The Stories We're Not Telling

Liberal democracy is in danger. We need the stories of those who rescued it last time.

I think it’s safe to assume the average reader of PastPresentFuture is more familiar with history than a randomly selected passerby. So let’s test your knowledge.

Who was Paul-Henri Spaak?

Do you know? Is his name even a little familiar? Despite my high opinion of my readers, I suspect most people will answer “no” to both questions.

And that is proof of a serious problem in this dangerous time.

There are people and movements bent on destroying liberal democracy and the international order it built. They are growing in strength and number. They understand the power of a story drawn from history, and they tell such stories (as I’ve written once or twice before) even if they have to twist history to suit their purposes. But liberal democrats? Defenders of the international order? They either do not understand the power of stories drawn from history, or they are reluctant to draw on that power for other reasons.

That leaves the field open for the enemies of freedom. Ironically, that dynamic is something we have seen before in history.

“One of the strongest weapons of the far right and autocrats has always been what Fritz Stern, the great historian, called ‘cultural despair,’” Gerald Knaus told me in a recent conversation. Stories of failure. Stories of decline. Prophecies of collapse. Despair pushes people to embrace ideas and movements they would otherwise shun. “Stern described these authors who wrote about the decline of the West and the decline of Western civilization that formed the cultural background under which National Socialism and fascism took over. And I think what we see today is exactly the same. The people who say that the West is doomed, democracy is doomed, liberals are feckless and ineffective, that we are unable to control borders, to solve problems with migration, to defend ourselves.”

Knaus is an Austrian social scientist who lives in Berlin. He believes the European Union, and liberal democracy more generally, are in grave danger. There are many reasons for this danger but the one that is least recognized — and easiest to remedy — is the failure of liberal democrats to tell stories: Stories that explain how the EU, international institutions, and liberal democracies came to be. Stories that show how they succeeded beyond the dreams of those who created them. Stories of the peace and prosperity and human flourishing without equal in human history that liberal democracy and the international order delivered to us.

Paul-Henri Spaak is a case in point.

His is a wonderful, inspiring story. But so few have heard it.

Paul-Henri Spaak in the 1930s.

“He was a young man from an incredibly interesting Belgian family. That alone would make a novel,” Knaus told me. I looked it up. He’s right. Spaak’s family story is itself amazing. But let’s not get sidetracked.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Belgium was neutral, but Belgium was the path to France so the German army invaded anyway. Spaak was only 17 but he tried to enlist, was caught by the Germans, and endured two years in a camp.

After the war, “he becomes this very successful lawyer and politician,” Knaus recounts. “He was flamboyant, a great orator. He gives a speech in the 1930s where he says, our future lies in being neutral, no entanglements, no alliances, a foreign policy just for Belgium.” One is tempted to call it “Belgium first.”

In 1939, the Second World War broke out. Spaak was Belgium’s foreign minister. He was committed to keeping Belgium neutral and out of the war, but his efforts made no difference. In May, 1940, the Germans again invaded Belgium on their way to France. On the morning of the invasion, the German ambassador went to Spaak to read a formal explanation for the invasion and urge Belgium not to resist. Spaak cut him off. “No, you are not going to read this to me. I know what it is. I am the one who is going to speak, and what I have to say is — get the hell out of here.”

“He goes to France with his prime minister, expecting the French to resist,” Knaus recounted. “And then, of course, after six weeks, the French lose and capitulate and create Vichy. Then he has this spectacular escape from Vichy and evades capture in Franco’s Spain. He gets to Britain.”

In London, Spaak met officials from the many other governments-in-exile “and he starts thinking, ‘we need to build a completely different Europe.’” His first idea is to create close cooperation between Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. This became the “Benelux” idea. Today, it sounds trivial. But it was a huge conceptual step. Belgium and the Netherlands had fought a war in the 19th century, after all, and the sort of international cooperation Spaak was imagining was unheard of. “It was an outrageously daring idea at that time,” Knaus noted.

Paul-Henri Spaak

After the war, Spaak became Belgium’s prime minister, and as the international order we have known for 80 years was being envisioned and built, Spaak was at the centre of it all. Bringing together ideas and people. Negotiating essential compromises. And taking charge of the new organizations.

