DUTY CALLS, BUT NO-ONE'S HOME

One suspects the modern European state has finally achieved what generations of utopians only dreamed of: a polity so thoroughly denationalised that it can no longer risk asking its own citizens to defend it. The proposition is delicious in its absurdity. For decades the official line has been that Britain (and much of the Continent) is no longer a nation in the old, inconvenient sense, but a sort of luxurious international departure lounge where the indigenous population are merely the longer-stay guests, expected to keep the carpets clean and the Wi-Fi working while newcomers settle in for the better life. Then, when a foreign power begins rattling its sabre a little too loudly, the same authorities suddenly remember the language of blood and soil and start murmuring about “doing one’s duty.”

It will not happen. The state will never dare try conscription, and one rather hopes any half-hearted attempt would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions before the first reluctant recruit had finished lacing his boots. The moment the call-up papers fluttered through letterboxes, the carefully constructed post-national fiction would evaporate overnight. Those who arrived more recently would, with admirable practicality, recall urgent family obligations in the lands of their origin. Flights would be booked, WhatsApp groups would hum with sudden nostalgia, and the “New Brits” would discover that home, after all, still held certain charms. Meanwhile the longer-resident population – those awkward, unfashionable natives who had been told for thirty years that they no longer owned the place – would find themselves, by pure bureaucratic accident, revealed as the only people left who might actually have to stay and fight. The propaganda of the preceding generation would be undone more efficiently than any opposition pamphlet could manage. One almost feels a twinge of pity for the speechwriters.

A serious war, of course, would impose still greater inconveniences. Borders would have to be controlled with something approaching competence. The open-door hospitality that has been the moral centrepiece of recent policy would become a strategic liability. Welfare systems designed for perpetual expansion would face the unromantic necessity of prioritising those who might be required to risk their necks. None of this appeals to the governing class, whose principal talent lies in the management of appearances rather than the management of reality. The cost, in both political capital and ideological consistency, would far outweigh the fleeting satisfaction of another round of virtue-signalling speeches about solidarity with distant causes.

Ukraine will therefore be quietly demoted in the hierarchy of official concerns. The language will soften, the photo opportunities will grow scarcer, and the whole business will be allowed to drift into the category of problems that are important but not urgent – until the next financial upheaval arrives to sweep the present arrangement aside. This is not cynicism so much as pattern recognition. States that have spent decades dissolving the emotional bonds that once made conscription thinkable are unlikely to rediscover those bonds the moment the artillery grows louder.

There is, however, a certain dry optimism to be extracted from the mess. Across Europe the electorate appears increasingly primed to reject those who keep insisting that distant conflicts require the indefinite sacrifice of domestic cohesion. Voters have noticed that the same voices loudest for escalation are often the ones most reluctant to acknowledge the social and fiscal consequences of their preferred demographic experiment. An attempt at conscription – even a tentative one – would accelerate that realisation. It would force a clarity that polite discourse has long avoided. The resulting backlash would not be elegant, but it might prove decisive. Politicians who have treated national identity as an embarrassing relic may yet discover that electorates retain a residual attachment to the idea of a country worth neither invading nor abandoning.

One does not need to romanticise the past to observe that a polity which cannot, without contradiction, ask its people to defend it has already answered a rather fundamental question about its own future. The hope, modest but persistent, is that any further attempts to square this particular circle will simply make the circle more visible – and that the voters, when next given the chance, will politely but firmly show the circle-drawers the door.

THE USEFUL ENEMY

It has become the received wisdom of our time that Russia, that perennial bogeyman of the European imagination, is the party itching for a wider war. One hears the pronouncements from Brussels and the various national capitals with their carefully calibrated notes of alarm, and one is invited to picture Vladimir Putin as a man who spends his evenings polishing bayonets while muttering darkly about the restoration of the Tsars. The truth, as usual, is both simpler and more embarrassing. Russia does not particularly want a war with Europe. Europe, or at any rate those portions of it that still believe themselves to be in charge, rather does. The reason is not strategic genius or historical destiny. It is that the political and ideological model under which large parts of the continent have been labouring has reached the end of its shelf life, and everyone concerned knows it.

