This year, the renowned historian and journalist Anne Applebaum delivered The Speech to Europe entitled »The European Moment«. In it, she took a hard look at the continent’s current political challenges – from geopolitical threats and the role of democracy to the future of European sovereignty.

Initiated by ERSTE Stiftung to mark Europe day, the series began in 2019 with a lecture by the acclaimed historian Timothy Snyder. The timing and setting are not a coincidence. Judenplatz, steeped in layers of European history, serves as a powerful stage for ideas that shape the continent. Each year, the event invites the speaker to deliver a narrative which shines a different light on the Europe we live in, and would like to live in.

With »A Speech to Europe«, ERSTE Foundation together with our partners, the Wiener Festwochen, Institute for Human Sciences and in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Vienna, seeks to anchor the European idea, once a promise of peace and unity, into the public arena and into our shared awareness.

Friends and colleagues; ladies and gentlemen; distinguished guests: it is a pleasure to be here. Many thanks to the ERSTE Foundation, the Wiener Festwochen and the Institute for Human Sciences for the honor and the opportunity to speak here this evening. I am particularly grateful that you have together established this speech as an annual tradition, bringing people from all over the world to the city of Vienna to think about Europe.

And that observation leads me to where I want to begin, with a question for the audience: Why are you here? Why did you take time out on a Wednesday night to come here, to the Judenplatz, to hear a »Speech for Europe«? Why did you want to join this annual tradition?

Let me take a guess at two of your motives. First, many of you are here because you remember the catastrophe that engulfed this city, this country, and this continent during the Second World War, more than 80 years ago. You knew that this lecture, in this place, would recall that history—of the war, of the Holocaust, of the hatred and the hunger—and that it would honor the memory of the victims.

Secondly, I am guessing that many of you fear that some version of that catastrophe might return. If that is the case, then you are in good company, and indeed you are part of a very long tradition. Since 1945, several generations of Europeans have been working very hard to prevent another disaster like the Second World War. They wrote history books and put up monuments. They organized events like this one. As you can see, they still do.

They also reorganized their societies. As Austrians were reconstructing Vienna, as other Europeans were rebuilding Paris and Berlin, they were not just putting things back to the way they were before. Surrounded by rubble, they decided to build something brand-new: a set of institutions designed to promote liberal democracy, the rule of law, cooperation between states, economic integration and, eventually, a single market for trade.

These institutions were intended both to promote prosperity and to prevent the return of the imperial and genocidal ambitions that had done such damage to this city, and to so many other cities. Instead of returning to the old system of rivalries, protectionism, and warring armies, Europeans created the European Union and a host of other organizations that connected them to one another and to the world through ties of commerce, trade, travel, and diplomacy.

The Europe that emerged from this process represents an enormous achievement—an unprecedented achievement, in fact; one with no real parallel anywhere else in the world. Thanks to the efforts of that postwar generation, Europe is safer, richer, and more peaceful than ever before in its history. European countries are also more sovereign. Thanks to eight decades of collective deterrence, Europeans have been able to develop their own national cultures within a framework of peace, instead of perpetual war. Thanks to the European Union, Europeans can preserve their art, literature, and architecture, including the buildings that surround us here. Thanks to a network of treaties and agreements, Europeans have also built democracies that protect individual freedom and citizens’ rights.

This success does have a downside. Because these institutions worked so well, people began to imagine that they were not the result of hard work and difficult compromises but rather something natural, just some »bureaucracies« that emerged by themselves. Because we had those 80 years of peace, people started taking the laws and norms that ensure peace for granted.

If you came tonight because you fear that these institutions are now in danger, you are correct. For right now, at this moment, they are indeed under attack. The challenge comes, first and foremost, from within our own societies. All across Europe and North America, discarded texts, forgotten concepts, and dimly remembered theories are being revived by people who don’t remember why they were discredited three generations ago.

Many have, for example, adopted old attitudes to parliamentary democracy, and are now channeling the same scorn for elections that the autocrats of the 20th century once expressed. Lenin dismissed parliaments as nothing more than »bourgeois democracy.« Hitler called parliamentary democracy »one of the gravest symptoms of human decline.« When you hear European politicians talking about the »degeneracy« of democracy, or the »weakness« of liberalism, remember that these same words were also used in the 1930s, by groups describing themselves as both Left and Right

Some are also rediscovering old political tactics, for example the idea that politics should focus not on creating consensus but on building an existential, potentially violent distinction between »friends« and »enemies.« They may not even know that this idea comes from the German philosopher Carl Schmitt, popular in the Third Reich, who dismissed liberal politics as a sham.

