Big questions loom for Europe - and for us all, hears Kilkenny's annual Hubert Butler Lecture

The world has entered a new era that will see great and vying-to-be-great powers seek to carve out new political realities, and the future of Europe may well be in the balance.

What that future could be —and indeed, what Europe even is as a concept — was the theme of this year’s Hubert Butler Lecture, as part of Kilkenny Arts Festival. The speaker was British journalist and author of This Is Europe, Ben Judah, with the event chaired once again by stalwart Olivia O’Leary in a packed St Canice's Cathedral.

Unsurprisingly, the Russian/ Ukraine war was a focal point and much of the Q&A centred around the conflict, but Judah began by posing the question that concerns his book: In a continent of almost 750 million people, from different countries, regions, cultures, languages, etc— what does it mean to be European?

Europe, he says, is more that the borders drawn on the map, (although the question of where it begins and ends does it stop in the east remain contested). It is blurry. It is not a language or a religion. There are, he notes, more French speakers in Africa than in France, and they are not Europeans.

It is, he says, a shared ideal, a community of ideas that becomes harder to pin down the more you try to. The urban Parisian or the Kyivan may have more in common with a denizen of Sydney or Toronto than he does with a rural Bulgarian.

There is shared history and the grand narrative of histories. More murky and perhaps complicated, Judah feels, is the shared vision for the future. Europe’s common past brings us together, but where do we see its future?

Responding to an audience question, he concedes the American shared vision for the future, as espoused in the post-war 50s and 60s, may have had more tangibility and shape than anything existing in Europe today. Defining this may be key to the success of the European project.

What Europe is and will become ultimately, he says, will be dictated by two great issues of our time. The first is the conflict to our east: Ukraine, with its population of around 40 million people, wants to be part of the great European community. Western leaders have courted and encouraged this, drawing Ukraine away from the Kremlin and increasingly into the Eurosphere. Can they now follow this through to its conclusion?

Ukraine’s moving closer to the EU and away from the pan-Russian vision will change the face of Europe, in part due to the demographic shift and also the incorporation of such a large agri/food producing nation.
Following up, O’Leary wonders if bringing Ukraine — a country actively fighting a protracted war within its borders — may undermine the noble vision of a conflict-free Europe.

She also wonders has Europe failed in its ideals and its obligations to those immigrating from the global south, by concocting ‘grubby deals’ with North African and Middle Eastern countries to contain transient groups and prevent them reaching European shores. Judah foresees more of these deals being hatched.

The second issue is the great migration north by people coming from Africa and the Middle East, leaving their homelands for a better life. They are attempting to come here in their millions, and this is going to continue; indeed — it is going to become more and more pronounced, Judah says.

Expanding, Judah suggests that the global reality has now shifted, and the days of a struggle between the great powers for supremacy have in many ways returned. He says that since the mid-1980s right up until the beginning of the present decade, that balance had been maintained through a series of both written and unwritten rules and understandings — the hierarchy, permissible interventions, acceptable, overt diplomacies, and quieter ones.

This may now be at an end; and we will live in a very new and evolving global reality which may be the case for some time to come.