In 1945, Karl Popper published “The Open Society and its enemies” in the UK, and since then, several individuals have emerged over the decades who claimed to be champions of the Open Society, but whose actions proved the reverse to be true. Popper wrote that the Open Society was under attack by authoritarians who believed in the inevitability of their rise. Clearly he had been influenced by the years when Germany was ruled by Adolf Hitler, a byword in tyranny. What Popper failed to perceive was the threat that Open Society faced from within. In 2022, the excuse trotted out by countries in Europe for assisting Ukraine in its war on Russia was that they were helping Zelenskyy to defeat authoritarianism in the form of the Russian Federation. That Russia would invade countries in the European Union after they had defeated and conquered Ukraine. While a subkinetic war was being waged by them against Russia from the 1990s onwards, in 2022 the “Open Society” champions in Europe saw in the Ukraine-Russia war, which began in 2022, as an opportunity to convert the conflict to a kinetic mode by arming and funding Ukraine. At the same time, along with the US at the time, they blocked news outlets from Russia and imposed severe curbs on Russian visitors to the EU, even freezing Russian assets kept with them. We do not know if the Von der Leyen family had lost its lands to the Russian side during the 1941-45 war between the USSR and Germany. What is clear is that Ursula von der Leyen has a visceral dislike of Russia while at the same time seeing no contradiction in being very cosy with China, hardly an exemplar of democracy or of the Open Society. Of course, much of Europe did make itself open, most notably Germany under Merkel, to a flood of unassimilable immigrants in such a brew. Vice-President of the US J.D. Vance was direct in his speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference.
Vance pointed out the hypocrisy in the position of several of the participants of the Munich Security Conference, to their unease. His speech was opposed to the position of the organiser of the conference, yet its honesty should have been welcomed by any believer in the Open Society envisioned by Karl Popper. Instead, it was met with a cold silence. Clearly, a believer in their version considered any view contrary to theirs as being antithetical to the Open Society. In other words, what they saw in the term was in effect a Closed Shop. President Trump is just a few weeks into his term, yet already the media is abuzz with comments about his impending fall from grace where the US voter is concerned. Sadly for them, his voting base is on a planet far distant from theirs. Every day, the shock waves from the views and policies that he has openly espoused for years are growing in size in what passes for the Open Society bubble. They have been accustomed to believing in a make-believe world in which Europe is still the hub to which all other spokes are fixed. In reality, that era passed by the close of the First World War in the 1920s. An apt comparison would be a noble family coming upon hard days, that nevertheless dresses in its finery and preens around as though such a change never happened. It is well past time for Europe and for those in the US who subliminally believe the US to be a fragment of Europe that has drifted to the other side of the Atlantic. J.D. Vance introduced a bucket of cold realism at Munich, and it is time that those who were listening understood that, and ceased to believe and act as though they were still in a past long gone.
MDN