Strategic Europe is, first of all, a European Union that develops a realistic view of its own potential and limitations. Second, it is an EU that gets its act together domestically. And it is, third, an EU that tackles its global goals in a close alliance with the United States.

All three of these definitions seem to fly in the face of what is considered “strategic” in Brussels today. The Brussels consensus has, for too many decades now, pretended that Europe resembles the proverbial man on a bike going uphill who needs to pedal forward if he doesn’t want to fall. Upon which John Bruton once quipped: “That’s nonsense. All one ever has to do is firmly put one’s foot on the ground!” In that sense, in being realistic about what the Union can be and what it cannot be, in tackling its real instead of its imaginary challenges, and in returning to our real instead of our imaginary friends as well as foes, we can metaphorically put our foot on the ground and redefine strategic Europe.

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“I don’t know what solidarność means in Persian. But this is what it looks like….”

This is the facebook comment of a Polish friend. Across the globe these days, when looking at the massive protests in Iranian cities, memories come back of Berlin, Budapest, Prague 1989  – in other words, of the peaceful revolution against European communism that ended the Cold War, heralded the collapse of the Soviet Union and meant the demise of state socialism as well as a triumph for market democracy.  Manifestations of mounting anger about a regime suppressing freedom, the global excitement, the regime’s reactions ranging from helplessness to intransigence to violence, its allegations of “foreign interference”, but above all, the feeling that we are seeing one of those rare but momentous points in time when history is made by the people in the street (quite literally): Whoever has lived through those dramatic months at the end of the eighties in Europe, had a clear sense of déjà vu this week about Iran.

So is this ’89? The short answer is no, because a collapse of the mullah regime is not imminent, according to most observers. The long answer is, however, that depending on further developments, this may very well be something like Prague in 1968. And I am less referring to the violence applied by Soviet troops then, although massive violence now seems to follow in Iran. The much more important parallel is that most of the people then, and certainly all of their leaders, did not want to abolish socialism. They wanted “socialism with a human face”, just like the demonstrators in Iranian cities constantly repeat they are not marching for “regime change”, only for their votes to be respected, for reform and more personal freedom. And come to think of it, even Poland’s striking shipyard workers in August 1980 did not dream about a market economy. But they paved the way for its arrival 9 years later, just like it took the Czechs and Slovaks 21 years to make Venceslas Square again reverberate with their protest – and this time, it was for the end of communism, period.  But all that means that in a wider sense, and with all due respect for cultural and historical differences – yes, we may witness some sort of ’89 moment, if not now, then in 1 or 2 or 3 years, not in 10 or 20. (Maybe YouTube and twitter have helped accelerate history, too). After all, it took a whole year from the first massive protests against the Shah in 1978, to the takeover of Ayatollah Khomeini in early 1979.

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