Europe’s Suicide Pact

There are many ways for a civilization to die. Civilizations do not fall like walls; they fade like prayers that no one remembers how to repeat.

Filip Gašpar is a political advisor and publicist with Croatian roots from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He specializes in strategic communication, international positioning, and conservative networks. He regularly writes for German and international outlets such as JUNGE FREIHEIT, The European Conservative, and various media across the former Yugoslavia.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.

Europe’s support for Ukraine has become more than policy. It is a moral ritual for a continent that no longer trusts its own purpose. What began as solidarity has turned into self-punishment, a crusade of virtue that drains both wealth and will. Germany, once Europe’s pragmatist, now embodies this strange devotion to decline. The Union mistakes endurance for courage and sacrifice for strategy, spending its future to preserve the illusion of moral clarity.

There are many ways for a civilization to die. Civilizations do not fall like walls; they fade like prayers that no one remembers how to repeat.

Some perish by conquest, others by decadence, still others by exhaustion. Europe’s tragedy is more discreet. It dies not from lack of wealth or knowledge but from a slow corrosion of meaning. It dies while still congratulating itself for being alive.

Out of fear of history, the European Union was born. It sought to tame power with law, to replace the drama of nations with the serenity of administration, to create a civilization so rational that it would no longer need courage. The ambition was noble in theory and lethal in effect. In seeking to overcome tragedy, Europe abolished the vocabulary that gives tragedy form.

Traumatized by the twentieth century, Europe’s elites learned to distrust destiny itself. They sought to build a world where guilt would replace glory, where process would replace providence. In trying to escape the cycle of power and punishment, they attempted to abolish the very grammar of consequence. Having survived its own excesses, Europe sought not renewal but anesthesia. What began as a project of peace became a sanctuary from reality.

What began as liberal humanism has hardened into a moral empire. The creed is inclusion, the liturgy is compliance, and the heresy is doubt. Its temples are ministries, its saints are victims, and its heaven is procedural harmony.

For decades the continent lived under the illusion that peace could be permanent if only it were managed by the right kind of technocrats. The EU turned memory into regulation and replaced sovereignty with procedure. When violence returned, the continent had forgotten how to think politically. It could only think morally.

When the first missiles fell on Ukraine, the reflex was not strategic but sentimental. The aggression itself was brutal and real, a reminder that evil still takes territorial form. Yet instead of facing it with clarity, Europe retreated into performance. The language of values filled the vacuum that once belonged to statecraft. Brussels discovered in Ukraine a mirror for its own conscience. The defense of democracy became a way of defending the European project itself, a grand act of moral self-preservation disguised as solidarity.

Within months, Ukraine ceased to be a country and became a catechism. To stand with Ukraine became the secular confession of the European elite. Flags appeared on ministry buildings, hashtags multiplied, speeches grew solemn. The gestures were precise, the emotion sincere, the understanding superficial. The continent soon transformed empathy into ideology.

In Brussels, empathy has become a kind of incense. It perfumes every meeting room, rising from committees as if from an altar. Policies are drafted as prayers to a nameless deity called humanity, and the bureaucrats speak of moral progress with the certainty once reserved for salvation.

The pilgrimage to Kyiv became a ritual of legitimacy. Each new visit from Brussels was staged like a sacrament of renewal. Cameras flashed, promises were made, new tranches of aid were announced. What mattered was not the effect but the gesture. The act of feeling right replaced the act of doing right.

Since 2022, the European Union has entered a state of moral mobilization without war. The borders of Europe no longer move on maps, but in minds. Bureaucracies speak the language of resistance, economies behave as if under siege, and daily life has taken on the rhythm of a quiet emergency. The continent wages war not against an enemy, but against doubt itself.

Moral intensity remains genuine, yet it conceals exhaustion. The continent no longer believes in power, seeking redemption through compassion instead. The land that once ruled half the world now measures its virtue by its willingness to endure economic ruin for symbolic causes.

