Second, The Leopard exposes the failure of Italian Unification. Lampedusa shows it to have been basically a takeover of the south by the north. The Piedmontese envoy sent to persuade the Prince to become a senator in the new united legislature refers to the happy “annexation” before hastily correcting himself to “union” while the Prince himself predicts that it will “simply mean Torinese rather than Neapolitan dialect, that is all”. Unification was also maimed at the start by the mendacity of the liberal nationalists who simply binned contrary votes in the referendum on unification. In the film, the announcement of the cooked result becomes farcical as the off-key band keeps on breaking into Don Calogero’s platitudinous speech.

The enduring relevance of The Leopard to Italy is obvious. Nearly 175 years after unification, the country remains fundamentally divided between north and south, and more so than any other European country. The Mezzogiorno — as the south of the country is often called — still lags far behind the more developed north. A major contemporary political party, the Lega, formerly Lega Nord, has espoused secession in the past. No wonder that The Leopard is a set text in Italian schools.

It is with respect to Europe as a whole, though, that the book resonates most powerfully today. Before we can understand why, we need to come to a better understanding of the author’s beliefs and intentions. The cynical phrase about things changing so that they can stay the same was certainly Tancredi’s belief and the Prince’s hope, but it reflected neither Lampedusa’s own programme, nor what he was trying to convey about the nature of the Risorgimento. It has been widely misinterpreted.

The author despaired not only of the Sicilian aristocracy from which he descended but also of the island as a whole. We know from his excellent biographer David Gilmour that Lampedusa was no reactionary, but an Anglophile Whig. He dearly wished that his ancestors had grasped, for example, the possibilities opened up to them by the British-brokered Sicilian constitution of 1812. He wanted nothing more than for his countrymen to wake from their torpor and join what he called in the novel “the flow of universal history”. Visconti captured this inertia well with the two great scenes which bookend his film: the lengthy opening recitation of the rosary, so rudely interrupted by news of Garibaldi’s landing; and the interminable dance sequences, a kind of aristocratic rosary, at the end, punctuated by gunshots marking the execution of some now redundant revolutionaries.

It was, in fact, the Prince himself who delivered the most devastating indictment of Sicily’s failure to progress. Surely, the kind if naïve Piedmontese envoy asks, “the Sicilians must want to improve”? The Prince replies that “the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery”. Their “pride”, he continues, is merely “blindness”. What Sicilians want from politics, the Prince says, is “sleep and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them”. That is why, he explains, the island had always been a “colony” and, we intuit, always will be.

Unsurprisingly, The Leopard shocked Lampedusa’s aristocratic relatives when it came out, and outraged wider opinion in Sicily. The book was clearly an indictment of the island and its history. Leonardo Sciascia, then Sicily’s greatest living writer, bitterly attacked it on those grounds. If he later recanted, then only because he had come to agree with Lampedusa.

The author did not believe that things did not change. They plainly did, even in the novel. The Prince’s power, and that of his class, slips away in myriad ways. He himself acknowledges in a famous exchange with his confessor, Father Pirrone, that the nobility has merely secured a stay of execution, not developed a viable strategy for long-term survival. In due course, Mussolini plunged the nation into a catastrophic war, which Lampedusa alludes to only in passing, in an aside about the Pittsburgh-made American bomb which later shatters the palace in which the ball took place. When Lampedusa was writing in the Fifties, the latest conquerors of Sicily had been the Anglo-Americans who landed on the island in 1943, booted out the Nazis, and blasted his childhood home in Palermo to pieces.

Europe today is Italy yesterday (and today). The continent, Henry Kissinger lamented back in 2019 at a policy event, had “checked out” and was making neither a sufficient financial nor an adequate intellectual contribution to the common defence. If it persisted in this stance, Kissinger also warned, the continent would end up as a “strategic appendage of Eurasia”, of the Sino-Russian cartel — in effect a colony.

Kissinger could easily have expanded the indictment. At the time of his remarks, the European Union was attempting to run a common currency without a common state or even a common economic policy, causing a sovereign debt crisis which nearly destroyed the euro. It had created a passportless common travel area without properly securing its external border, resulting in an unprecedented migration crisis. Meanwhile, the continent was rapidly losing its economic edge to the Indo-Pacific. In the field of security, Europe was not only failing to mobilise against Vladimir Putin’s ambitions but actually deepening its dependency on Russian energy through the construction of a second pipeline through the Baltic Sea.

