Decolonising a Continent: Vienna, Remigration, and the Question of Europe

Few cities in Europe carry the weight of historical symbolism quite like Vienna. For centuries, it stood at the intersection of worlds—the seat of an empire and the defensive frontier of a civilization that saw itself as both Christian and European. Armies once gathered before its gates; in its palaces, multicentury alliances forged; and the fate of the continent was debated in its salons and academies.

It was therefore fitting that a recent gathering, co-organized by The European Conservative magazine and Vauban Books, devoted to the idea of remigration and the future of European identity should take place precisely there.

The event brought together three prominent figures who represent different strands of a debate that has been steadily gaining visibility across the continent: the French writer Renaud Camus, the Austrian activist Martin Sellner, and the British policy analyst Harrison Pitt, who moderated the evening’s discussion. What emerged from their conversation was not a clash of perspectives but rather a striking convergence of arguments—philosophical, cultural, and political—about Europe’s present condition and the language through which it should be addressed.

The setting itself evoked an unmistakable resonance. Camus opened the discussion by invoking the historic memory of the Siege of Vienna, that moment in 1683 when the city became the symbolic bulwark of a continent resisting Ottoman expansion. For Camus, the event remains more than a historical episode. It represents a civilizational metaphor.

“The siege of 1683,” he remarked, “was one of those moments when Europe might have disappeared.” Reflecting on a visit to the hills above Vienna with his children, he spoke of telling them that, while Ottoman armies had once stood outside the gates, the modern battle appears to have moved inside them. The point was less numerical than symbolic. Europe, in his view, now faces a challenge that is demographic and cultural rather than military.

This opening gesture framed the entire evening. The conversation was not about immigration policy alone, nor even about political strategy in the narrow sense. It was about the deeper question of how Europe understands itself—historically, culturally, and morally.

Camus’ intellectual role in this debate has long been associated with the expression “Great Replacement,” a phrase that has traveled far beyond the circles in which it first appeared. During the introduction, he was described less as a political theorist than as a literary figure whose contribution lies in the act of naming. For Camus, the writer’s task is to observe reality with enough clarity to give it language. Once named, a phenomenon often becomes impossible to ignore.

Sellner approached the same subject from a different vantage point. Known as one of the most prominent activists of the identitarian current in European politics, he represents a generation that took such concepts and transformed them into a political vocabulary. Pitt, meanwhile, occupies yet another position—that of policy translator, someone attempting to turn theoretical arguments about migration and sovereignty into operational proposals.

Yet despite these different roles, the discussion unfolded along remarkably similar lines. Each participant, in his own way, returned to a common diagnosis: Europe’s present difficulties cannot be understood solely as external pressures. They are inseparable from an internal transformation of the continent’s moral and cultural self-understanding.

When Pitt posed the question directly—why does Europe appear uniquely vulnerable to large-scale demographic change?—Camus located the answer in the psychological legacy of the 20th century. Europe, he argued, emerged from the catastrophes of the Second World War with an unprecedented sense of historical self-interrogation. The continent that had once dominated global affairs suddenly saw itself primarily through the lens of its own crimes and tragedies.

This reflex of self-examination, which Camus regards as a distinctive feature of European intellectual life, gradually turned into something more corrosive. The desire to understand the past evolved into a permanent moral guilt that shapes political choices in the present. Europe, he suggested, began to behave as though its own historical existence required apology.

Sellner pushed the argument further. In his interpretation, the problem is not that Europe is being replaced by forces alien to the continent alone; it is that the continent has lost the instinct to defend its own continuity. What appears from the outside as demographic pressure is, in his view, largely an internal ideological phenomenon.

“It is an autoimmune problem,” he said at one point, describing the cultural dynamic that he believes drives the process. Rather than a simple demographic trend, the issue has become a crisis of civilizational confidence.

Both men therefore approached the question through a mixture of history and philosophy. Camus expanded the analysis by introducing a broader concept that he calls “global replacism.” In his view, the demographic shifts visible today are only one expression of a deeper transformation that began with industrial modernity.

Industrial civilization, he argued, reorganized society around systems of production and efficiency that gradually reshaped how human beings themselves were understood. Mass production, first applied to objects, was eventually extended to social life. People, cultures, and even identities began to be treated as interchangeable units within a global system.

The consequences of this shift were not merely economic; they were civilizational. The modern world, in Camus’ telling, erodes the particularities that once rooted individuals in families, languages, and traditions. When those bonds weaken, societies become more susceptible to demographic and cultural substitution.

