Marek A. Cichocki: We have become prisoners of a corrupt political culture

Across Europe, political power appears to have lost sight of what should be its central purpose: good government. Marek A. Cichocki points to Germany, where the radical AfD is pursuing power, Britain’s imploding political system, France’s growing potential for political revolution, and Poland’s internal deadlock and increasingly brutal destruction of state structures.

In his view, these developments form a broader spectacle of deepening crisis. States seem to have lost the ability to maintain, develop and protect the whole state and political community. Good government ends, he argues, when power and the effort to retain it become ends in themselves.

Cichocki warns especially against politicians who openly say they will not surrender power because their opponents represent “evil” that must be destroyed at any cost. He describes that path as a route to tyranny, recalling warnings made by political philosophers in ancient Greece. Governments focused solely on staying in office and eliminating opponents, he says, have become a major force behind the destruction of European states and political communities.

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Technology, money and law have made the techniques of retaining power more sophisticated than ever, but Cichocki says this does not remove citizens’ responsibility. One of the most painful features of the current crisis, he writes, is the widespread abdication of responsibility for the state. People choose to remain passive spectators and obedient supporters rather than risk defending the common good.

“We have become prisoners of a corrupt political culture that has turned us into petitioners before power instead of raising us as guardians and defenders of the whole,” Cichocki writes. He is a co-host of the podcast “Germany in Ruins?”

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We have become prisoners of a corrupt political culture that has turned us into petitioners before power instead of raising us as guardians and defenders of the whole.