The far right can’t take away our hopes and memories. Culture is our weapon

Henry Kissinger is reputed to have asked China’s prime minister Zhou Enlai whether the French Revolution had been a success. “Too early to tell,” was the reply. If the question were asked again today, the answer would be: “Probably not.” Because all three of the values underpinning the revolution – liberty, fraternity and equality – are now disappearing into thin air in Europe, the birthplace of democracy.

And the political changes seem irreversible: In seven European democracies, far-right parties have entered government, and in several more states, including France, they are pushing at the gates of power. Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia and, of course, Russia, have quasi-autocratic governments. Last Sunday the Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ), a party that even the conservative media describe as “radical rightwing”, won a general election for the first time. They campaigned on the slogan “Fortress Austria”, in effect advocating an ethnically and culturally cleansed country. The term is reminiscent of “Fortress Europe” – a phrase favoured by Goebbels.

The FPÖ manifesto calls for “two genders” to be enshrined in the constitution, “remigration” to be radically implemented and for the creation of a two-tier society in which only “real” Austrians are entitled to social benefits. In the words of the FPÖ, it wants to “gain full power over government, space and people”. In the area of cultural policy, it wants to follow the example of neighbouring Hungary and Slovakia and cut public subsidies for “woke events”, such as the Eurovision song contest and the Vienna festival, which I am the director of. In the eyes of the FPÖ, “woke” is presumably anything that is not brass band music, operetta or Germanic-pop schlager music.

In doing so, it is politicising a trend that has been apparent throughout Europe for many years: cutting cultural budgets on the grounds that they are not economically viable. I remember in 2019, when I was still artistic director of the NTGent in Belgium, we demonstrated against the Flemish region’s budget cuts. The process of allocating subsidies was akin to distributing scarce food after a natural disaster: institutions and independent companies were thrown together into a pool that had far too little money at its disposal.

In neoliberal fashion, the actual problem – namely, insufficient subsidies for the arts – was translated into a competitive conflict. Now a similar process is taking place in the Netherlands, and is also expected in Germany. During the Flemish budget cuts, I recall an independent study being commissioned to examine the return on public investment in all sectors. Culture came out on top.

But budget cuts are no longer about money, they are nothing less than a tool of creeping censorship. They are about dismantling diverse and inclusive societies. In much of eastern Europe, the cultural clear-out is almost complete. In Slovakia, the heads of national cultural institutions are being replaced one by one by rightwing bureaucrats.

After two decades of cuts, the German-language culture channel 3Sat, a collaboration between public broadcasters in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, is on the verge of closure. As far as Belgium, the Netherlands and France are concerned, by the end of the decade the work will be done here too – the charge led by the NVA (New Flemish Alliance) in Belgium, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen’s Nationally Rally in France.

The Francis Fukuyama illusion, that liberal society would inevitably triumph after the end of the cold war, has now also been invalidated in founding countries of the EU. Equality and fraternity – openness to the world, solidarity under the welfare state and religious, political and sexual self-determination – are, as is now evident, no longer universally shared values, but “woke propaganda” as far as rightwing politicians and voters are concerned.

Perhaps Wilders summed it up best when he congratulated the FPÖ on Sunday: “We are victorious! Identity, sovereignty, freedom and no more illegal immigration/asylum is what tens of millions of Europeans long for!”

It couldn’t be clearer: we will get “identity” instead of pluralism, “sovereignty” of the nation state instead of the shared sovereignty of Europe, and “freedom” from language “bans” will replace policies designed to protect minorities from hate speech.

When the charismatic Jorg Haider led the FPÖ in the 1990s, he avoided Nazi rhetoric, and the party at least imitated liberal values. Likewise, in France, Marine Le Pen set about detoxifying her father’s party of its extremist image.

But that is now a thing of the past in Austria. The victorious FPÖ won the hearts of Austrians with its leader’s call to become Volkskanzler – “the people’s chancellor” – as Hitler was called, and with a programme that seeks to make Austria more “homogeneous”; a nation where migrants, asylum seekers and “uninvited foreigners” are unwelcome.

Yes, the masks have slipped: on the Friday before their election victory, leading figures in the FPÖ attended the funeral of a party veteran, at which, according to a video published by Austria’s Der Standard newspaper, a song that was glorified by the SS and which praises the “holy German reich” was sung.

And when I and the Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek signed a joint appeal for resistance to the FPÖ shortly before the elections, commentators on social media joked that we had secured a “place on the list”. To me this was code for a place on the death lists of identitarian thugs who flocked around the FPÖ at their election rallies.

In Austria, German-speaking “folk culture” was consigned to history in 1945, but is crawling like a zombie out of the grave. In Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia, the destruction of cultural diversity is almost complete. Russia, meanwhile, is financing its rightwing sister parties, watching with amusement as Europe falls apart. What should we do?

In Zhou Enlai’s famously sarcastic answer lies hope: things are not looking good, butrepublican ideals are not quite dead yet. It is still too early to join in the swan song of democracy sung by rightwing parties. The history of civil liberties is a history of resistance: against kings and emperors, feudalism, Stalinism, fascism. Since the days of ancient Athens, democracy has been under constant attack, and the few decades in which it has existed are many times shorter than all the centuries in which it was nothing more than a dream.

When Xerxes the Persian king marched against Greece to end the freedom of the city states, he sent a messenger who demanded that the Greeks hand over their swords and shields. The Greeks proudly replied: “Come and take them.”

Of course we don’t have swords and shields. To the messengers of the far right, I say: our weapons are our theatres, our museums, our street festivals and universities, our cultural and pop festivals. Our weapons are our memories and our hopes: our diverse and inclusive society itself. Come and take them!

• Milo Rau is a Swiss theatre director, playwright and essayist. He is the artistic director of the Vienna festival (Wiener Festwochen)

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