Europe was not born in Yalta. It was not founded to redraw spheres of influence, secure Western hegemony, or enshrine balance-of-power realism under U.S. nuclear protection. Europe was born in Auschwitz.
Its foundational telos was not geopolitical strategy—but moral rupture. The unbearable truth of the Shoah shattered the very possibility of political legitimacy rooted in will to power. What emerged in its wake was a radically new wager: that self-limiting, supranational institutions could redeem the political, not by denying tragedy, but by embedding its memory into the architecture of order. Europe institutionalised contrition—transforming catastrophe into covenant.
This is what made the European Union a unique moral experiment in world history: the attempt to organise power against itself, to bind national sovereignty through law, to restrain violence through recognition, to replace identity politics with dignity politics. From the European Convention on Human Rights to the Charter of Fundamental Rights, from economic integration to shared jurisprudence—the Union was not merely a marketplace. It was the construction of a moral order.
And that is precisely what is being forgotten in Europe’s hesitant, fragmented, and morally evasive response to Gaza.
This is not about comparing Auschwitz to Gaza. That would be historically obscene and politically irresponsible. The Shoah was a singular, industrialised attempt to annihilate a people. But the lessons of Auschwitz—the impermissibility of collective punishment, the sanctity of human dignity, the imperative to protect civilians as bearers of universal rights—are universal, or they are nothing.
Europe cannot invoke the Holocaust to justify its moral identity while remaining silent before structures of unaccountable power that reduce human beings to collateral abstractions. The logic of “security” used to justify indiscriminate bombardment, the bureaucratic deference to “complexity” as an excuse for paralysis, and the persistent refusal to name disproportionate violence—all mark a profound regression in moral clarity.
This failure is not marginal. It signals the corrosion of the very moral architecture that Europe once dared to build. If Europe becomes once again a derivative power—defined by its alignment with hegemonic interests rather than its own transcendent commitments—it will have betrayed its founding truth.
Europe was not meant to be neutral in the face of injustice. It was meant to be a testimony that politics could be otherwise.
To remember Auschwitz is to remember what politics must never again become.
To respond to Gaza with silence, equivocation, or selective empathy is not just a political failure. It is a moral one.
And it may well be the moment we discover whether the European project still believes in the promise it was born from—or whether, after all, it too has chosen Yalta.
#leadership
Details on Yalta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference
Link to the interesting conversations that ensued: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ottivogt_leadership-activity-7357775725904437249-Kh5m?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABm1WMBiwxFaUc1X66gje88odJOEyNAskc
Photo: Washington Post