Is the world entering the age of forgetting?


Is the world entering the age of forgetting?

On Remembrance Day we're supposed to remember the monstrous atrocity that was World War I, one of humanity's absolute low points, vast carnage from political failure. In Australia and New Zealand we concentrate our memories of World War I on the murderously disastrous Gallipoli campaign led by Britian's First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.

But, beyond the searing lesson of betrayal of the two infant nations' trust in the great and powerful Motherland, have we remembered the most important lessons? Pat Cox, an Irish politician who went on to become president of the European Parliament, is well versed in the miseries of Gallipoli. One of his grandfathers fought and was wounded in that campaign, a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

Illustration: Andrew DysonCredit:

Cox developed "an affinity" for the Australian experience on the peninsula, he says this week during his first visit to Australia. He's toured the Gallipoli battlefields, read Les Carlyon's epic history, and absorbed "all of the shocking awfulness of war". Yet Cox fears that the world is losing its memory.

Not just the memory of human suffering on an unimaginable scale, but the memory of how to keep peace. Peace is not a natural condition or an automatic one. It's a political construct.


The settlement of World War I was itself a failed construct that led on to World War II. "We learned the lessons after World War II," says Cox.

"We understood that if you want a sustainable peace you have to reach a reconciliation, that if you want a peace that reaches beyond the enmities of war into sustained reconciliation and peace, the power of the constructive ideal is the key element of that in Europe."


Populist politics is an exercise in forgetting the "constructive ideal" of a unified Europe. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Cox himself laboured to bring that ideal to fruition – he spent 15 years bringing the former Soviet bloc countries of eastern Europe into an expanded EU. But now, nationalist grudges and firebrand politicians are tearing at that "constructive ideal" as Britain tries to leave the EU and Eurosceptic parties rise across the continent.

Cox recalls a saying of the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini: "If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, nobody would notice." Says Cox: "There's been too much feather plucking going on." Freedoms are lost, one by one.

Which feathers does Pat Cox have in mind, exactly? He starts with Europe. The dominant worry five years ago was Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea and stealth invasion of eastern Ukraine. "The spoiler nature of Russia was the issue," he says.

But the dominant security concern of Europe today is not Russia but, "by some margin", America: "Mr Trump is the great disrupter – transactional, erratic, unpredictable, quixotic, mercantalist, operating outside all of the known norms established in politics, diplomacy, decorum, communication."

Donald Trump is the great disrupter of modern times.

Donald Trump is the great disrupter of modern times.Credit:Bloomberg

Indeed, French President Emmanuel Macron said on the weekend that Europe was "on the brink of a precipice" and that the NATO military alliance forged to protect Europe against Russian aggression was experiencing "brain death".

"The US remains our major ally, we need them," Macron told The Economist. "But we find ourselves for the first time with an American president who doesn’t share our idea of the European project, and American policy is diverging from this project."

Macron said that not only was Trump uninterested in European unification, but that Europe was forgetting its history in the grip of "selfish nationalism" while authoritarian powers were on the move, naming China and Russia. "All this has led to the exceptional fragility of Europe which, if it can’t think of itself as a global power, will disappear," the French President concluded.

Illustration: Dionne Gain

Illustration: Dionne GainCredit:

Some of the other feathers being plucked, according to Cox: "My biggest fear is that we are dismantling those bilateral things of the old bipolar world – the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, probably the SALT strategic arms limitation treaty – where there's no multilateral alternative in place and where lots of guys want to play in the grey space."

These are two of the great constraints agreed by the US and Russia to control their nuclear arsenals and as they are torn up "that has got to make the world more uncertain and more unpredictable", says Cox.

The solution? Cox likes to quote Pope Francis who has talked of "the need for a transfusion of memory".

"The transfusion of memory," repeats Cox. "If you forget some things there's always a risk you could slip backwards. And so effective, multilateral, open systems, international agreement on how to settle disputes, all these things have been powerful legacies of the Second World War and of great benefit to Australia and to the EU, so we have a lot at stake that we share."

But how do you stop a heated political argument to administer a history lesson? Cox takes some hope from the fact that the expected "tsunami" of populist parties in this year's European Parliament elections was, in fact, "a trickle or at most a wave", and that there is economic growth across most of Europe.

Yet Australia itself, where sane and centrist politics has largely prevailed, isn't immune to the danger of a xenophobic populism in future. The Lowy Institute's Sam Roggeveen has written an essay with the disturbing title Our Very Own Brexit.

"The tacit agreement between among our political class to support high immigration levels is presently untouchable," he writes, "but the forces that have held this compact in place are weakening, and the issue is ripe for political exploitation."

Roggeveen doesn't predict but warns that, in the worst case, one of Australia's main political parties breaks the compact and proposes an indefinite stop to Australia's immigration program. This would "see Australia make a symbolic and real-world break with its geography just as Britain did when it voted to leave the EU".

We tried this – it was called White Australia – a great economic and social and moral gash in our country's history. It was a mistake that our historical memory should warn us against repeating. As Cox puts it: "We must be conscious of what history has taught us not because we should fear it but because we should mobilise ourselves not to repeat it." Lest we forget.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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