Could 2018 Be Europe’s New 1968?

Last October, a group of respected conservative thinkers from across the Continent published a manifesto titled “A Europe We Can Believe In.” It is, in many respects, a thoughtful, beautifully written document and a rhetorical dose of national liberation movement discourse from the glory days of decolonization.

The impression that the reader gets from this manifesto is that Europe’s conservatives are anti-imperial (the European Union is, they complain, an “empire of money and regulations”), anticolonial (“emigration without assimilation is colonization”) and defenders of the nation-state from the contempt of pro-European elites (who, they declare, are “blinded by vain, self- congratulating visions of a utopian future”).

Believe it or not, the nativist revolution they call for resembles the left-wing uprisings of 1968. Like the protesters then, these intellectuals are not trying to simply win elections but to change the way people think and live. At the same time, however, precisely what they want is to undo the legacy that ’68 left behind in Europe.

The key concept that drove ’68 was “recognition.” Recognition basically meant that those without political power should have the same rights as the powerful ones. The key word of the current nativist revolution is “respect,” by which these 21st- century rebels are saying that the fact that we all have equal rights does not change the fact that we have different political power.

If the demonstrators in ’68 were preoccupied with the rights of minorities, the nativist revolution of today is about the rights of the majorities. If ’68 was about nations’ confessing their sins — see Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany on his knees at a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — nativist leaders today are busy proclaiming the divine innocence of their nations. ( The recent Polish law criminalizing any reference to Polish participation in the Holocaust is an especially ignominious illustration.)

The populist parties of the right today are, above all, cultural par- ties. They see their position of power as an opportunity to shape national identity. They are not much interested in changing taxation or welfare. More important to them is how society relates to its past and how children are educated. The debate of immigration is, above all else, an opportunity to define who belongs and could belong to a national political community.

But while in individual countries the nativist revolution takes the form of a struggle between liberals and conservatives, on the level of the European Union it is experienced as a conflict between Europe’s West and Europe’s East. It’s a conflict between two versions of conservatism.

Western European conservatism is post-1968. It has internalized some of the progressivism that has shaped the West in the past half century — like freedom of expression — while rejecting what it sees as the excesses of ’68. In Western Europe, activists and leaders of the far right can be openly gay without raising eyebrows.

In its Eastern version, conser- vatism is a more radical form of nativism. It rejects modernity as a whole and sees the cultural changes of recent decades as an attempt to destroy the national cultures of Central and Eastern European societies. To be conservative in Central Europe means to be not only against the excesses of ’68 but against any form of cosmopolitanism or diversity.

This view has no better spokesman than Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. “We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed,” he said in February. “We do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. We do not want that at all. We do not want to be a diverse country. We want to be how we became 1,100 years ago here in the Carpathian Basin.”

His position makes clear the difference between the East’s vision of conservatism and the West’s. In the West, conservatives believe that it is not enough to get an Austrian passport to become Austrian — you should also adopt the culture. In Mr. Orban’s view, you cannot become a Hungarian if you were not born a Hungarian.

And here is the paradox of today’s nativist revolution in Europe. Both Eastern and Western Europe have shifted to the right in recent years, but instead of contributing to the unity of Europe, this shift makes the gap between the two regions even wider.

While Western Europeans contest the merits of diversity, they do live in culturally diverse societies. Central and Eastern Europeans, however, live in ethnically homogeneous societies and believe that diversity will never happen to them. Conservatives in the Western part of Europe dream of a continent where majorities will be the ones shaping society; in the East they dream of a society without minorities and governments without oppositions.

So while conservative political leaders like Mr. Orban and Sebastian Kurz, the new conservative prime minister of Austria, share similar views when it comes to control over migration or mistrust of old-style conservatism, they are not natural allies when it comes to the future of Europe.

In fact, they differ in much the same way 1968 in Western Europe differed from ’68 in Eastern Europe. In the West it was about the sovereignty of the individual. In the East it was about the sovereignty of the nation.