Nor are these the only ideas that have returned. Ethnic nationalism, for example, the belief that nations are better if they are somehow purer, however purity is defined, is also back. So is theocracy, or dominionism. This is the belief that the only good societies are those run by the church. So is an older idea of sovereignty, a vision of the state that gives all power to a ruler or ruling party that is, by definition, immune from criticism, even when they violate the rights of their subjects.

Indeed, the downgrading of human rights as something sentimental and weak is a very old idea. The replacement of news-gathering and fact-checking with propaganda—we have lived through that before too, along with attempts to control and manipulate access to information. Similarly, we don’t have to look far back in history to discover that the creation of scapegoats, minority groups whose presence can be blamed for economic losses or social distress, is a political tactic that has been tried before.  

These are European ideas, and they come from European history. But they are also being reinforced from outside of Europe. We hear them, for example, from the Russians, in the propaganda that they use to justify a whole range of military, cyber, and hybrid attacks on Europe. Russia’s war on Ukraine is sometimes described, including recently by the American vice president, as if it were nothing more than a territorial dispute, a scuffle over lines on a map. But when Russia denies that Ukraine is a real nation; when Russia builds concentration camps on occupied Ukrainian territory; when Russia bans the Ukrainian language and systematically arrests mayors, teachers, journalists, and priests, then Russia is also attacking the Europe that was built after 1945, the Europe whose borders are not supposed to be changed by force. Russia invaded Ukraine not only to destroy Ukraine, but also to prove that treaties are meaningless, alliances are weak, and that brute force still decides the fate of nations. By waging an imperialist war of conquest, Russia seeks to undermine Europe’s post-imperial order.

In this sense, the Russian attack on Ukraine is also an attack on the European Union. Europeans may imagine that the EU is a mere bureaucratic inconvenience. But the Russians have never believed that. On the contrary, the Russian president has long understood that when unified, Europe can resist Russian influence and Russian corruption. When divided, Europeans find it far more difficult to turn down Russian offers of special treatment, or lucrative secret deals.

That is why, for two decades now, Russian propagandists have belittled the Union, mocked its institutions and, echoing some Europeans, portrayed it as decadent, divided, overregulated, or doomed. Nor is their policy limited simply to words or memes. They also seek actively to create chaos and division. A few months ago, agents paid by Russia placed explosives on a Polish railway line, in an attempt to create mass casualties. Russian drones have been used to hamper traffic at airports all over Europe. Russian assassins have killed people in Britain, Germany, and Spain.

Russian money backs European political parties and leaders whose victories would limit Europe’s ability to defend European territory. That is why the Russians fund or amplify anti-European political parties as well as separatist movements. Russia wants to replace the Europe of law with a Europe tolerant of kleptocracy: a Europe in which every country can be separately pressured, separately threatened, separately bought.

In another, earlier version of this speech, one that I might have given two or three years ago, I would now speak about how European and American leaders need to work together to push back against Russia’s military and ideological threat, to protect and defend liberal democracy and the rule of law together. But here is where I think we need to acknowledge what is happening in Washington now, because the United States under this administration is no longer interested in leading democratic coalitions, against Russia or anyone else. Democracy is no longer at the center of US foreign policy, or of America’s identity. Instead, Donald Trump has begun to align US foreign and domestic policies with the values and practices of the autocratic world, including Russia.

This dramatic shift is most visible, of course, in the domestic policies of the president, and in his administration’s attempt to strip funding from USAID or Radio Free Europe, the American institutions that once promoted democracy around the world. But it is also apparent in the president’s relationships with Washington’s historic allies. From his first days in office, President Trump verbally attacked Canada, the European Union, and America’s Asian partners, placing inexplicably high tariffs on their goods. He has shouted at the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office, threatened to annex Greenland by force, claimed that the EU was created to »screw« the US, and, more recently, echoed Putin in calling NATO a »paper tiger.« In a break with all previous postwar administrations, Trump has primarily negotiated with Russia not to bring a just peace to Ukraine or security to Europe, but in order to help US businesses profit from the lifting of Russian sanctions. Like the Russians, and like European critics of democracy, some members of the Trump administration have also entered the war of ideas. At a speech in Munich last February, the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, declared that America and Europe are bound together not by values, not by a commitment to democracy, but by »Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry«—by blood, soil, DNA and the distant past, in other words, not the present or future. Indeed, although the speech praised Dante, Shakespeare, Mozart, and the »vaulted ceilings of the Sistine chapel,« Rubio, like Putin, condemned modern Europe as a continent overwhelmed by migrants, crime, and decay.

