The year that could have been

Every December in recent years, I have thought back to the time when Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the opposition Labour Party in my new country, the United Kingdom, said in his New Year’s speech: “This year will be harder than the last.” Corbyn’s words were familiar to me because he was quoting Enver Hoxha, the notorious communist leader of my country, Albania. Hoxha continued: “On the other hand, it will be easier than the next.” Corbyn’s comment provoked a heated reaction: some saw it as evidence that Labour had become a Marxist sect, while others condemned him for being insensitive to the trauma left by Albania’s communist past.

Under the rule of “Uncle Enver,” Albania, where I spent most of my childhood, was one of the most isolated places in the world, cut off from both the “revisionist” East and the “imperialist” West. It existed in its own time capsule, a harsh reality shaped by loyalty, propaganda, surveillance, and repression against those who did not support it. Visions of the future were shaped by past myths of heroic self-sacrifice and self-sufficiency, woven into conspiracy theories of imminent foreign aggression.

Each new year brought new paranoia, new shortages, new disciplinary measures, new calls for patience. The only constant investment by the state was the construction of bunkers. How does this even remotely compare to what was happening in the West?

But despite the dark humor, which Albanians and many others did not like at the time, Corbyn’s speech (and the quote he used) proved surprisingly insightful. It captured the eerie darkness and fears with which most of the left has greeted each new year since 2016. Brexit seemed like the ultimate disaster. “Take back control.” This triumphant slogan for Britain’s exit from the European Union sent shivers down the spines of cosmopolitan elites across the West.

Many rushed to stock up in case of a “no-deal” Brexit, and I remember being asked if the half-empty supermarket shelves reminded me of Hoxha’s Albania (no, they didn’t). But today, looking back at Donald Trump’s first election as US president, the global pandemic, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and Trump’s return to the White House, even the most ardent Brexit opponents can admit that their panic was a little exaggerated.

Or is it not? The coming year will mark the tenth anniversary of Brexit. It is undoubtedly an important symbolic turning point in the current era of globalization. That referendum marked a return to a world in which states are increasingly isolated from each other, institutions hostage to arbitrary individual power, and the rule of law is clearly in irreversible decline.

There is little chance that 2026 will be any different. The Brexiteers’ call to “take back control” (which once had at least the semblance of intellectual honesty, calling for a legitimate debate on sovereignty) has degenerated into a full-blown conspiracy theory. Control, we are now told, is impossible because of the constant threat from foreigners and those deemed incapable of “integration.”

The future seems to promise us nothing but a mixture of fear and paranoia. What else can we expect in a world where only military-related markets are growing reliably, and where technological innovation seems increasingly focused on perfecting the art of mutual destruction? Where, in such conditions, can we find hope?

THE SECOND TIME

In his essay “The Idea of ​​Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant attempted to find a way to interpret history as more than just a sad spectacle of violence, injustice, and irrationality, and to identify patterns that encourage the formation of a moral compass. Kant believed that this was difficult because people do not always pursue what is in their rational interest. They have free will, which allows them to understand what is right, but also makes them fallible.

Paradoxically, Kant saw war (or rather, the irrationality of war) as the key to hope. He believed that a time would come when war would not only be utterly destructive and incomprehensible, but also economically unsustainable—a cause of uncontrolled debt and ruin. He believed that the escalation of conflicts between national interests and the expansion of global trade would eventually make “the impact of any turmoil in one state in our part of the world so noticeable on all the others” that a new political configuration would have to emerge. He foresaw the emergence of a cosmopolitan federation in the future, of which “the world of the past has no example.”

In time, such an example, though imperfect, did emerge. Kant predicted that “after numerous catastrophes, upheavals, and even the complete exhaustion of their powers,” nature would “push men into what reason could already tell them without all this dark experience.” His prediction seemed to come true when, in the terrible prison conditions on the island of Ventotene, to which Mussolini had exiled his democratic opponents, Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi wrote a manifesto in which they advocated the creation of a federal Europe, in which states would be bound not by conquest but by cooperation.

Later, the “Ventotene Manifesto” inspired the founders of the European Coal and Steel Community and then the European Union. It was a historically unprecedented attempt to transform common economic interests into a moral and political project. In the mid-2000s, this project was still very much alive. Participants in university seminars debated fiercely about the future of Europe as a supranational institution and discussed how to transform the functional integration of the current union into something more ambitious: a political body based on “rights” rather than “powers”. It was a time when Europeans could still dream of a constituent assembly representing “we, the people of Europe”. It was a moment of hope.

GIVE ME SHELTER

Paradoxically, today Albania is the only place where this dream still lives. The country seems to have found itself once again in a time capsule - an alternate reality that reminds me of the novel "Time Shelter" by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, in which people choose the historical era in which they want to live. For Albanians, the ideal era is the European Union of the mid-to-late 1990s, roughly from the signing of the Maastricht Treaty to the draft constitution. In Albania, elections are won on promises of EU membership, and laws are quickly adopted to align with the acquis communautaire (Acquis communautaire).

But all this comes at a price. The temporary detention centers built by Italy on the Albanian coast, in the towns of Shenjin and Gjakarta, to house deported asylum seekers, are a reminder of the time and order in which the rest of Europe (and much of the world) now lives. There we find the borderland between a cosmopolitan ideal and a future dystopia.

In a speech to the Italian parliament in March 2025, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni best articulated this new order. Not surprisingly, she took aim at the “Vento Tenno Manifesto,” whose authors wrote: “The problem that must first be solved - because without it all other progress will be superficial - is the definitive abolition of the division of Europe into sovereign nation-states.”

That is why Spinelli and Rossi advocated (among many other sensible proposals) the separation of powers, the importance of democratizing the economy, the role of cultural inclusiveness, and the political necessity of mobilizing a broad coalition of progressive parties. To all this, Meloni replied: “I don’t know if this is your Europe, but it certainly isn’t mine,” expressing the hope that those who defended it had not even read the document.

Outside Italy, almost no one has noticed this. Perhaps because Europe today is much closer to the ideas of G. Meloni’s “Brothers of Italy” party than to those of the first European federalists. The contribution of the European elite to imagining the future now consists mainly of applause for G. Meloni’s “migration management” model and generous flattery to Trump in the hope of obtaining meager trade concessions. And the recent call by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for Europe to “re-arm” reminded me, I admit, of the bunker-building campaign in Albania.

As I reflect on the year ahead, I return to Kant and his reminder that in human affairs no one can truly predict the future. “Hypothetical history,” he wrote, differs from natural history in that the course of human events depends on freedom, not necessity. The only prophecy that can be fulfilled is the one that the prophet helps to fulfill.

So, instead of speculating about what might happen, I will talk about hope. What Vaclav Havel called hope without optimism: a moral imperative that persists even when the outlook is bleak. The hope that the ideas that once inspired Europe’s institutions will return to its streets to defend the rights of migrants and oppose the war machine. Progress is never guaranteed, but it is always possible – provided we act as if it were. And in this strange, hypothetical historical way, we could do worse without reviving the spirit of resistance that gave us the cosmopolitan socialism of the “Vento Tenno Manifesto.”

The author is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science; Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University; and a Permanent Fellow of the Berlin College of Sciences.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. (translation: NR)