Spectator's Journal / Europa! Oy, Europa!
Ledeen, Michael
you probably noticed that, as we were marching off to establish the new world order, Europe hit the fan. It shouldn't have surprised us all that much—after all, Europe's given us fascism, Communism,...
...This gave the rest of Europe a severe case of indigestion: they had either to raise their own interest rates (thereby strangling any hopes of economic recovery), or devalue their money (thereby wrecking the scheme for an integrated European currency...
...Shortly thereafter the Spanish peseta and the Swedish crown followed suit, leaving monetary integration a shambles...
...And those are only the noisy kids...
...This was the same policy that the Italians had so disastrously adopted for their own south, but if the Germans noticed, they probably dismissed the comparison out of hand...
...Given the Europe-envy that plagues so many of the members of our own cultural elite, we could do with a strong dose of Americanism ourselves...
...And throughout the old continent, the merchants of death design, build, and export newer and more efficient weapons, including, for the first time, chemical weapons of mass destruction...
...Fear of the Soviet Union and respect for hundreds of thousands of American troops compelled the Europeans to be on good behavior, and occasionally to face reality...
...It would be difficult even under optimum conditions, and the current economic problems are going to make it even harder...
...Lenin is competing with the Dadaists in Zurich for Beast of the Bourgeoisie honors, the anarchists are plotting to Michael Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...The second reason for the brief life of The New Europe is less pleasant: we are still in 1914, with all the centuries-old hatreds at full burn...
...Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia have already joined the ranks of Rand McNally's money-makers, adding new colors to the maps...
...In fact, the big news in Rome was that a group of young Jews had trashed the Nazis' headquarters and beaten up some of the storm troopers there, and some Jewish leaders were feeling a bit guilty about it...
...Such variations as do exist give rise to separatist demands, which shows the premium they put on homogeneity...
...The center isbesieged by refugees from ex-Yugoslavia (Germany alone has taken over a quarter of a million of these unhappy souls) and the USS-were...
...With rare exceptions, the European nation-states have not embraced these principles...
...But unification was A Good Thing only so long as the Easterners stayed in their zone and didn't clutter up the good neighborhoods in the old Federal Republic...
...The New Europe, whatever else it was supposed to be, would have funded several new layers of bureaucrats, provoked a metastasis of regulation, and greatly diminished individual freedom and enterprise...
...Monetary integration was supposed to pave the way to political unification (or at least political federation...
...When you've got enemies without, it's only a matter of time before you find lots of them within, and so it's not surprising to see outbreaks of other-bashing, whether it's • torching Turks in Germany or mauling Moroccans or Albanians in Italy or bashing the rag-heads in France...
...The Byzantines couldn't have said it any better...
...They believe that raison d'etat is paramount in virtually all cases, and their people tend to be exceedingly homogeneous...
...Neither is in the cards for the near future, and right now the vision of the new Europe is so unattractive that the Swiss voted to stay out of the Common Market...
...But you wouldn't know it from the public rhetoric...
...The New Europe looked like an acceptable idea only so long as there was a Soviet Union on the other side of the line, for one could justify a big European state in order to protect Europeans against the big enemy...
...The Germans went mega-lo, assuming that their capacity to generate wealth was so great that they could painlessly absorb their poor relations to the east...
...they've become so wacky that the New Europeans have agreed to let the Danes reject the terms of integration in order to "keep them in...
...The map that the lunatic Woodrow Wilson drafted along with Lloyd George and Clemenceau after the First World War is undone, at long last...
...All the old hatreds are still there, and they're busy avenging real and imagined ancestors at the same time that the elegant and overpaid bureaucrats sit around the tables in Brussels, mopping up their moues marinières with their crusty baguettes, pondering deeply their future as the planet's latest and greatest superpower, The New Europe...
...It may be too late for us to get a grip on things European, but there is an outside chance if the new administration shows real leadership...
...From Portugal around to Italy, hundreds of thousands of impoverished Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans are clamoring for entry...
...The European Community has thousands of wines, hundreds of cheeses, farmers who riot at the thought of selling their produce at market prices, and they can't find the wit or the will to stop Serbs from slaughtering Bosnians and other Serbs just next door, even though the last time the Serbs went hyper, the First World War was required to calm them down...
...The Brits and the Italians, fancying themselves just as smart as the Germans, tried both...
...In fact, you may have to forget about some of its biggest pieces...
...We are not living through the opening scenes of the rise and fall of the Fourth Reich, but we are almost certainly watching the disin- tegration of The New Europe...
...Sound familiar...
...It shouldn't have surprised us all that much—after all, Europe's given us fascism, Communism, and two world wars in less than eighty years—but somehow we'd thought that the Europeans had outgrown that kid stuff and were ready for graduate school...
...You can't ignore two millennia of history and just redraw the map in accordance with convenience...