Sellner largely accepted this philosophical framework, but he translated it into political terms. The question, as he sees it, is not simply how Europe arrived at this situation, but whether it still possesses the will to reverse it. Cultural collapse, he argued, is not inevitable; but it becomes irreversible if a population loses the desire to preserve itself.

The speakers repeatedly returned to this theme during the discussion of culture and education. Camus lamented the disappearance of cultural hierarchies within European institutions. Schools that once transmitted literature, art, and history now tend to present culture as interchangeable and universally equivalent. The result, he suggested, is a society that no longer knows how to articulate the value of its own inheritance.

Sellner summarized the problem with characteristic bluntness: one cannot defend a civilization that has already forgotten what it is.

Religion was brought into the conversation in a similar spirit. Pitt asked whether Christianity—often described as the moral foundation of European civilization—had in some way contributed to the continent’s present self-doubt.

Sellner rejected that interpretation. Christianity, he argued, historically coexisted with a strong instinct for civilizational self-preservation. Medieval Europe did not interpret the commandment to love one’s enemies as a mandate for political surrender. The deeper problem lies not in Christianity itself but in the secularized moral universalism that emerged from it in the modern era.

Camus offered a more melancholy reflection on the state of contemporary Christianity. The churches of Europe, he suggested, have gradually abandoned the aesthetic and spiritual dimension that once gave them their cultural authority. Religion has increasingly been reduced to moral exhortation—a language of humanitarian goodwill that, in his view, lacks the depth necessary to sustain a civilization.

From this point the conversation moved toward strategy. If remigration is to become a political reality, both Camus and Sellner agreed that it must first be framed as a moral project. Technical discussions about logistics or legality, they argued, are secondary to the question of legitimacy.

Sellner emphasized that the political Right has long struggled to articulate such a moral language. Remigration is often portrayed as harsh or punitive, yet he insisted that its proponents must argue that it is not only legitimate but humane—both for European societies and for the countries from which migrants originate.

Camus proposed a striking rhetorical shift. Instead of speaking solely about remigration, he suggested describing the process as “decolonization.” The reasoning behind this formulation is simple but provocative. If colonization historically involved the transfer of populations into foreign territories, then large-scale demographic transformation can be interpreted through the same conceptual lens. In that framework, reversing such a process becomes analogous to the decolonization movements that reshaped much of the 20th century.

“If colonization is wrong,” Camus observed, “then decolonization is right.” The term, he argued, carries an immediate moral legitimacy that the word remigration alone does not.

The political implications of this perspective extend beyond rhetoric. The discussion briefly turned to the institutional landscape of Europe itself, particularly the role of the European Union. Sellner expressed strong skepticism toward the current structure of Brussels, but he differentiated the nature of his critique from a rejection of European cooperation as such. The unity of European peoples, he suggested, could exist independently of the bureaucratic architecture that currently governs the Union.

At this point in the discussion, Pitt introduced a policy idea developed in his own work: a cooperative framework among European states designed to coordinate migration enforcement measures, an arrangement he described metaphorically as a “deportation NATO.” Whether or not such a concept ever materializes, its presence in the discussion illustrated the attempt to move from philosophical reflection toward practical policy.

Perhaps the most interesting dimension of the evening was the generational continuity it revealed. Camus, the elder of the three, represents a literary and intellectual tradition that supplied the language of the debate. Sellner belongs to a younger activist generation that transformed those ideas into political slogans and campaigns. Pitt, the youngest of the three, embodies the next stage: the attempt to translate ideological arguments into concrete policy proposals.

In that sense, the Vienna gathering felt less like a debate than a relay across generations. Concepts born in the world of literature had passed into activism and were now entering the realm of political planning.

The discussion closed with a sober assessment of time. Demographic trends, Sellner warned, create a limited window in which political decisions might alter Europe’s trajectory. The next decade or two could prove decisive.

Camus returned to the central concept that has come to define his contribution to the debate. Europe, he argued, must rediscover the moral language through which it can defend its own continuity. In his formulation, that language is decolonization—a claim that Europeans, like other peoples, possess a legitimate right to preserve their historical homeland.

Whether one accepts or rejects the premises of that argument, the Vienna discussion revealed something significant about the current European moment. Questions once confined to intellectual circles are increasingly entering the public sphere. The debate over remigration, identity, and sovereignty is no longer abstract. It is becoming part of a broader conversation about what Europe is, and more importantly, what it intends to be.