The Great Divorce: The U.S. and Europe After the Cold War
Aikman, David
Books in Review "The Great Divorce" of the Soviet Union, secrets supposedly buried forever slowly emerged and finished the job that Allen Weinstein started. But not before General Dmitri...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W IW TH THE FALL of the Soviet Union, secrets supposedly buried forever slowly emerged and finished the job that Allen Weinstein started...
...Weigel's The Cube and the Cathedral has much less reporting than any of the above books...
...and British post-war strategy and goals before and during the Yalta Conference...
...It has achieved great strides in the course of economic and social integration since the end of World War II, and even more since the end of the Cold War in 1991...
...T HESE BOOKS FALL conveniently into three categories: laudatory of the new Europe, critical of the new Europe, and sitting on the fence...
...Bat Ye'or's narrative is not for the weak-kneed, because it suggests that the rise of anti-Americanism in Europe, along with the rise of anti-Semitism, has been all along engineered by forces seeking to subvert completely Europe's Judeo-Christian heritage...
...Europe may have discovered a dream (a la Rifkin), but where is its hope...
...A recent article in the London Spectator suggested that, if you had cancer, you would have a far better chance of surviving in the U.S...
...involves not just differing views of global strategy but a different understanding of what constitutes global truth...
...would better protect human rights...
...for its own role of global policeman, all the while avoiding significant assistance, why should the U.S...
...Though many Europeans would like the EU to assume a superpower status on the world stage as a counterweight to the U.S...
...That assertion had been met with hallelujahs from the liberal media, with ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and NPR all sighing with relief that Hiss had finally been found innocent...
...Weigel's answer to the question, of course, is that the culture that represents the great moral and political achievements of Christian Europe is Christian...
...WELL, IT IS NO SURPRISE that the Europeans are less hopeful than Americans, in the view of George Weigel: quite simply, they've abandoned Christianity...
...and, if convicted, to maintain their innocence for the rest of their lives...
...Europe, building its new "paradise" of welfare-statist economic security for all and embracing social tolerance under the protection of America's strong arms—thus not having to worry about the Saddam Husseins or the Kim Jong Its of the world—had concluded that all the world's woes could be settled as easily as Brussels bureaucrats discussing the size of labels on olive-oil bottles...
...And as he drew his willing audience of liberals into his campaign, he certainly hastened the collapse of the American left...
...Kagan's book, though very insightful, did not flesh out the far more substantive divergences that have emerged between Europe and the U.S...
...They then discovered, with considerable disgust, that two of our closest allies in the Cold War, and one ally in the war David Aikman is the author of Jesus in Beijing (Refinery Publishing) and A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush (W Publishing...
...Oddly, and perhaps to his credit, he does note that these same Europeans whom he sees as having found the right balance between the right of the individual to freedom and the right of society to protection from the individual, aren't hopeful about the future...
...not the American) once said, "Everything that is done in the world is done by hope...
...Reid's book is well written and well reported, as you would expect from a Washington Post foreign correspondent...
...More importantly, White points out that together with the famed British spy Donald Maclean, who was then working at the British Embassy in Washington, Hiss kept the Soviets apprised of much of U.S...
...434 PAGES, $25.95) The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God by George Weigel (BASIC BOOKS, 194 PAGES, $23) Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye'Or (FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 384 PAGES, $23.95) Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash (RANDOM HOUSE, 286 PAGES, $24.95) Reviewed by David Aikman late 1960s...
...The retraction got far less attention...
...Europe, obviously, is a work in progress...
...If Weigel is pessimistic about Europe, Bat Ye'or, in her Eurabia, is positively apocalyptic...
...since the The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by T.R...
...Winston Churchill, a "reactionary" already well known to Lenin, said in Zurich in 1946, "We must build a kind of United States of Europe...
...and Europe After the Cold War Ew AMERICANS NOTICED the great split that was taking place in European-American relations until the months before and after the U.S...
