WE ARE EUROPE - Keeping Europe European: The Threat From Within

 

What happens when immediate concerns become more important than the values we still believe in?

R.M. Westerink; August 2026 

 

“Yes, But Not in This Case”

External threats are comparatively easy to recognize. Internal threats are harder because they can arise while we still sincerely believe in the European Values we want to protect. We support expression until the expression feels intolerable; equality until the person seems dangerous; religious freedom until a practice feels threatening; solidarity until scarcity makes helping others feel unaffordable; privacy until crime makes surveillance feel urgent; democratic outcomes until the other side wins.

Values have not necessarily disappeared.

The exception has appeared: “Yes, I believe in our Values - but not in this case.”

Immediate Concern

Immediate concerns are often real.
Migration can pressure housing and services.
Terrorism and crime exist.
Economic insecurity damages lives.
Cultural change can create tension.
Political movements can threaten democracy.
War can require measures unacceptable in normal circumstances.
The danger is therefore not taking concerns seriously. It begins when urgency changes the rules.

Sometimes a temporary restriction is justified; rights themselves permit carefully bounded limitations. The crucial question is what happens next.

From Exception to Erosion

CONCERN 🠞 URGENCY 🠞 EXCEPTION 🠞 NORMALISATION 🠞 EROSION

If an exception is specific, lawful, necessary, proportionate, temporary and reviewable, the protective system may be working as intended. The danger comes when the exception becomes convenient: it expands to new groups, temporary powers remain, scrutiny becomes 'obstruction', and unequal treatment becomes familiar. We may still profess the original value while practicing it less often.

Where It Can Happen

Level	Immediate concern	Tempting exception
Personal	“These people threaten my way of life.”	Their equal treatment matters less.
Community	Rapid cultural or demographic change	Constrain an unpopular minority.
National	Crime or terrorism	Weaken privacy, due process or equal protection.
Political	“The other side will destroy the country.”	Democratic restraints become obstacles.
Economic	Jobs, housing, cost-of-living pressure	Solidarity stops at the group boundary.
EU	Migration, security, geopolitical pressure	Rules become optional when inconvenient.
European society	Manipulation and disinformation	Restrict openness so broadly that openness itself weakens.

The outside world can create or intensify concerns.
The internal question is what we ourselves do to our values in response. This is difficult because values can genuinely collide: freedom with security, tolerance with intolerance, solidarity with scarcity, privacy with investigation, majority rule with minority rights, peace with deterrence. Erosion rarely announces itself as anti-values. It often arrives as one urgent interest pushing another aside.

Two Other Ways We Can Lose It

Rejection

Some actors genuinely reject parts of the liberal-democratic settlement: unconstrained majority rule, stronger executive power, unequal treatment, restricted pluralism or a system in which opponents do not enjoy the same protections. Here the value itself is challenged.

Neglect

A protective system can also hollow out because it is poorly maintained. Institutions become ineffective or remote, corruption grows, services fail, inequality or regional decline weakens solidarity, citizens disengage and trust falls.

Rejection attacks the model.
Neglect hollows it out. Immediate concern persuades people who still support it to suspend it case by case.

Guardrails - What We Built to Protect Us From Ourselves

When immediate concern says...	The guardrail asks...
We must act now	Is there a legal basis?
These people are dangerous	Are they still equal before the law?
Security requires it	Is the restriction necessary and proportionate?
The majority wants it	Are individual and minority rights still protected?
This is an emergency	Is it temporary and reviewable?
Government knows best	Can courts, parliament, media and citizens challenge it?
Normal rules are inconvenient	Why should the rules not apply here?

National constitutions, parliaments and courts provide the first protection. EU law and the Charter add guardrails where EU law applies; the European Convention on Human Rights and its Court provide a wider European framework. The machinery is complex, but its purpose is simple.

Guardrails slow the moment when “we must do something” becomes “therefore we may do anything.”

Responsible Care - And It Comes Back to Us

Institutions cannot carry the whole burden. European Values survive because people keep using them - not only to judge governments, other countries or political opponents, but also to judge themselves.

Keep Judging - Along the Same Ten Values

Our compass	The question to keep asking
Human dignity	Am I still treating the person as a person of equal worth?
Live our own lives	Am I allowing others choices I would claim for myself?
Equal say	Am I respecting their democratic voice even when I dislike it?
Equal before law	Would I accept the same rule if it applied to my side?
Protection from arbitrary power	Am I accepting power I would fear in an opponent's hands?
Help when needed	Does concern make me stop seeing genuine vulnerability?
Free to be different	Am I protecting difference only when I approve of it?
Honesty / trust	Am I excusing deception because it helps my side?
Rules / dialogue / compromise	Am I still willing to resolve disagreement inside common rules?
Peaceful resolution	Am I resisting coercion and political violence as normal methods?

Judge others - but especially yourself - by the values you expect others to respect.

How We Behave

European Values become real in ordinary behavior before any court is involved. Equality matters when we dislike somebody. Pluralism matters when another person's choices offend us. Dialogue matters when we are convinced the other side is wrong. Honesty matters when deception would help our side. Peaceful resolution matters when anger makes coercion attractive.

Responsible care does not require agreement or passivity. Europeans can protest, campaign, demand stricter or more open policies, criticize religion, governments or the EU, support military action or oppose it. The test is whether we pursue what we believe important without casually removing from somebody else the protections we expect for ourselves.

How We Vote

Voting is where personal responsible care acquires political power. We naturally ask whether we want what a party promises. We should also ask what that party will do to the system that allows all of us to choose again next time.

A party may offer an attractive answer to migration, security, housing, inequality, climate, taxation or cultural change while proposing methods that weaken courts, discriminate between citizens, attack legitimate opposition, undermine trustworthy information or remove constraints on executive power. Responsible voting prescribes no party. It asks us to judge both the promised result and the means against the same ten values.

Keeping Europe European

Keeping Europe European does not mean keeping Europe unchanged. Europe itself is the product of enormous change. What deserves care is the protected space underneath our disagreements: the ability of people to live their own lives while allowing others to do the same.

Our laws and institutions provide guardrails, but citizens decide whether those guardrails remain worth having. Responsible care appears in how we treat people who differ from us, what exceptions we accept when frightened or angry, what behavior we tolerate from our own political side, and what we consider when we vote.

The hardest moment for European Values is not when following them costs us nothing. It is when an immediate concern gives us a compelling reason to say: 'Yes, I believe in that - but not in this case.' That is precisely when the protection begins doing the work for which it exists.

Keeping Europe European does not require us all to agree.
It requires us to keep judging what others do - and especially what we ourselves do - against the values that allow us to disagree while continuing to live freely together.

We inherited a Europe in which much that earlier generations struggled to achieve has become ordinary. We are free to change it. That too is one of the freedoms they left us.
Keeping Europe European means exercising that freedom with responsible care.

APPENDIX:

This is the observed*) EUROPEAN CITIZENS Values Package:

• We value human dignity - every person remains a person of worth.
• We value being free to live our own lives.
• We value having an equal say in how we are governed.
• We value being equal before the law.
• We value being protected against arbitrary power.
• We value helping each other when help is needed.
• We value being free to be different.
• We value honesty and sufficient trust to deal with one another.
• We value solving our differences through rules, dialogue and compromise.
• We require our differences and conflicts to be resolved peacefully.

https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/08/we-are-europe-our-european-values.html