Friday, December 12, 2025
‘Make Europe Great Again’ is a slogan that is adopted by some in Europe on the right based on the ‘Make America Great Again’ from the Trump movement. The key word here is ‘Again’. The word ‘Again’ implies that ‘it used to be better, let’s get back to that better past’. It is a strong psychological and therefore electoral ‘pull’ that attracts a lot of support. It often triggers a longing to a time that was supposedly better than the current state of affairs. It works for many people as long as you avoid to define what ‘again’ actually means. The word ‘again’ raises the strong emotion of nostalgia. Nostalgia is an understandable emotion and at the same time a psychological ruse. We all would like to go back to a ‘simpler world’ in which everything was clearer and in which ‘everyone went to Church’. However the reality is usual that we are plagued by very selective memory. It is a psychological given that we often the past as much better than it was. Nostalgia therefore is in many ways a psychological ‘trick’ that we play on ourselves. The problem is that far too many people are convinced that this psychological mechanism is the same as the reality. It is obviously easy to manipulate that emotion for political gain. Of course there are things in the past that were better. The question is (again) ‘which past?’. If I look to my personal past, there is no reason whatsoever that I want to go back to the 1980’s (mass unemployment, a lot of criminality, vandalism everywhere). So people have an urge to go back to a ‘nice past’ but do not realize how that past actually was. Taking these emotions as a political direction is therefore a road to failure. Nostalgia was the reason that many people in the UK voted for Brexit. So far it has costed the UK 15 billion euro in lost trade every year. Moreover it failed to contribute to any solution for any problem the UK faces. Even more problematic is a nostalgia to a past in which ‘men were the boss in their family’. Basically nostalgia to a time in which women had less rights and in which racism and colonialism was deemed acceptable. This goes however against equal human dignity and is therefore outside the framework of Christian politics. Moreover this is not sustainable in a free and democratic society. It is clear that this kind of nostalgia is both wrong and mistaken. While nostalgia in and of itself is not bad and an understandable emotion; it becomes problematic if it is used as a political manifesto or manipulated for political means. Instead it is necessary to accept the present and apply a relational understanding of human dignity as the compass to chart a way to the future. This is also the message of Christmas; that God became human in order to bring us to God. By doing so, Christ also confirmed our human dignity as He showed Gods love for us. This is how we will move forward, not backward, to the new year. This newsletter informs you of some of the activities that will be undertaken in the new year and some new publications that came out. We wish you all a merry Christmas and a blessed new year!