Since then, the situation has deteriorated further. Even Putin’s full-scale attack on Ukraine, though it produced the biggest European response to date, did not lead to a sea change. In fact, some European countries like Germany are beginning to retreat from the strong stances they adopted at the outset. Olaf Scholz’s much-heralded Zeitenwende has thus joined the long list of turning-points at which German (and European) history failed to turn. Scholz’s government wanted to change things just enough so they could stay the same. In security terms, most of Europe is still little more than an American colony, completely dependent on US military protection. But as the war in Ukraine reaches its denouement and President-elect Donald Trump threatens to withdraw, or at least re-negotiate, the American defence umbrella, the Continent needs to wake from its deep Sicilian slumber.

If Europeans really want things to remain halfway the same, in other words to maintain their standard of living, security and territorial integrity, they will have to make some very far-reaching changes. As British and American observers, including the present author, have repeatedly pointed out there are basically two options. Europe can form a full political union rallying the entire resources of the Continent on the lines of the United Kingdom or the United States. Alternatively, the Continent can re-configure itself as a looser confederation of sovereign nation-states each of which is truly committed to its own and the collective defence through Nato. So far, Europeans have done neither, not because anyone is stopping them, but because like The Leopard’s Sicilians they prefer the rest of oblivion to the effort of action.

Most likely, neither the election of Donald Trump, nor the dire situation in Ukraine will actually rouse Europe from its torpor. As Russia advances, Europeans will recite interminable rosaries about the need to “step up”, but they will not undertake the necessary fundamental reform. Europe’s vanity is stronger than its sense of strategic squalor. Like Lampedusa’s Sicily, the Continent thinks itself already perfect, and certainly far superior to its Anglo-American lecturers. But the idea that Europeans just have to change a little so that things stay the same is an illusion. While the continent sleeps, things are changing, and will continue to change, just not for the better.

This makes it incredibly tough for Germany to compete with China. Not only does Russian gas continue to flow to China in ever greater quantities, but the Chinese are also receiving sanctioned Iranian oil; installing more than 90% of the world’s new coal power capacity; putting the finishing touches on a hydroelectric infrastructure that already generates more power than Japan; and building ever more nuclear power plants. All this has ensured a fundamental manufacturing advantage over Germany.

But there’s more to the tale of German decline than cheap electricity. The past two decades have also witnessed an industrial revolution of sorts: at the turn of the millennium, China churned out cheap junk and not much else. Now, though, it is shaping up to be a formidable and sophisticated rival.

The car industry is a prime example. Today, Chinese electric vehicles are among the best and cheapest in the world, posing a menace to domestic production in Germany and the rest of Europe. But this was not always the case. As one post on r/CarTalkUK, a Reddit group with half-a-million users, puts it: “I remember only a few years ago when Top Gear went to China and showed us all those horrific knock-off death trap shit-boxes that looked like mutilated Minis… now those things are seemingly a thing of the past.” The EU is well aware of this development, having just slapped tariffs on Chinese cars that would make Trump blush. And it’s not just cars — China dominates many key markets, including drones, shipbuilding, solar panels, and wind turbine components to name just a few, and is making strides in other areas too.

Consider its acceleration. The nation started out by hawking junk, leveraging cheap labour to build up healthy export surpluses. This provided Chinese companies with the cash to invest in moving up the supply chain and, critically, to go shopping abroad. In 2004 and 2005, Chinese state-owned enterprises bought up F Zimmerman and Kelch, two of the world’s leading machine tool companies whose highly specialised equipment is vital for thousands of manufacturing processes. Of course, buying companies doesn’t necessarily hand its new owners the keys to the kingdom: transferring high-end R&D and manufacturing processes to China and training up loyal Chinese engineers and scientists who won’t emigrate can still be scuppered by export control laws, union action, political intervention and so on. But it’s a pretty useful strategy that sooner or later creates opportunities.

Another tool at China’s disposal has been the joint venture system, whereby German manufacturers who wish to set up shop in China are expected to share their critical knowledge and technology with their Chinese competitors. This kind of pact may seem utterly Faustian, but dozens upon dozens of high-profile companies have signed up. This includes Volkswagen, which now finds itself shutting down its German factories for the first time in history, in the face of ever more daunting competition from Chinese rivals.

China’s twin strategies — joint ventures and purchases — were both turbocharged by the financial crisis. And still Germany did nothing. A series of new laws that might have enabled better government screening and intervention were passed in 2013, but not used for years.

