opinion
What Ukraine Has Taught Europe About
the Need for Nationalism
BY FIAMMA NIRENSTEIN
Erhoman / iStock / Getty Images Plus
E urope’s new thinking on Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s
war against the nationalist and
democratic Ukrainian resistance
could be promising, if it signals that
the West is finally about to descend
from the sense pacifist supremacy
that has characterized it since the
end of World War II.

Already, however, all the boasting
by E.U. leaders about the newfound
unity and meaning that will change a
post-Putin world resembles the froth
of classical European rhetoric. It’s
a powerful choir that may not only
silence all the uncomfortable truths
revealed by the conflict, but deplete
its energy to plan for the future.

Witnessing, as I do, the Ukraine
war from Israel, a country perpet-
ually at war—and one, like any
democracy, which abhors war —
is instructive. Having Hamas and
Hezbollah missiles rain down on the
country’s civilian population; living in
a place where at least 2,000 people
were killed during the years of the
Second Intifada; inhabiting a nation
that has been attacked from all sides
for the last 80 years — nevertheless
induces first and foremost optimism.

Indeed, small nations tied to their
history, culture and origins possess
extraordinary strength of resistance.

Ukraine, therefore, is capable of win-
ning this war despite the torment
that it’s undergoing.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky, whom Ruth Wisse has
called a kind of post litteram Isaac
Babel, a Jew and a Cossack, can
succeed in the way of the late Israeli
Prime Minister Golda Meir or other
Jewish-Ukrainian leaders, among
them Zev Jabotinsky. And Zelensky
is well aware of this from his family
history. The Jews of Ukraine are survi-
vors who owe their survival solely to
themselves. Today, too, the Ukrainian
people, like the Jews, will receive no
substantial help; no “cavalry” will be
coming. Loneliness is a lesson that
the prime minister of Ukraine cer-
tainly learned as a Jew and is now
teaching to his people.

Herein lies the first post-world war
global lesson: Putin was shocked
by the resistance he met, because
he had told himself lies and drawn
a non-existent geopolitical reality
in which Ukrainians were Russians.

But Ukrainians aren’t Russians, as
we are now seeing clearly. And they
have always been searching for their
identity in the West, for better or for
worse, precisely in order to escape
Russia. Now European culture, for which
nationalism had been muddied by
the Nazi-fascist past, must under-
stand that the nation-state is not only
necessary; it’s the historical bearer
of freedom. Indeed, the evils mis-
takenly attributed to nationalism are
actually those of imperialism.

The E.U. has to recognize that
human beings are born free and
fight for the freedom of their national
collective through their heroes, tra-
ditions and institutions. It needs to
rehabilitate the word “nation,” and
with it develop a different relation-
ship with the state of Israel.

But this is for tomorrow. In the
meantime, to preserve its internal
cohesion, the E.U. must step back
from its globalist absolutism and
grasp that there are differences and
contrasts in Europe. Moreover, it
must mercilessly reject “cancel cul-
ture” in all its stupidity. The heroes
and monuments of the past have
shown their power, after all.

And here’s more for productive
conservative thought. During the
current war, men remained to fight,
as they have always done over the
course of millennia, while mothers
and grandmothers have taken chil-
dren by the hand to safety. It’s a
magnificent revival of a de-ideol-
ogized feminism that will consider
women’s primary task during both
war and peace as key to safeguard-
ing freedom.

Liberalism, nationalism, freedom,
democracy and tradition must go
hand in hand. Europe must separate
itself from some of its postmod-
ern dreams, parlance, rhetoric and
socialist origins, and reduce its uni-
versalism. Even war, the most abhorred con-
cept, has to be finally reconsidered.

Pacifist smoke signals don’t prevent
or stop it. It is Putin who must be
stopped. Germany doubled its defense bud-
get within a single day, an instructive
somersault. Here in Israel, the coun-
try wouldn’t survive a day if it didn’t
know how to fight, win wars and
cultivate valor. It takes a lot of moral
strength to risk one’s children’s lives.

The E.U. has completely forgot-
ten this principle, but now needs
to remember it. If Israelis, whether
religious or secular, on the left or the
right, didn’t know how to rise above
their own hard principles and stick
together in need, we wouldn’t have
survived and flourished. Blessed is
the country that has its heroes; not
the one that doesn’t need them.

Finally, as the late Middle East
historian Bernard Lewis explained
to me, the Turks didn’t realize that
the recoil of the cannons made their
beautiful war ships sink.

We must move the cannons of
democracy to prevent our vessels
of freedom from sinking like the
Ottoman Empire. JE
Journalist Fiamma Nirenstein was a member
of the Italian Parliament (2008-13), where she
served as vice president of the Committee
on Foreign Affairs in the Chamber of
Deputies. She served in the Council of
Europe in Strasbourg, and established
and chaired the Committee for the Inquiry
Into Anti-Semitism. She is a fellow at the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

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