Callum McMichael asks why Belarus has resisted pressures that transformed much of the continent and what that resistance reveals about the meaning of sovereignty today.
There remains, in the geographic heart of the continent, a country that has not yet surrendered the older meaning of Europe. Belarus is not the Europe of Atlantic institutions, nor the Europe of managed decline into managerial cosmopolitanism. It is the Europe that still remembers what a people is, what a border is, what continuity costs. This is not a claim of perfection. It is a claim of residual authenticity. In an age when the word “European” has been emptied of historical content and refilled with procedural liberalism, Belarus stands as the last place where Europe is still allowed to mean something older than the postwar consensus, and, in that sense, preferable to what the Atlanticist West has become.