There is an old observation, attributed variously and never quite pinned down to a single source, that the problem with socialism is that you can vote your way into it, but you have to shoot your way out of it. The phrase has the rough elegance of a frontier proverb, and it has rarely felt more apt. What we are witnessing is not the confident advance of a coherent system but the final, slightly frantic manoeuvres of people who sense that the experiment has failed and who would prefer almost any catastrophe to the simple admission of error. The rhetoric directed at Russia has taken on a peculiar intensity precisely because the domestic alternatives look so unpromising. Better a distant enemy whose motives can be painted in primary colours than a long, honest look at the books.

The difficulty with the particular strain of narcissism that thrives in modern European politics is that it cannot relinquish power without also relinquishing the flattering self-image that power supplies. To step back would be to concede that the grand project—call it democratic socialism, social democracy, progressive governance, or whatever soft synonym is currently preferred—has not delivered the promised combination of prosperity, cohesion and moral superiority. Multiculturalism, that most sacred and least examined article of the faith, has proved especially divisive, producing not the harmonious tapestry of official literature but a series of parallel societies held together by the thin glue of official optimism and the occasional riot. Rather than adjust course, the stewards of the project prefer to double down. History offers no shortage of precedents for this preference. When the ideology falters, the enemy abroad becomes indispensable.

One notices, of course, that large numbers of ordinary citizens have begun to notice the gap between proclamation and result. They have begun, in that awkward modern phrase, to “wake up.” Yet the conditioning runs deep. Marxism, or the diluted, academic, bureaucratic version of it that has soaked into institutions for decades, has a talent for producing people who resemble drones more than citizens—shells of human beings whose critical faculties have been carefully trained to operate only within the approved narrative. They can recite the latest orthodoxy with impressive fluency and genuine sincerity, but the moment the script is interrupted they look faintly panicked, as if someone has switched off the teleprompter mid-sentence. This is not a conspiracy in the usual sense; it is something more mundane and therefore more durable: the cumulative effect of education, media and professional incentives all pointing in the same direction for a very long time.

The result is a curious inversion. The side that talks most loudly about peace and European values is the one that appears least able to tolerate the possibility that its own model might need revision. Russia, for all its many and obvious faults, has no particular interest in conquering the suburbs of Lyon or the business districts of Frankfurt. It has its own difficulties, and wars of choice are expensive. Europe’s political class, by contrast, finds the prospect of heightened tension useful. It supplies distraction, moral clarity of a crude sort, and a ready explanation for why living standards feel sticky and social trust continues to fray. The psyop, if one may borrow the vernacular, is less a secret plot than the natural consequence of people who cannot afford to be wrong.

One is left, then, with the unedifying spectacle of a civilisation that would rather risk escalation than confront the possibility that its governing assumptions have passed their sell-by date. The leaders do not plot this outcome in smoke-filled rooms so much as drift toward it, sustained by the conviction that any alternative would be unthinkable. The rest of us are invited to accept the invitation to panic. It is an invitation best declined. The shelf life of ideology is finite, even when those who stocked the shelves refuse to check the date.

DOOMSCROLLING THROUGH THE GOLDEN AGE

As we continue to hurtle into an uncertain and dystopian future, it’s important to take the time to enjoy the present. Even though things could be, and have been, better, it’s very likely that at some point you will remember this time period as 'the good old days.' Enjoy the now. There. That’s the sentiment, delivered with the forced cheer of a hospice nurse trying to brighten a terminal ward by suggesting a game of cards. It’s the sort of advice that sounds almost wholesome until you notice the blood seeping under the door. We are, after all, living through a period that future historians—assuming we still have historians and not just algorithmically generated content summaries delivered via neural implant—will almost certainly look back on with the same misty-eyed fondness currently reserved for the 1990s, or the Blitz, or any other era that involved slightly less sophisticated methods of making people miserable.