By 2016, the threat could no longer be ignored. That year, Chinese interests took control of a hugely important German company, the robotics giant KUKA. Their products are used in a whole range of industries: from carmakers and battery manufacturers to medical device companies and aerospace companies such as Airbus. Along with another big deal that year, the purchase of the plastics processing machine company KraussMaffei, the alarm was sounded.

Yet Germany kept on hitting snooze. It wasn’t until 2018 that the government first cited security concerns to block a major takeover, this time of the metal forming specialist Leifeld Metal Spinning. The same year, then economic minister Peter Altmaier proposed a special government fund to buy German firms facing a foreign takeover. The idea came to nothing.

Slowly, however, the Germans have been wising up to the competition. A series of legislative changes have updated the 2013 foreign takeover screening tools, enabling more intervention in recent years. There have been around a dozen or so measures taken against acquisitions every year since 2019, with hundreds more scrutinised but left to proceed.

Arguably, this is all too little, too late. Thanks to decades of investment in tech acquisition through takeovers, industrial espionage and joint ventures, as well as complementary investments in human capital, China now has its own high-tech innovation ecosystem. The days of Chinese copying are not over per se, it’s just that copying is now accompanied by homegrown invention.

Last year, China accounted for more than half of the world’s industrial robot installations and surpassed Germany and Japan in industrial robot density, a key measure of automation. This will potentially enable China to avoid old trade-offs associated with the transition from low- to high-end industry. In a contrast with the historical experience of some developed nations, China may not need to offshore low-end industry to wherever labour is cheaper, instead leaning on automation and cheap energy to keep supply chains national — a strategic boon in an era of growing tensions.

The US cottoned on to China’s industrial coup in 2016 and began responding. Donald Trump’s China policy, his “trade war”, was adopted and further developed by Joe Biden after 2020. The focus on technology, industry and China is now a central pillar of US foreign policy, and historians will surely view 2016 as a historical turning point in China-US relations.

By contrast, it has taken the EU eight years of damage to start a serious conversation about China — despite being a prime victim of high-tech industrialisation. And it only began in September, when former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi published a report on European competitiveness for the European Commission. This has since been promoted by the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen in the context of the escalating dispute about European protectionism against Chinese electric vehicles.

And still it seems that the EU’s response to China’s innovation boom will once again be late and ineffective. One only needs to look at the battery sector to see why. In an attempt to turn the tables, the EU has hinted that it will block Chinese companies from accessing its electric battery grants when investing in Europe: unless they hand over their superior battery technology. This is the very same trick that China played on Europe for years, but the EU’s hand is undermined by the weakness of European battery initiatives. Just last month, “Europe’s Tesla”, the “battery champion” Northvolt, declared bankruptcy.

Add to this EU infighting. The troublemaker in chief is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which argues against an “economic cold war” with China, having received nearly half of all Chinese investment into Europe in 2023, including funding for a major automotive plant that is now subject to retaliatory probes from the EU Commission. Germany must balance its own interests with those of an increasingly fragmented trading bloc.

With German industry collapsing, nationalism is on the rise once again. Since July 2023, the anti-EU, anti-immigration AfD has consistently been rated the second most popular party in national polls. And in June’s European Parliament elections, the AfD came second, winning most support in the old East. In September, it won a plurality in the eastern state of Thuringia, but has yet to form a governing coalition.

The region is also home to another radical political force: Sahra Wagenknecht, whose nascent Left-wing populist party is named after her. A half-Iranian former Stalinist and self-described “Left conservative”, Wagenknecht has attempted to unite anti-immigration, anti-Nato and pro-Russian politics, arguing that “Nato must be dissolved and replaced by a collective security system including Russia”.

Both Wagenknecht and the AfD have been investigated by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) — Germany’s equivalent to MI5. In particular, the BfV has embroiled itself in legal disputes with the AfD, which it has successfully argued in court should be subject to surveillance on the basis it is a suspected anti-constitutional organisation. This is due to its supposed anti-Muslim, anti-refugee and anti-democratic rhetoric. The AfD has also endured espionage investigations involving Russian and Chinese financial and personnel infiltration.