This new faith is not Christianity reborn but Christianity inverted. The cross has been replaced by the banner of universal empathy, and the idea of salvation has been reduced to policy language about shared values. The European mind replaced transcendence with tolerance and in doing so lost the grammar of hope. What remains is a civilization fluent in compassion but illiterate in redemption. It mourns injustice yet cannot forgive, celebrates rights yet doubts meaning. The EU’s moral language sounds universal, but it is only the echo of a faith it no longer believes in.

Beneath the surface of institutions lies a deeper crisis, anthropological, not administrative. The Union was built on the fiction of the autonomous individual, yet every human being is born dependent, bound, and unfinished. A newborn cannot feed itself; a dying man cannot bury himself. Between those two helpless moments lies all of politics. A civilization that forgets this truth will replace belonging with bureaucracy and call it freedom.

Few nations have paid so quietly and so dearly as Germany. Since 1945, the country has defined itself through renunciation. To be modern and moral meant to distrust ambition. The result was a political culture that treats every act of self-assertion as a potential relapse into sin. The war in Ukraine gave that neurosis new life.

The price of this moral certainty has been immense, though rarely spoken aloud. Inflation has become doctrine. Electricity rose by more than eighty percent. Gas by over one hundred and forty. Basic food staples climbed by thirty to forty percent.

In 2023, German households paid on average €0.38 per kilowatt-hour for electricity, one of the highest rates in Europe. Natural-gas prices reached €0.1187 per kilowatt-hour, roughly seventy-four percent higher than before the war.

Milk, bread, flour, tolls, even paper bags. Every receipt now reads like a confession. The kebab, once the working man’s lunch in Berlin or Cologne, costs twice what it did before 2022. The hands that prepare it are the same, the ingredients unchanged, but the meaning has shifted. It is no longer food. It is testimony.

Statistics speak the language of economics, but behind each number lies a confession of faith, the belief that hardship itself can purify.

Germany has not been at war, but it has been mobilized. The war did not reach its borders, but it redrew them in the mind. From that moment, the rules of life changed. Every rise in price was explained as moral necessity: higher gas bills as the price of independence from Russia, higher rents as the cost of saving the planet, higher food prices as the proof of European solidarity. To ask about the cost became indecent. To question it was to betray the cause.

Not merely an economic crisis, this is the quiet imposition of a new creed, suffering as virtue. At a small grill in Düsseldorf, a man no longer prints the new price; he says it softly, apologetically: eight euros now, brother, sorry. The gesture is small, but the meaning is vast.

When a street meal becomes a luxury, something deeper has cracked. Germany is not only experiencing inflation. It is experiencing abstraction, the moment when prices rise and questions fall silent.

Sanctions and energy shortages were not merely tolerated; they were embraced as proof of moral seriousness. Industrial decline was reframed as ethical progress. The same society that dismantled its nuclear plants in the name of virtue now dismantles its industry for the same reason.

Germany has confused repentance with responsibility. Germany now taxes like a rich state, governs like a poor one, and signals like an empire. Its contradictions have become theology. Each policy is a sermon, each crisis a rite of purification.

Behind the moral grandeur lies fatigue. The public senses the absurdity but lacks the language to oppose it. To doubt the official narrative is to risk isolation. Only at the edges of respectability does that language begin to reappear.

Movements like the AfD, dismissed as reactionary, have become vessels for questions that the official discourse can no longer contain. The national conversation has become a sermon. A once pragmatic nation now finds its meaning in ritualized guilt.

Across Brussels, institutions function like a stage without a plot. Summits are held, resolutions passed, statements released. Each gesture repeats the same refrain of unity and resolve. Yet the machinery operates without purpose. It produces words as a substitute for will.

In the city that houses Europe’s power, speech has become ritual rather than reason. Its vocabulary is theological, not practical. The most sacred word in this new catechism is signal effect.