Paul-Henri Spaak was elected chairman of the first session of the United Nations General Assembly. Later, he became “the first president of the assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community. He is the first president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. And most importantly, he becomes the person who drafts the report that leads to the European Economic Community, the EEC.” To most non-Europeans, or even most Europeans without history degrees, these names may not mean much. They may also sound boringly bureaucratic. But just as Spaak’s “Benelux” idea was actually a bold step forward on a continent that had never known such cooperation, so all these steps were revolutionary. And Spaak was a central figure in all of them.

And he didn’t stop at promoting economic cooperation. The man who had once believed that strict neutrality and “mind your own business” was the path to peace became a fierce supporter of collective security. In 1956, he was elected NATO’s second secretary general.

In 2012, when the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for advancing peace and reconciliation, some American commentators groused that NATO and the United States deserved the award. Paul-Henri Spaak would have insisted that economic cooperation and collective security were inseparable, so both the EU and NATO were essential.

The story of Paul-Henri Spaak is amazing. And within his story is the wider story of the 20th century that has so much to teach us right now: When Spaak was born in 1899, the world had little international law and almost no international institutions to promote trade and limit conflict. It was a world in which states could and did invade others on whatever pretext they chose and reward themselves by tearing off chunks of land. That world produced the unprecedented catastrophe that was the First World War. In the wake of disaster, some far-sighted statesmen saw the need for greater internationalism and checks against aggression but they failed to implement them, so the world returned to an order dominated by nationalism and militarism. A second and even more terrible world war followed. Finally, after so much horror and suffering, statesmen like Paul-Henri Spaak understood there must be fundamental change.

Thus the post-war international order of the past 80 years was built. It didn’t produce utopia. But it did deliver a world with less international war, less predation of the weak by the strong, more cooperation, more trade, and more prosperity.

As a young man much too long ago, I studied in Germany and I vividly remember looking out the window of a bus as we crossed the border between Germany and Belgium. I spotted the place where a border post had once been. A place German soldiers twice seized by force. A place where Belgium was twice plunged into a nightmare of war and occupation. There was nothing there. The bus didn’t even slow down.

People marvel at pyramids and palaces, thinking they are grand accomplishments. I marvelled at the nothing that stood on the border between Germany and Belgium.

That is an accomplishment that towers over every pyramid and palace on the planet.

September 1, 1939: German soldiers dismantle a Polish border crossing the pre-European Union way.

Across Europe, there are countless other evocative sites like that non-existent border post.

Gerald Knaus cites Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. “I wrote a book with my daughter recently. We started in Vilnius because the geographic centre of Europe is in Lithuania. It’s now also one of the most attractive, thriving, prosperous and democratic countries in the world.”

The fact that Knaus can say that is stunning, or at least it should be. Lithuania was a province of the Russian Empire that attained independence after the First World War, but was invaded and occupied along with Latvia and Estonia by Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1940. It languished behind the Iron Curtain until the fall of the USSR in 1991. When I was a young man, it would have sounded like science fiction to say Lithuania would be, in a few decades, “one of the most attractive, thriving, prosperous and democratic countries in the world.”

How was Lithuania transformed? It joined the European Union and NATO.

“It’s very hard to find theories for social development” that reliably hold up, Knaus says, “but if there’s one, it is ‘you join the EU, you become rich.’” Ireland. Portugal. Spain. Greece. Romania, Estonia, Poland. Lithuania. All these countries are democratic, peaceful, and prosperous to an extent unimaginable not so many years ago.

Thanks to the European Union. And Paul-Henri Spaak.

But will the European Union last?

We live in a moment when the international order created after the Second World War is crumbling. Every day we see evidence that ideas buried long ago — that autocracy is more efficient than democracy, that go-it-alone nationalism delivers peace and prosperity, that there is a natural hierarchy of ethnicities, that diversity and empathy are weakness and homogeneity and cruelty strength — have risen from the grave.

The top “history” Substack is written by a Hitler apologist. A leading “intellectual” of Silicon Valley and Trumpian circles is a smirking fascist, a description that now also fits the world’s richest man. Naked racism and anti-Semitism are commonplace on social media and are growing forces on the American right. Far-right political parties lead polls in the UK, France, and Germany, while the far-right party in power in the United States is explicitly working to promote extremism in Europe and subvert the European Union. The American president is also determined to betray Ukraine and Europe to Russia and abandon the principle that nations may not invade neighbours and help themselves to conquered lands, a principle created and enshrined in international law by the United States. Meanwhile, all the post-war international institutions that delivered peace and prosperity are reflexively belittled and dismissed by large and growing numbers of people — people who have no idea who created those institutions, when, or why — with sneering references to “globalism.”