For such a popular party to be treated as if it is a terrorist organisation raises questions about the strength of Germany’s post-Cold War regime. Does it risk shedding legitimacy by stigmatising widely held concerns? Or can it accommodate and temper the emerging political forces that have been nurtured by years of mass immigration and are now best set to capitalise on looming de-industrialisation? There is already evidence that voters in Western industrial areas may be the vanguard of possible AfD gains outside the old East — AfD politicians continually attack Net Zero, responding to fears about industrial jobs. Then there’s Wagenknecht, who warned ominously in 2022 that Germany risks experiencing “incredible deindustrialisation” without major reform. Her solution is peace with Russia and renewed gas imports. This autumn’s state elections in Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony suggest these messages are hitting home.

Despite the swell of popular discontent, there is little sign that Germany’s February election will change enough to reverse the energy crisis. At this rate, Germany’s industrial woes are set to continue, multiplying opportunities for China to steal a lead in key areas. Meanwhile, Russia will dangle the promise of unlimited gas before the eyes of the growing AfD and Wagenknecht movements. These insurgents may yet experience breakthroughs outside of the former Soviet East, prompting a constitutional crisis at worst, or otherwise forcing the established parties into major policy adjustments. Already, Scholz has announced unilateral steps effectively to suspend Schengen, Europe’s free movement system, after coming under pressure over immigration.

This is without doubt the most severe crisis Germany has faced since its rebirth 34 years ago, when the former president Richard von Weizsäcker promised that the fledgling republic would “serve peace in the world in a united Europe”. How, though, can Germany do so when both peace and a united Europe have proven so elusive? Uncomfortable as it is to admit it, history is far from over for Germany. The nation may yet decide that it is better simply to serve itself.

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Sam Dunning is a writer and researcher who serves as director of UK-China Transparency, a charity that promotes education about ties between the UK and China.

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Whatever happened to the Resistance? To the rows upon rows of lawn signs that sprang up in besieged and beleaguered liberal enclaves, signs exhorting their well-heeled, super-insulated residents to stand up to Trump? Where is the deafening clamour that rang out of every nook and cranny of the Left-liberal establishment, right up until the moment when Trump won back the White House, resoundingly and conclusively, last November? Did the “existential threat”— a phrase used ad nauseam by liberals since 2016 — Trump posed to democracy suddenly become downgraded from “existential” to a mere threat, just at the moment Trump’s Republicans took both the White House and the Senate?

In 2016, Trump won by a hair. By December 2017, he was “authoritarian” only in the hollow rhetoric of an ugly temperament. A plaything of laws, customs, rites, and politics that he did not understand, Trump had struggled to gain any kind of stable footing as president. He had not signed into law a single piece of legislation seriously undercutting the liberal agenda.

On the other hand, by December 2017, the woke revolution, existing only by virtue of its fiction of standing up to Trump’s “existential threat”, was on the verge of taking over the country’s major cultural institutions, as well as its educational establishment, from kindergarten on up. So gratifying and rewarding was the “opposition” to Trump that Goldberg could actually make the false claim, in the New York Times no less, that Trump had become president “despite the will of a majority of the American people”. In fact, Trump had won a legitimate US presidential election. And far from forcing themselves on “an unwilling nation”, as Goldberg wrote, the Republicans retained control of both Houses of Congress, giving them both Congress and the presidency for the first time in 12 years.

Leave aside Goldberg, whose husband, a longtime paid political consultant to Democratic political campaigns, only stands to gain professionally from the apocalyptic political fantasies his wife gins up in her columns. Why, when Trump posed no actual threat to democracy in 2017, but when, in the alarmist liberal perspective that has reigned for eight years, he does in fact pose a threat to democracy now, do Goldberg and other liberals cry “Run for cover!” instead of “Resist!”

Why, from 2016-2020, did liberals compare Trump to Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Pinochet and Juan Peron, when he had done nothing to remotely justify the comparison, but now that Trump has truly consolidated his power and, by way of certain Cabinet choices, made clear his autocratic intentions, why does his mere blustering about revenge provoke calls for immunity rather than calls for heroic “resistance”? Was it easier to “resist” Trump when he posed no threat than it is now, when, having the support of the country’s majority, tech titans, the banking and finance sectors and even widening swathes of the media, he — again, along the lines of the erstwhile “resistance” — poses a true threat? Doesn’t more power mean the greater threat, which would require the greater “resistance”? Or is it the very fact that Trump has so much power now that has cowed the liberals, who worship power, into submission?