Not the consequence, not the cost, but the appearance. The effect of seeming virtuous has replaced the substance of being sovereign. Europe has turned conscience into currency and belief into branding.

The European project no longer promises salvation of souls but salvation through systems. Its theology is technological. Its promised heaven is management.

Dependent for protection and coherence, the Union still lectures the world on moral independence. The relationship resembles that of an aging aristocrat to a younger patron, pride disguising dependence, vanity masking fragility.

Across the continent, governments speak in a double language. Prices rise, wages stagnate, yet every question is answered with a moral slogan. Citizens are told to consume less, to travel less, to heat less, as if restraint were salvation. The continent no longer measures prosperity but purity. Its rulers have turned scarcity into sacrament.

When Washington inevitably turns its full attention to the Pacific, Europe will face the silence it has feared for decades. No alliance can fill the void of conviction. The absence of American supervision will expose the spiritual emptiness that Brussels has so skillfully concealed beneath its rhetoric.

Before 1914, Europe’s unity was not bureaucratic but spiritual. The continent was fragmented by states yet united by form. Cathedrals, universities, and music spoke a common language of beauty. The bells of a thousand towns once marked the rhythm of the sacred week, binding labor to liturgy. The peasant knew the psalm as well as the prince knew the creed. The continent breathed through ritual, and its faith gave weight to every act of work and art.

Faith gave order to freedom, and art gave shape to truth. The balance between belief and reason produced an architecture of meaning that no modern ideology has replaced.

The European Union inherited the shell of that civilization but not its soul. It preserved the techniques of diplomacy without the metaphysics of destiny. It built institutions without transcendence, commerce without communion, prosperity without purpose.

Europe’s skylines still bear the silhouettes of churches, but their towers no longer point toward anything. They remain as stone metaphors for a civilization that remembers the gestures of reverence but has forgotten the object of devotion. The old Europe built monuments to eternity; the new one builds frameworks for compliance.

Modern Europeans can no longer answer the simplest of questions: what is all this for? Their ancestors built cathedrals to praise God; they fund think tanks to measure happiness. The contrast is unbearable, and so they distract themselves with moral performance.

In the East, the European project meets its mirror image. The nations once mocked as provincial — Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia — are now repositories of memory. They remember what the West has forgotten, that freedom is not the absence of authority but the fruit of sacrifice.

These societies still carry the genetic memory of suffering. They know the texture of occupation, the taste of hunger, the humility of survival. In Lviv or Vilnius, in Novi Sad or Zagreb, the elderly still speak of winters when bread was a currency and silence a form of resistance. In these places, patriotism is not a theory but a scar. They have known both empire and ruin, and they know that history does not forgive weakness.

Their suspicion of Brussels is not ignorance, but instinct. They recognize in its bureaucratic idealism the familiar scent of utopia and they know where utopias lead.

For them, Europe is not an abstraction but a fragile inheritance, and they guard it not with lectures but with prayer. The future of the continent may depend less on its enlightened centers than on these stubborn margins that still believe life has structure, that history has direction, and that faith has power.

Ukraine’s courage and suffering have revealed the hollowness of Europe’s moral theater. The invasion by Russia was a crime of power, cynical and merciless, and its victims deserve more than hashtags and resolutions. The war shows what conviction looks like and therefore embarrasses those who speak of it most loudly. In Kyiv one finds a sense of sacrifice that Brussels has turned into performance.

Admiration for Ukraine reveals precisely what the West itself has lost: faith, patriotism, and endurance. It celebrates these virtues in others because it can no longer live them itself. The land that once defined modernity now survives by reflecting borrowed light.

The tragedy of Ukraine is real, but the continent’s fascination with it is psychological. It is the fascination of a culture that senses its own decline and seeks meaning in someone else’s struggle. What is called solidarity is often nostalgia, nostalgia for an age when belief was still possible.

