Anne Applebaum’s speech at Vienna’s Judenplatz, 14 May 2026 — YouTube video available online
Anne Applebaum — Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, journalist, and author known for her work on authoritarianism, the Soviet Union, and the future of democracy in Europe. Born in the United States and long based in Poland, Applebaum has become one of the leading voices warning about the return of nationalism, propaganda, and imperial politics in the 21st century. (Image created with AI.)
Standing beside Vienna’s Holocaust memorial on 14 May 2026, historian and journalist Anne Applebaum delivered a speech that felt less like an academic lecture and more like a warning to Europe.
Her message was simple but urgent: the peaceful and democratic Europe built after 1945 can no longer be taken for granted.
Applebaum reminded the audience that the European Union and the wider postwar order were created deliberately after the destruction of the Second World War. Europe’s institutions were designed not only to create prosperity, but to prevent the return of dictatorship, nationalism, and imperial conquest.
But many of the political ideas Europeans once believed had disappeared are returning. Applebaum spoke about contempt for democracy, ethnic nationalism, propaganda, and the search for scapegoats — ideas that Europe itself once produced.
The war in Ukraine stood at the center of the speech. Applebaum argued that Russia’s invasion is not merely a border conflict, but an attack on the postwar European idea that nations have the right to exist independently and that borders cannot simply be changed by force.
Perhaps most striking was her warning that Europe can no longer assume the United States will always defend the democratic order it helped build after 1945. Parts of the contemporary American political movement, she argued, increasingly see Europe less as a partner and more as a battleground in a wider ideological struggle.
Yet the speech was not entirely pessimistic. Applebaum insisted that Europe still possesses enormous strengths: stable institutions, rule of law, scientific knowledge, culture, and democratic traditions. The real question is whether Europeans themselves still believe in those strengths.
One line captured the evening perfectly. European civilization, she said, is not just “a backdrop for Instagram influencers.” Europe’s true inheritance also includes free speech, judicial independence, religious tolerance, and accountable government.
That may be the real challenge facing Europe in 2026: deciding whether its future will be shaped by fear and fragmentation, or by the democratic ideals it once rebuilt from the ruins of war.