...even when specific governments (i.e., Canada) are opposed to U.S...
...He sees the Mitterrand cube, built to commemorate the anniversary of the Declaration of the Rights of Manand Citizen of the French revolutionary era, as an emblem of the pretensions of today's largely secular European society...
...She writes about the subversion of Judeo-Christian Europe as though it were a fait accompli...
...In a profound way, we are dealing with the religious breakup of the West...
...It is also highly informative in the way it describes the European Commission's use of the "precautionary principle" of using less than complete scientific evidence as a way to forestall environmental or health disasters...
...were not going to support us in military action against the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein...
...His account of Europe's success in marshaling its financial, commercial, technological, and scientific skills across a broad spectrum of ventures, from the European Space Agency, to Nokia's glob-al cell-phone success, to the Airbus, is fascinating...
...There is, of course, no actual entity called "The United States of Europe," but that has not pre-vented people of very diverse views from writing and talking about it for close to 100 years...
...The European problem,' as I have come to think of it," he writes, "is fundamentally a problem of cultural and civilizational morale...
...The result, vividly portrayed at the beginning of 2003 in Robert Kagan's pithy book, Of Paradise and Power, was a massive re-orientation of strategic world-views on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Europeans should stop lecturing Americans on their global role, he says, "but the challenge for America is to exercise a degree of voluntary self-restraint unusual among states...
...policy...
...In fact, it is not so much a description of the decline of the Christian faith in Europe as an extended essay on its likely causes...
...But he becomes a bit unglued in rhapsodies over Europe's pattern of universal health coverage...
...The U.S., having kept the Soviets at bay successfully until the Cold War ended in 1991, toyed briefly during the 1990s with downsizing its powerful military machine, but then decided that the world was still a very dangerous place and needed somebody approaching a volunteer policeman to keep it in order...
...By involving in his lie old colleagues in the Roosevelt administration, friends, and even family—he co-authored a book with one of his sons furthering the lie—Hiss became the most despicable kind of liar...
...Anthony's in Oxford and the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, acknowledges that there is a EuropeanAmerican crisis in "the West," and usefully dissects some of the categories within it...
...In her introduction, 1.111...
...So is his tale of the "Waterloo" of Jack Welch, hard-charging CEO of General Electric, at the hands of European anti-trust bureaucrats...
...But Rifkin's lyri1 \ITED STATE s E( Rop1...
...America, Kagan said, had never abandoned the Hobbesian view of political reality that the world was full of nasty forces and nasty people who at times needed violent confrontation...
...Which culture," Weigel asks rhetorically...
...The subsequent release, by the National Security Agency, of the Venona files—intercepts made during WWII of cables from the Soviet Union to its American agents—positively identified Hiss as a Soviet Agent once and for all and brought an end to Hiss's campaign...
...Hiss accompanied FDR to Yalta, and it is believed briefed the Soviets at the end of each day of talks on everything that transpired on the U.S...
...Much of this book is an academic detective story of the diplomacy and maneuvering by which, she says, the Arab world has succeeded over the years in undermining Europe's ability to resist the controlling forces of jihad...
...Therein, perhaps, lies the greatest of all dilemmas for Europe...
...He take as a starting point "Janus" Britain, a nation that, for the last 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 century...
...But as Weigel's reading makes clear, Europe at some point must embrace core values that genuinely bring its people hope...
...As Martin Luther (the German...
...Though he makes fun of Prime Minister Tony Blair for trying to be the ultimate Janus—an American when he is being feted on Capitol Hill, a European when he is attending a Brussels conference on closer economic integration—Ash sees him as the best hope for both continents in bringing their strengths, rather than their weaknesses, to the common table...
...The marriage had broken up, and they weren't quite sure why...
...Though she has faced resistance in academic circles to exploring the idea of dhimmitude (dhimmi is an Arabic term for an adherent of a faith other than Islam, supposedly "protected" but actually discriminated against by Islam), Bat Ye'or has done pioneering work on the decline of Christian churches under Islamic control throughout the Mediterranean region...