Consider the present carefully. We scroll endlessly through carefully curated despair, pausing only to argue with strangers about whether the latest atrocity is slightly more or less important than the previous one. Our phones buzz with notifications that someone, somewhere, has been cancelled for a joke they made in 2014, or that a new strain of something unpleasant is making the rounds, or that the weather has once again decided to behave like a poorly written villain in a disaster film. The air is thick with the low-grade anxiety of knowing that the systems holding everything together are held together by the digital equivalent of chewing gum and crossed fingers. And yet, in a few decades, some grey-haired survivor will sit in what remains of a pub—probably a VR recreation of one, with the faint smell of hops added for authenticity—and sigh about how simple it all was back then. “Remember when you could still pretend the climate was mostly fine if you just didn’t look at the charts? Remember when the AI only hallucinated mildly and didn’t yet run the government? Those were the days.”

This is the cruel joke at the heart of human nostalgia. We are hard-wired to sand the edges off the past until it becomes a soft-focus commercial for a product that never existed. The 'good old days' are always the ones that weren’t actively trying to kill you in ways you fully understood. People once fondly recalled the trenches of the First World War once enough time had passed and the mud had dried. They missed the rationing and the blackout curtains once the immediate threat of being flattened by a bomb had been replaced by the more abstract threat of nuclear annihilation. The pattern is consistent: whatever fresh hell we currently inhabit will, given sufficient temporal distance and a selective memory, acquire a certain rustic charm. Future generations will romanticise the era of performative outrage, of algorithmic radicalisation, of people filming themselves crying in their cars for engagement metrics. They will speak of it the way we speak of vinyl records—warm, imperfect, somehow more authentic than whatever sterile nightmare has replaced it.

We live in a time when you can order a meal with a few taps on a glowing rectangle, have it delivered by a stressed stranger on a bicycle, and then complain about the packaging while simultaneously fretting about the collapse of civilisation. We have more information at our fingertips than any generation in history, and we use it primarily to confirm that everything is falling apart and that the other side is to blame. We have medical advances that would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents, and we spend our evenings doomscrolling through lists of new ways those advances might be weaponised or monetised into irrelevance. Progress, it turns out, is less a straight line and more a drunken stagger in which we occasionally trip over our own innovations and land face-first in a fresh puddle of absurdity.

And still the advice stands: enjoy the now. Not because the now is particularly enjoyable, but because the alternative is to spend your remaining functional years in a state of permanent low-level panic, which is both exhausting and, frankly, a bit passé. The dystopia is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed and packaged with free next-day delivery. The uncertain future is not some distant horizon—it’s the next software update, the next election cycle, the next heatwave that makes the previous heatwave look like a mild inconvenience. To 'enjoy the now' is therefore less a lifestyle tip and more a form of grim stoicism. It is the decision to notice the small, temporary consolations while they still exist: the taste of coffee that hasn’t yet been synthesised from algae, the absurdity of a viral video that briefly unites strangers in shared ridicule, the brief illusion of control that comes from deleting an app only to reinstall it three days later.

There is something almost touching in the way we cling to the idea that this particular stretch of history might one day be missed. It suggests a residual optimism so deeply buried it borders on the pathological. Yes, the systems are fraying. Yes, the discourse has the intellectual coherence of a bar fight. Yes, the planet is running a temperature and the adults in the room appear to have left for a long lunch sometime around 2016 and never returned. And yet the human capacity for retrospective romanticisation remains undimmed. One day, someone will look back on the great pandemic years, the culture wars, the slow-motion technological upheaval, and decide that it all had a certain rough-hewn integrity. They will miss the freedom of still being able to log off, even if most of us never did. They will miss the relative simplicity of a world in which the machines still needed us more than we needed them.

So by all means, enjoy the now. Pour yourself a drink. Watch something frivolous. Argue with a stranger on the internet if that’s what passes for connection these days. Take a walk while the air is still, for the most part, breathable. Do it with the full knowledge that this moment—this messy, anxious, over-connected, underwhelming moment—is already being prepped for the nostalgia treatment. Future you, or more likely some distant descendant with fewer illusions and better implants, will look back and shake their head fondly. “They had no idea how good they had it,” they’ll say, conveniently forgetting that we had every idea and simply chose to doomscroll through it instead. The present is a joke told in real time. The punchline is that we’ll miss it.