And how have liberal democrats around the world responded? They could tell stories like Paul-Henri Spaak’s. To know Spaak’s story is to know why the European Union and NATO exist and why they are worth fighting for. But democratic leaders don’t speak the man’s name. I suspect many don’t know his name.

So what else do they do? Do they loudly defend the international order which fools are now busily tearing down? Do they draw on the history that explains why the order was created and what the horrific consequences could be if we return to a world of might-makes-right? No.

Overwhelmingly, liberal democrats have responded to this existential threat with confusion, inarticulate stammering, and technocratic gestures. They are not making clear, coherent arguments in the battle of ideas. Worse still, they occasionally resort to restrictions on free speech, which cannot possibly win a battle of ideas but can generate a backlash — and lose a battle of ideas.

If they wanted to prove the far right correct that liberal democrats are feckless and ineffectual, they’re doing a good job.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Gerald Knaus notes that a Danish television series called Borgen, about a fictional Danish prime minister, garnered a worldwide audience on Netflix. “It managed to make Danish parliamentary coalition politics really interesting!” Knaus laughed. “We could make a series like this on the founders [of the European Union], on Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman and Paul-Henri Spaak.”

There are countless other forms such story-telling could take. Here, there is much to learn from the United States.

Americans have always had a cottage industry devoted to telling the stories of their Founding Fathers, which is why everyone in the world knows Washington and Jefferson and Franklin — and what they built. Ken Burns just released a major new documentary on exactly that. As a result, the American project has always had an emotional resonance wholly lacking in the European Union.

Why should that be so? It’s not the story that’s lacking. The story of the European Union’s creation is one of war and peace, slavery and liberation, starvation and prosperity. Told with a wide-angle lens, it is the greatest drama in modern history. Yet almost no one, anywhere, associates that drama with the dull, boring, bureaucratic European Union — because European leaders have utterly failed to tell this story as someone like Ken Burns would.

Which leaves the field wide open for the likes of Viktor Orban, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and their patron in the Kremlin. “If we liberals are so afraid of our own stories,” Knaus said, “then we leave it all up to the far right, which tells very different stories of the past.”

And this is far from an exclusively European failure. I’m Canadian and much I’ve written here is true of Canada. I’m not so familiar with Australia and New Zealand, but I suspect it holds there, too. Even Britain, with its popular appreciation of history, has singularly failed to explain what went right and why — which goes a long way to explaining Brexit and the dismal descent that followed.

So why have liberal democrats singularly failed to tell the truly glorious story of liberal democracy and international cooperation? In part, I think it’s simple ignorance. Even staunchly internationalist Americans are unlikely to know about the Welles Declaration or how the United States enshrined it in international law and how that contributed to global peace. You can’t tell a story you don’t know.

In part, I think nationalism muddles our thinking. “Liberal democracy” is a category that transcends any one nation, as does the European Union by definition. But we are so used to thinking of history as separate national categories — American history is one thing, British history another, French history a third — that we either ignore history that transcends those mental boxes or we jam it into those boxes and talk about “American liberal democracy” while severing all the connections between American liberal democracy and liberal democracy elsewhere. Truncating history this way obscures as much as it reveals.

Knaus also blames academics. In European universities, how the European Union came to be is typically taught as a series of treaties. “It’s like a manual. It’s not something you can be inspired or excited about.” Worse is the obsessive focus on theories and social forces. Knaus doesn’t deny the importance of either, but theory-obsessives make little room for — or even actively dismiss — the importance of individuals making decisions at key moments. “If we take out humans making decisions from history it becomes the most boring subject. Then we end up with international relations theory.”

Another explanation for our failure is more embarrassing. Knaus illustrated it with a story he told me about his daughter, who studied at the University of Amsterdam and became fascinated by Max Kohnstamm. On the day the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, Kohnstamm was a student at the same university taking his final exam in history. He was half-Jewish so he spent most of the war in a concentration camp with his professors. But he survived — and became another of the remarkable architects of what became the European Union. “Now this guy is unknown in Europe,” Knaus told me. “My daughter and I made a presentation in Amsterdam, at the university,” and of the 80 or so people in the room three or four knew who he was. “That’s bizarre!” Knaus’ daughter suggested perhaps the Dutch could name the new university library at the University of Amsterdam after this remarkable leader with an enormous legacy. One response was as predictable as it is pathetic: “Yeah but he’s a white man.”