...t' (. Iuh IIr•+I MAY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67 B O O K S N R E V I E W she writes, "This book describes Europe's evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it...
...State Department records also indicate that Hiss requested secret information from the Office of Strategic Services on post-war atomic energy policy and the internal security of the UK, France, China, and the Soviet Union...
...It currently comprises 25 member-states, about 455 million inhabitants, a common currency in many of the countries, and obvious aspirations to playing a major role in the world...
...take Europe seriously...
...Which culture would more firmly secure the moral foundations of democracy...
...The laudatory, and in the case of Jeremy Rifkin, breathlessly euphoric, books are Rifkin's The European Dream and T.R...
...In 1998, after all had been revealed, George McGovern claimed that "I have always believed that Hiss was a victim of the `Red Scare' and of Nixon's political rapacity...
...Within weeks, however, Volkogonov retracted the statement, admitting that he had looked no further than certain KGB files (Hiss had worked for the GRU, which was military intelligence and did not share its files with the KGB) and that he had foolishly reacted to pressure from Hiss's supporters in making the initial statement...
...BOOKS N R E V I E W against Adolf Hitler, had deserted us: France and Germany, NATO partners in the wall of solidarity that had kept the Soviet Union away from the gates of Vienna (and Paris, and Bonn, and Rome) in the period between 1947 and 1991...
...Some of the American reactions were predictable and not especially mature: pouring French wine down the drain or renaming french fries "liberty" fries...
...The Hiss case has come to exemplify America's 50-year Cold War with the Soviet Union, and it continues to shed more light on the bankruptcy of the American left than any other incident possibly could...
...But it had also been striving to cement in place social institutions and social policies that reflected an emerging new European consensus of how life should be lived...
...Well...
...Americans," he admits, "are flush with hope and optimism, Europeans are less so, as a people...
...has instinctively cast its lot on all major international crises with the U.S...
...side...
...you need to take a breath just to digest those two sentences...
...Weigel quotes the British historian Niall Ferguson on what will happen if Europe's demographic collapse forces it to take in ever more Muslims as laborers than the 19 million who currently live there...
...Rifkin appears to think that Europe has found the Holy Grail of all future successful economic and social progress...
...On the other hand, as long as Europeans continue to take diplomatic pot shots at the U.S...
...But not before General Dmitri Volkogonov, formerly the official historian of the Soviet Union, issued a statement that he had examined "a great amount of materials" and found nothing implicating Hiss as a spy...
...Rising to the top levels of the Roosevelt administration while stealing state secrets and turning them over to his Soviet handlers took an enormous amount of skill and aplomb, and in doing so Hiss became averygood liar...
...The Great Divorce: The U.S...
...In March the French government abolished the 35-hour week on the grounds that it made France much less competitive and, instead of providing people with more leisure, deprived poor working people of the opportunity to earn more money to make ends meet...
...If Reid's book is the view of a dazzled but intelli66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005gent reporter, Jeremy Rifkin's is that of a religious convert...
...ree...
...very few of them are willing to bear the military burden that doing so would entail...
...Two examples of his spaced-out prose: "The European Dream exists at the crossroads between post-modernity and the emerging global age and provides the suspension to bridge the two eras," and "Stripped to its bare essentials, the European Dream is an effort at creating a new historical frame that can both free the individual from the old yoke of Western ideology and, at the same time, connect the human race to a new shared story, clothed in the garb of universal human rights and the intrinsic rights of nature—what we call a global consciousness...
...As all this is happening, there is one group in Europe resolutely increasing its size and profile: the Muslims...
...Europe, willy-nilly, at some point will have to decide whether it wishes to acquiesce in part of the Arab world's overall plan to eliminate Israel, thereby provoking not just disagreement with the U.S., but possibly confrontation, or return to its normative cultural roots (Judeo-Christian and, by Weigel's reckoning, those of the Cathedral...