“Resistance” really shouldn’t be that hard. Trump’s threats to prosecute his enemies have no real basis in any plausible reality, any more than his threats to deport millions of people are within the realm of logistical and legal possibility, any more than he can get Putin to leave Ukraine before he takes office, any more than he can “make America healthy again” by putting a man who has no medical or scientific background, and who is opposed to vaccines, in charge of Americans’ health. But all Trump has to do is say “Boo!” and the former members of the “Resistance” begin to tremble. Perhaps it is the overwhelming nature of Trump’s victory in November. Liberals, who pride themselves on knowing how to please by playing by the rules even as they break the rules, simply cannot bear being unpopular.

It’s not just the liberals. Olivia Troye, who worked as an advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, ran to the New York Times to inform them that she had received a letter from Kash Patel’s lawyer threatening to sue her if she did not retract criticism she made of Patel on television. “I haven’t committed a crime,” she told the Times. But, she said, “these are very different times. Is [a pardon] something that we’ve considered and are concerned about? Yes… I have not done anything wrong, and I haven’t committed any crimes, and that’s where it’s a complicated issue. These are unprecedented times.”

It’s hard to fathom what exactly Troye, Cheney, Romney, Adam Schiff and all the others on Patel’s list have to fear to begin with. In Troye’s case, Patel is a public figure; short of libelling or slandering him anyone can criticise him in any way they want, in any venue they want. Troye needs to loosen up. Cheney herself has stated that “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis” exists for an investigation of the January 6 congressional committee. At the same time, she pointedly has not said that she would not accept a pardon, or blanket immunity, unlike Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman turned Trump adversary, who has said flat out that he would refuse Biden’s protection.

As for the other reason Trump’s putative targets say they fear being investigated, which is that such investigations would entail expensive legal representation, these are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. You would think that for the sake of the “Resistance” they would welcome high-profile investigations, even lawsuits; that is, if there is a single judge who would not dismiss such a lawsuit as frivolous. The example of their persecutions would indict Trump in the eyes of most Americans, and their standing up to Trump would serve as an inspiration. Look what standing up to and defying his liberal persecutors did for Trump. It returned him to the presidency.

Surely Liz Cheney, a war-profiteer’s daughter, who enabled the horrendously destructive lies her father told that dragged America into an invasion of Iraq, has the grit not to run when the going gets unpleasant. It was Liz who bravely jumped to her father’s defence when Nancy Pelosi criticised Cheney pere’s support of torture. “Mrs. Pelosi’s problem,” Cheney heroically intoned at the time, “is that her spine doesn’t seem to reach her brain.”

At first glance, it is baffling that such powerful people, always so eager to brandish their principles, especially before a camera, would allow the possibility of immunity to be raised with Biden rather than choose to inspire their fellow Americans by defying Trump. It is bewildering because, in doing so, they make it unnecessary for Trump to actually go after them. By opening themselves to a pardon that would protect them from Trump, they make it seem like Trump has already brought them to heel. He doesn’t have to investigate or prosecute them at all. Apply yourself to this seeming riddle of self-defeat, though, and the clouds of perplexity begin to part.

“Immunity” is what the liberals who made it their profession to pursue Trump from pillar to post always wanted in the first place. They desired the moral immunity that comes with presenting yourself as morally outraged; the professional immunity that accompanies the display of superior virtue; the intellectual immunity that you get when cries of “existential threat” mask your intellectual mediocrity. Woke is, essentially, the endless pursuit of immunity by robustly crying affliction, portraying yourself as good by calling other people evil, and aloofly professing “kindness” and “caring” at every abstract turn. No longer certain that they can obtain that sort of immunity in Trump’s America, some of the country’s most prominent liberals now seem to hope it is conferred directly.

Receiving immunity from Trump is certainly less expensive than paying for it. Ask Mark Zuckerberg, who, having been threatened with jail by Trump, has just paid protection money to the president-elect in the form of a $1 million donation to his inaugural fund. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon has just forked over the same amount of money to the fund. You remember Bezos. His newspaper, the Washington Post, adopted as its motto “democracy dies in darkness” in 2017 as a response to Trump’s presidency.

So much for the “fascist” threat posed by Trump, who just appeared on the cover of the echt-liberal Time magazine as its “Person of the Year,” followed by his Time-sponsored appearance at the New York Stock Exchange, where he rang the opening bell to thunderous cheers and applause. So much for “holding the line against authoritarianism”! Especially now, when a rising autocratic tendency on the Right in politics — the same tendency on the Left has already killed culture — is becoming, actually and really, “existential”. But, then, like compartmentalised people, compartmentalised political and media coteries never tell anyone the truth.