This faith soon found its measure not in words but in money. Since 2022, the European Union and its member states have collectively pledged more than 158 billion US dollars in aid to Ukraine, a sum unprecedented in modern European history. The number is less an act of policy than a measure of belief, a monetary expression of moral anxiety.

Yet moral fervor cannot last forever. Inflation, energy shortages, and political fragmentation will erode the fragile consensus that keeps the illusion intact. Already the social fabric trembles. Populist parties rise not because they promise miracles but because they speak of things that are still tangible: work, land, family, and nation.

In Germany, even the much-maligned AfD has drawn strength from that same hunger for the tangible. It speaks in tones the establishment can no longer hear. Speaking of home, duty, and continuity, words once central to European civilization, is now treated as subversive.

No bureaucracy can inspire loyalty forever. The EU is no exception. Once the benefits dwindle, the moral narrative will collapse. The Union will discover that it cannot command sacrifice without offering belonging.

Europe has turned sacrifice into its last ideology. It has come to believe that suffering itself is proof of righteousness, that exhaustion is evidence of moral depth. Yet a civilization that treats pain as meaning will soon forget the meaning of freedom.

At that moment, the continent will face its most difficult question: whether it wants to remain a civilization, or become an exhibit. If it chooses comfort over conviction, it will end not with an explosion but with applause, surrounded by symbols of a greatness it no longer understands.

Renewal will not come through Brussels nor through Washington. It will begin at the margins, where people still remember the texture of life unmediated by ideology. It will begin in small nations that know their limits and refuse to be ashamed of them. It will begin in communities that rebuild the link between freedom and form, between compassion and order.

To recover, the continent must remember that love of home is not regression but responsibility. It must learn again that peace is not the absence of struggle but the presence of purpose. The future will belong to those who can reconnect justice with gratitude, liberty with loyalty, and progress with restraint.

Its survival depends on rediscovering the humility of rootedness. The parish, the village, and the nation are not relics of a darker age, but are the organs through which culture breathes. Without them, Europe becomes a museum of humanitarian slogans, haunted by the memory of its own vitality.

To rebuild itself, the continent must first learn to stop performing. It must exchange empathy for courage, sentiment for structure, and virtue-signaling for vision. The task is not to resurrect the past but to remember that continuity itself is sacred.

Perhaps Europe’s rebirth will not come through reform but through repentance. The continent may have to pass through the fire of its own forgetfulness to remember what it once was. Renewal begins where pride breaks and gratitude returns. When the nations kneel not before Brussels, but before the mystery of being itself, then Europe will rise not as a system but as a soul.

Nor is Europe’s fate distant from America’s own. Across the Atlantic, the same moral exhaustion gathers under brighter lights. Europe is only the first to forget that politics without transcendence cannot hold.

When the chroniclers of this age examine the ruins, they will find no conqueror, no decisive battle, and no single catastrophe. They will find a civilization that slowly talked itself out of existence. They will note that it mistook procedure for destiny and compassion for command. They will wonder how a continent that once built cathedrals of stone ended up worshipping bureaucratic forms.

Yet history is never entirely merciless. A civilization can die only if it forgets that it has a soul. Somewhere between the Baltic and the Adriatic, between the Pyrenees and the Carpathians, that soul still stirs in language, in liturgy, and in the stubborn memory of what it means to belong.

Before renewal can come, there must be remembrance. A candle lit in a ruined church. A family gathered around a table. A people refusing to forget who they are.

Europe will not be reborn in parliaments, but in hearts that still know silence. The future will belong to those who can pray again.

If the continent is to live again, it will not be through institutions or treaties, but through the quiet return of faith in the truth, in family, in nation, and in God. Only then will the funeral pyre become a signal fire, and the land that once sought to abolish history may yet begin it anew.

What begins in repentance ends in recognition. To see again what is near, to honor what is small, to kneel before what endures, that is how civilizations remember how to live.

---

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a patron of our publication! Your enthusiasm and support means a lot to all of us at The American Postliberal — and we promise we’ll work hard for your investment in our project.