternatives. “People honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity,” the author added.Those words could describe the spirit of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. They were written in the 1930s by Stefan Zweig, reflecting on the optimism of late 19th-century Vienna from the perspective of a Jewish émigré whose world had