...These are all unwelcome guests, and all the West Europeans are busily passing restrictive immigration laws...
...With unruly children like these, stern discipline is required, and the rod was not spared in the past fifty-odd years...
...Moreover, in another dramatic setback to the vision of The New Europe, there will be no elimination of customs and immigration borders at the start of '93...
...After all, what relevance could Italian history have for them...
...If they're going to get through the current crisis—for crisis it is—the Europeans, east and west, are going to have to rethink their national identities, and move toward our more profound understanding of what makes a modern democratic society work best...
...This quite naturally created a panic that savaged the pound sterling and the lira...
...The Europeans have forgotten nothing, and learned nothing...
...back in the corner of the sandbox the little Scots, Welsh, Basques, Catalans, Corsicans, Sardinians, Sicilians, Istrians, and Sudtyrolers are practicing anthems on their harmonicas and accordions, while the Irish dance their murderous jigs by the jungle gym...
...And the Brits have to cope with the pleas of those escaping from the unhappier reaches of the Commonwealth, from Hong Kong to India...
...We have understood two great principles upon which successful national life must rest: freedom of the individual is paramount to all but the most urgent needs of the state...
...And who can keep track of all the brats with the funny names, like the Ossetians...
...They should have paid attention...
...But no sooner did the Iron Curtain come down than they raced pell-mell into Fantasyland...
...All of them want to be sure they keep out the unwashed...
...Hopefully we will understand that Wilson's enterprise was a colossal blunder, the result of American patrician hubris run amok...
...Nationalism, presumed to have died (a few years after God was buried) en route to the new world order, has shown an unexpected vitality, along with its cousins, chauvinism and xenophobia...
...the major culprit is the great democratic revolution, which has thrown a spanner into the global works...
...just as the recession reached the Rhine, they found themselves strapped for cash (when you have to fork out upwards of 150 billion Deutschemarks a year for five to ten years, you tend to get a bit short...
...So, like good Europeans, they decided to spread the misery to their neighbors and raised interest rates to Valhalla, sucking up all the liquid capital in sight and funneling it eastward...
...French anti-Semites are bloodied but unbowed by the exoneration of Captain Dreyfus, while German and Austrian anti-Semites gather converts, laying the groundwork for the tidal wave of racial hatred that will come after the Great War...
...Worst of all, we failed to hector the Europeans into action when it was most desperately needed (as in the Yugoslav mess...
...Forget about "Europe...
...Some of the bashers have tried to give a bit of political gloss to their activities by calling themselves Nazis and dressing up in movie surplus costumes, but even the most hysterical fear-mongers are going to have trouble selling the idea that Hitler's making a comeback...
...Foreign policy became personalized (as in the embarrassing "Save Gorby" campaign), and we actually counseled Europeans to order the waves to retreat (as in the "Chicken Kiev" speech when Bush told Ukrainians to abandon their "impossible dreams" of independence...
...The easiest way to understand the mess the Europeans are making is to pretend that the two world wars, and the Cold War, never happened, and we're back in about 1914...
...To keep the twain from meeting, the Westerners were prepared to pay for housing, for unemployment, for retraining, above all for immobility...
...Instead, no sooner do we decide that they're big guys now than they race back to the sandbox and start bashing each other over the heads with their toys...
...The third cause of all the trouble is us...
...assassinate monarchs all over Europe, the old empires—Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman—are laboring to hold it all together, the Balkans are seething with ethnic conflict, Germany and Italy are trying to define their destinies as the young nations of the old continent, everyone is running after real estate in Africa, and the Americans are living in blissful isolation at the other end of the world, tending to domestic affairs and hoping that the rot will not contaminate them...
...As I've been arguing lo these many years, the people in most countries have figured out that bureaucracy is their enemy, and that the powers of the state need to be drastically curtailed...
...171...
...Meanwhile, the barbarians at the gate want in, and this presents the New Europeans with a problem of epic proportions...
...There is—as there has been all along—every reason to do so, for our nation has proved to be more successful than their nations...
...and the proper basis for legitimacy is citizenship, not membership in a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group...
...This is the end of the century of "total peace," the interlude between the bloody eighteenth century—which ended at Waterloo—and the century of total war...
...Bush and Baker never got a grip on the revolutionary nature of this period, and so, just when our moment came and the whole world looked to Washington for guidance, we abdicated...
...Absent the threat, The New Europe becomes much less attractive...
...But it's worth a try, not least of all because, in working with them, we will inevitably remind ourselves of our own basic values...
...It does not take an atomic scientist to figure out why The New Europe arrived stillborn...
...And that nationalism—which, with the collapse of the external threat, becomes more and more narrow in its focus—merges with the anti-state passions to produce calls for greater local autonomy (like the Catalans) or downright secession (like the Lombard League's call to saw Italy in half just north of Rome, and float the southern part down to North Africa...
Vol. 26 • February 1993 • No. 2
