…but I’m scared of direction in which the world is moving. The nationalism, fights between and within nations, polarization of the society - all are terrifying me. We can see far right parties gaining momentum and followers, while traditional right wingers and centrists are starting to take over some of the rhetoric that the far right has been pushing. This moves the Overton Window into the right, because people are frustrated by wide coalitions that are winning elections but are unable to get into agreement and are wasting time. Additionally we can see that changing governments are fighting against policies and projects started by their predecessor. We are in a constant loop, slowly moving two steps forward and one backward.
In addition to the issues mentioned above, we can see that people in power are moving towards more authoritarian policies that are often labeled as a protection of children, protection against crime. One of the examples of such policy is broadly known as a “Chat Control” - a proposed system where ordinary people are losing their privacy. The exact proposal is still changing and being negotiated, but the direction itself should be worrying. We are discussing systems which could make private communication subject to automated scanning and surveillance, while at the same time creating infrastructure that could later be reused for completely different purposes.
And you might think “I’m not doing anything illegal, why should I be worried?”. Now imagine that this bill is introduced and some lunatics take the lead in your country. They can change policies, so that drinking coffee becomes illegal. That’s silly, right? How would they enforce that? With Chat Control, they can scan a message in which you ask your partner to buy coffee, detect a photo of your new espresso machine, or flag a discussion in a group chat. Obviously nobody is proposing to ban coffee, but that is not really the point. Once the infrastructure for scanning private communication exists, changing what is considered illegal or suspicious is significantly easier than introducing such infrastructure from scratch.
This is why I don’t really like the argument that we should trust the current government because their intentions are good. Laws and institutions survive governments. A power given to politicians that you trust today can later be inherited by people that you absolutely do not trust. We should not build systems based only on the assumption that reasonable people will always be in charge. We should also think about how those systems could be abused by the worst government that could realistically come after them.
At the same time, I still strongly believe in the European project. I love the fact that I can leave Poland, drive through Czechia, Austria or Germany and barely notice the borders. I love that we can study, work, live and do business across most of Europe without treating every neighboring country as something foreign or hostile. The EU is slow, bureaucratic and very often frustrating, but I would still rather have European countries arguing for months around a table than solving their disagreements in ways that were normal on this continent not that long ago.
This is also why the growing nationalism worries me so much. I don’t think being Polish and being European are mutually exclusive. I can care about Poland, its culture and its interests while also wanting Germany, Czechia, Ukraine, France or Italy to be successful. Their success does not automatically mean our failure. Yet more and more political messaging seems to be built around finding another group responsible for our problems. Sometimes it is Brussels, sometimes immigrants, Ukrainians, Germans, liberals, conservatives or some other convenient enemy. It is much easier to mobilize people by giving them somebody to fear than by explaining that most problems are complicated and require years of boring work.
Fear also makes authoritarian policies easier to introduce. If people are scared enough of crime, terrorism, migration or some other threat, they become much more willing to accept surveillance and restrictions which they would reject under normal circumstances. Some extraordinary measures can of course be justified, but extraordinary measures have a tendency to stay with us after the extraordinary situation is over. This is why I think every expansion of state power should be considered not only in the context of the problem it is supposed to solve today, but also in the context of how it might be used ten or twenty years later.
The same short-term thinking is visible in other areas as well. Governments change and suddenly infrastructure projects, energy policies, education reforms or long-term investments become associated with the previous political camp and therefore need to be cancelled, redesigned or delayed. We lose years and enormous amounts of money because politicians would rather start their own project than finish something started by somebody else. Some things simply cannot be planned around a four-year election cycle. Energy, railways, defence, education and technological independence all require consistency lasting much longer than a single government.
I don’t expect Europe to become politically unified or for Europeans to suddenly agree about everything. Quite the opposite, disagreement is normal and probably healthy. Europe consists of countries with different histories, cultures, languages and priorities, and trying to remove those differences would make little sense. What I would like us to agree on are some basic rules: democratic institutions matter, privacy matters, courts should remain independent, political opponents should not be treated as enemies, and individual rights should not disappear just because they become inconvenient to the government.
When we give the state a new power, I think there is a very simple question worth asking: would I still support this power if it was controlled by the political movement I trust the least? If the answer is no, then perhaps we should reconsider whether that power should exist in the first place.
I love being European, and I want Europe to become stronger. But stronger should not mean more authoritarian, more willing to surveil its citizens or more divided internally. I want a Europe that can defend itself, compete economically and solve long-term problems without sacrificing the freedoms that make it worth defending in the first place. The European project is deeply flawed, slow and frustrating, but it is still one of the best things that happened to this continent. I would rather work on fixing it than watch us slowly dismantle it out of fear, frustration and short-term political gain.