How the US Kept Europe Down

On emerging from a decades-long political delusion

Underground (1995)

In the controversial film Underground (1995) by the even more controversial Bosnian Serb director Emir Kusturica, a group of WWII Yugoslav partisans are kept in an underground shelter for several decades, conned into believing that the war is still being fought above their heads. They are put there by opportunists, war and peace profiteers who ensure that the partisans underground are spoon-fed a steady diet of heroic wartime propaganda. The cellar dwellers thus live in a state of administered ignorance, neutered into submission. Meanwhile, a semblance of normal life goes on underground: weddings are celebrated and babies are born. Since Underground is a Kusturica film, many Goran Bregović songs are sung. What becomes clear about the cellar dwellers is that they’re a little bit slow, a little bit stunted–especially those who were born in the cellar, those who’ve never known a world outside of it. This becomes even more apparent when they finally surface in the 1990s, liberated at last only to find the break-up of Yugoslavia is well underway. Since they have been brainwashed into believing that WWII never ended, they think that they are witnessing the same war rather than an entirely new one. (All of this has made Kusturica immensely controversial in the former Yugoslavia, to put it mildly, but that is not the topic of this essay). By design, the cellar has disoriented them, and they are not prepared for the new shattered world. As the New York Times review of Underground read, “the film’s real heart is its devastating idea of a morning after”; it is about coming to one’s senses after “being in the grip of a political delusion lasting several decades”. The world these partisans were made to believe was stable and permanent is falling apart. Kusturica’s symbolism is subtle, making it more effective: the cellar represents a system that exploits people by keeping them in the dark.

I have thought a lot about the cellar in Underground over the past year, watching European leaders, specifically those belonging to the trans-Atlantic liberal elite, flailing, disoriented, in the new world. Trump and emergent multipolarity represent the end of the world as they knew it. As an American, I can’t help but feel implicated in their condition. Since the end of World War II, the United States has kept its European allies in a “Kusturician” cellar of sorts, feeding them propaganda, shaping their political cultures, and neutralizing their military capacity to act autonomously from Washington. Now their world is collapsing and they don’t know what to do, or even who they are. Trump’s crudeness has had an unexpected clarifying effect: the true nature of the trans-Atlantic relationship has been exposed. What the Biden administration cloaked in the pretty rhetoric of “partnership” and “allyship”, Trump’s bellicosity and contempt for alliances has revealed for what it really is.