Let’s be honest. Far too many liberal democrats allowed a perfectly reasonable and well-intentioned effort to expand the ambit of history and memory to curdle into a foolish and dogmatic program that reduces people to the demographic boxes they tick. It is dehumanizing. it is intellectually crippling. While accomplishing nothing constructive, it gives the far-right ammunition in its campaign to foment division and grievance. Worst of all, it convinces the timid — those who don’t have the spine to tell unreasonable activists to get lost — that it’s best to avoid talking about history altogether.

Which brings me to the related, and final, reason why liberal democrats are failing to tell stories. It is politics.

In 2002, when Euro banknotes were introduced, the images they bore were not of visionary European leaders like Paul-Henri Spaak, or great European figures from science or literature, or even Europe’s grand architecture. They were images of doorways, windows, and bridges. They weren’t even real doorways, windows, and bridges in real places. They were generic doorways, windows, and bridges. Generously, one might say they were nice metaphors. Less generously, they were manifestations of cowardice. The reason they didn’t have real doorways, windows, and bridges in real places is the same reason why they didn’t have leaders, scientists, or authors: To choose a real person or object means not choosing others, and if you put a French bridge on a note but not an Italian bridge, Italians may be pissed off. So the safe thing was to make no choices: Forget history and heritage. Stick with generic, meaningless placeholders.

This sort of cringing is, again, not limited to Europe.

Thanks to Stephen Harper,¹ a prime minister who understood the importance of history, Canada had images drawn from its history and culture — images like the Vimy Ridge memorial — engraved on the pages of its passports. Until 2023. That year, the government decided it had to redesign the passport for security reasons. Fair enough. So did it choose new images drawn from Canada’s history and culture? Of course not. It created images of generic children in generic scenes. Someone raking leaves. A bird on a bird feeder. That sort of thing. Those responsible either don’t know nations are collective identities forged with history, symbols, and stories, or they are so cowardly that choosing history, symbols, and stories was too daunting for them. Or both. All three explanations are appalling.

This essay has become angry, I’m afraid. But I can’t apologize.

Passion is exactly what’s missing. “The best lack all conviction,” Yeats wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Those of us who believe in liberal democracy and international cooperation need some of that passion. Before it’s too late.

Liberal democracy is the best form of governance human beings have ever created. It gives individuals dignity and freedom to pursue their lives as they see fit. It empowers diversity, openness, and discovery. It encourages invention, trade, and prosperity. It is the essential foundation of science and intellectual inquiry. It has enabled human flourishing to an extent far beyond the wildest dreams of most people who ever lived.

It is a creed worth celebrating. It is a creed worth fighting for.

But there is no celebrating or fighting without passion.

You know who understood that? Paul-Henri Spaak. He was a man of good humour who knew how to give a fiery speech. And when the crunch came, he told the German ambassador to get the hell out of here.

We need stories like that of Paul-Henri Spaak. But more than that, we need to tell those stories with as much passion as that great man could muster.

An American poster from the Second World War, when the United States was led by vastly better men.

POSTSCRIPT

If you’d like to hear more from Gerald Knaus, he created this video lecture. If you’d like to know more about the far right party in Germany, the AfD, here is Knaus speaking with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell on The Rest Is Politics.

If you’d like more about Paul-Henri Spaak, read this wonderful 1948 profile in Time magazine. It’s a rich character sketch. (“He bears a startling resemblance to Winston Churchill…. in the whole grey and sagging circle of European leaders, he is one of the few men with a spark of Churchillian fire.”) It also gives a sense of how bleak life in Western Europe was in 1948 — and how far Europe has come thanks to the likes of Spaak.

1. Longtime readers will know I was never Stephen Harper’s biggest fan, to state the matter with severe understatement. But he was right about history, and dead right about the passport. I would argue some of his other history-related policies were implemented more than a little ham-handedly — sorry, old editorial habit — but he is arguably the only modern prime minister to go beyond lip service and actually implement policies intended to promote awareness of Canadian history among Canadians. His personal interest in history is also clearly sincere, as his recent publication of a book about the history of Canadian flags shows. On this file, he indisputably deserves applause.