More recently, Vice President JD Vance, speaking in Budapest, also praised European architecture, but condemned the »faceless bureaucrats« of the EU for allegedly intervening in Hungary’s elections. He did so while speaking at a campaign event, while he was himself intervening in Hungary’s elections on behalf of the now deposed Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

These two speeches were not outliers. They represent the Trump administration’s policy, as presented in the National Security Strategy that it published at the end of last year. That document made it clear that, although the United States will no longer intervene to promote democracy anywhere in the world, it is now American policy to »help Europe correct its current trajectory,« language that implies the US will intervene directly in European politics. The point, the authors claimed, was to prevent European »civilizational erasure.«

According to reports published at the time, an earlier version of the document was more specific. It specifically called upon US diplomatic and security institutions to support illiberal forces in four European countries—Hungary, Poland, Italy, and, please note, Austria—with the explicit goal of persuading them to leave the European Union. For all four, this would be an economic catastrophe, just as Brexit was for Britain. For the rest of Europe, the prospects wouldn’t be much better. A damaged EU would certainly struggle to counter Russian hybrid warfare, let alone a Russian military attack. A badly weakened Europe would quickly lose its sovereignty and find it impossible to compete in a world dominated by the United States and China. Europe would become poorer and weaker, just as Hungary became poorer and weaker under Orbán’s rule.

But, as we can see, this policy is already in practice. Breaking with longstanding precedent, Rubio, Vance, and Trump himself all vocally supported Orbán, the politician who has done more to destroy European unity, to support Russian interests, and at the same time to impoverish his country, than any other. Even his election campaign explicitly sought to demonize both the EU and the Ukrainians, scapegoating them as existential enemies of the Hungarian nation in order to distract Hungarians from his own corruption, using tactics lifted directly from those dusty old history books. A few weeks before the vote, I saw posters in Budapest featuring three dark, menacing faces: Volodymyr Zelensky, Péter Magyar, and Ursula Von der Leyen. The slogan read: »They Are the Risk. Fidesz Is the Safe Choice.« As we know, this proved too ridiculous, too conspiratorial for the Hungarian people, and they voted the other way.

But the Trump administration stuck by Orbán to the bitter end. Partly, its goal was domestic: Vance campaigns for Orbán on behalf of his domestic audience, which long ago accepted the same false stereotypes of Europe and of Ukraine that we hear from Russian propagandists. But there is a hard commercial agenda here too. Like his colleagues in the tech community, Vance openly supports political leaders with an explicit anti-EU agenda precisely because, like the Russians, they want to weaken or destroy the European Union.

To be fair, Russian and American motives are different. But both ultimately care not just about ideology, but about their own commercial interests. Vance, like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, knows that the European Commission is the only body on the planet large enough to regulate digital platforms, to demand transparency from them, and to insist that private power be subject to public rules. In a January 2025 interview, for example, Zuckerberg said he felt »optimistic« that President Donald Trump would intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: »I think he just wants America to win.«         

Where does that leave us, here in Europe?

On one side, we are facing a rearmed, radicalized Russian regime that is already using sabotage, propaganda, and military threats to influence European politics.

On the other side, we are facing a radicalized movement inside the US administration that defines our societies as a civilizational enemy.

For different reasons, both favor a Europe that is weaker and more fragmented. Both want a Europe that is less capable of acting independently in the world. The Russians want a Europe than cannot defend itself militarily. The Americans want a Europe that is totally dependent on American technology, and thus susceptible to American political control.

In the face of this challenge, Europeans can, of course, give up. We—and I speak here as a Polish citizen—can let the US negotiators continue to prolong the war in Ukraine, continue to plan business deals with Russia instead of a peace that would help Europe. We can watch from the sidelines as Americans and Russians both amplify anti-European political movements and leaders. We can give in to the various temptations and bribes. We can let Europe once again become a continent of warring nations, easily manipulated by outside powers: Russia, the United States, and of course China as well.

We can let social media companies based in Silicon Valley and Shanghai decide what Europeans read and see, using opaque, manipulative algorithms that only they control. We can allow a Russian victory in Ukraine to endanger not just the countries on Russia’s borders, but all of us. Remember, Putin has said that wherever a Russian soldier sets foot is Russia. But Russian soldiers in the past have not only set foot in Warsaw and Riga, but in Berlin, and indeed Vienna. Nowadays, hybrid warfare stretches Russia’s influence to the Aegean and the Mediterranean, even to the Sahel region of Africa. We can give up and let it stretch to the Baltic and the Atlantic too.

Or we can choose something different.

We can fight back—not by talking, but by building. We can begin, as the French and Taiwanese have started to do, to collaborate on the construction of alternative technologies that would suit not just Europe but the entire democratic world. Instead of getting our information from platforms that are designed to divide and exploit us, we could found, and fund, new companies. We can change the rules that govern them.

Transparency can replace obscurity. Customers of social media platforms could own their own data and determine what happens to it. They could influence, directly, the algorithms that determine what they see. Legislators in democracies could create the technical and legal means to give people more control and more choices, or to hold companies liable if the algorithms they use promote terrorism, racism, or child pornography. Citizen scientists could work with the platforms in order to better understand their impact, just as citizen scientists in the past worked with food companies to ensure better hygiene or with oil companies to prevent environmental damage.

Above all, we need to lean into our achievements. Europe remains an oasis of security, stability, and the rule of law. We have independent courts, who strive not to be mere mouthpieces of whoever is in power. We keep our word. We respect contracts. Our continent respects and admires science, reads history, cares about culture, and is mindful of the lessons of the past. We should use those things to become a magnet for investment, for innovation, for people with new ideas. Our very predictability is an advantage in a world of unpredictable powers.  

In order to capitalize on our many advantages, we do need to change some policies and some priorities. We need to put more money into the new European defense tech companies that are being created now, sometimes inspired by the incredible technological progress of the Ukrainians, and sometimes working directly with them. We need to invest in European social media platforms and European AI, with European values built into them. We need our data stored on this side of the Atlantic. We need a capital markets union so that Europe’s full economic potential can be reached. We need to think like the world’s most powerful economic zone, which is what we are, and to act like it.

We should do all of these things to protect our sovereignty, so that decisions about Europe are made in Europe. In an earlier era, sovereignty was measured in armies, borders, and industrial strength. Today it must also be measured in networks, platforms, and engineering talent. If the infrastructure of democratic debate is owned elsewhere, governed elsewhere, and answerable to private interests elsewhere, then formal independence becomes meaningless. Those who use the word »sovereignty« to mean isolationism and protectionism are making an even more foolish mistake. Nowadays, a nation may have its own elections, a separate legal system and carefully controlled borders and yet still find that its public sphere is being shaped by systems it neither understands nor controls.

Finally, we should have an answer to the nostalgic appeals to Western civilization that we are now hearing from US politicians and ideologues, as well as many Europeans. We care about the past—I care deeply about the past—but I want us to remember more of it. Yes, Europeans built beautiful, eternal cathedrals, and city squares like this one. But European civilization is not just a backdrop for Instagram influencers. Let’s also remember the other things that Europe built. After centuries of religious war, dictatorship, and genocide, Europeans invented the ideas that form the basis of liberal democracy.

A truer definition of European or Western civilization includes not just flying buttresses, but the rule of law, the separation of powers, judicial independence, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the idea that governments are accountable to citizens. Those things are no less part of Europe’s inheritance than its literature or architecture. Indeed, they are what make Europe’s cultural inheritance more than a museum collection. They are what allow free people to read Dante differently, to argue about Shakespeare openly, to attend whichever churches or cathedrals they choose, to criticize their rulers without fear, and to change governments without bloodshed.

You cannot celebrate European civilization while simultaneously attacking the legal and political order invented here, or while openly seeking to undermine the institutions that protect pluralism and dissent. Anyone who does so is defending the shell of that civilization, not its substance.

Let me leave you with this thought: Every day, the US is alienating potential visitors, investors, and researchers. Every day, Russia is murdering innocent people in a bloody and pointless colonial war. And every day, Europe offers proof that ancient rivals can live alongside one another in peace, while they pursue prosperity.

We are living through a moment of great change, as significant and consequential as the end of communism in 1989. But we can make that shift work in our favor. Europeans are indeed tied together by many links, by shared history, both good and bad; by shared art and culture; by shared religions, as well as by shared religious tolerance, an idea invented here, in Europe, in the 18th century, and later exported to the United States.

We did invent divisive and ugly ideas, and we can retrieve them from the past. But all of the texts that led to the birth of classical liberalism were written here too, if we want to find them, revive them, and reinterpret them for the present. These too are old ideas that can be made new again. We are not condemned to the might-makes-right, brutal world of Carl Schmitt or Lenin. We can choose something different, and I believe we will.

Anne Applebaum

Header image: Mateusz Skwarczek