...than Britain...
...The EEC, or in colloquial English, the "Common Market," morphed into the European Union...
...Since Europe's late 19th-century adoption of the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche, Weigel argues, European elites have become increasingly "Christophobic...
...But it conveys the unmistakable impression of being the eyewitness report of a man newly dazzled by the things in Europe that seem to work, that he didn't previously know much about, and that he admires rather uncritically...
...Reid (PENGUIN PRESS, 305 PAGES, $25.95) The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream Jeremy Rifkin (JEREMY P. TARCHER/ PENGUN...
...but which is strongly drawn by history and today's culture toward its European neighbors, Ash skillfully writes of the "Anglosphere," the alliance of intelligence and military assets of the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada that continues to play a major role in overseas conflicts...
...As George Will so eloquently said, in his review of Perjury, "Clinging to their belief in martyrdom in order to preserve their belief in their 'progressive' virtue, [Hiss's supporters] were drawn into an intellectual corruption that hastened the moral bankruptcy of the American left...
...But for many Americans, the European rejection of American military and strategic leadership was as bewildering as it was saddening...
...But as these books, in their totally different approaches, powerfully illustrate, the great European-American marriage, simply known for many decades as "the West," was in deep trouble long before Saddam Hussein inadvertently triggered the final breach...
...invasion of Iraq in March 2003...
...But not quite...
...It is a national outrage that this essentially decent and patriotic American went to prison as a consequence of the demagoguery of Nixon and the ignominious House Committee on Un-American Activities...
...Weigel's title derives from two architectural achievements in Paris: the colossal glass-sided cube, 40 stories high, that is known as La Grande Arche de la Defense—a project of the late President Mitterrand—and Notre Dame Cathedral...
...Assuming this information all went to the Soviets, the damage was considerable...
...Hon EoROSt's VrsroR or rot FurttR1 is Quttrtr (curs tR~ rRt AYtRt tAR OR(AY B O O K S I N R E V I E W cal account of the socially wonderful effects of the 35-hour work week in France has been seriously outpaced by events...
...It is contrasted starkly with the aspirations embodied by the builders of Notre Dame Cathedral...
...We don't know what secrets he gave to Stalin, but we do know that he stole classified documents from the State Department for nearly ten years during World War II, many of them with military importance, so it is logical that they gave the Soviets plenty of useful information...
...Unlike those annoying Americans who still don't accept a pro-environmentalist interpretation of the Book of Genesis, he writes, "Europeans have laid out a visionary roadmap to a new promised land, one dedicated to re-affirming the life instinct and the Earth's indivisibility...
...Ash thinks Britain, with its instinctive understanding of American attitudes and its deepening ties to Europe, is in a good position to act as a bridge between the two continents...
...Indeed, the titles of all these books suggest that the great divorce between Europe and the U.S...
...What damage did Hiss's espionage cause the United States...
...In Weigel's view, the secularism of Europeans is connected to the other catastrophe about to face Europeans, the demographic one...
...The title of Reid's book is based, essentially, on a conceit: that the EU is an embryonic version of the "United States of Europe...
...The European Dream in places reminds you of John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World (a gaspingly admiring account of Lenin's seizure of power in Petrograd in 1917), or the far more disturbing comment of journalist Lincoln Steffens after his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1919 on behalf of President Wilson, "I have been over into the future and it works" (often misquoted as "I have seen the future and it works...
...Ash, an Englishman who, like a few of his compatriots, seems to commute between St...
...Put simply, Rifkin seems on a trajectory that soars out of his days as a self-confessed "activist" of the 1960s and is striving for some sort of emotional and philosophical Zen satori amid the constructs of modern Europe...
...The old joke was always that even if Hiss confessed, the old lefties would still insist on his innocence...
...S A TONIC TO THE EUPHORIA of Rifkin and the gloomy cadences of Bat Ye'or, somewhat on the fence, there is Timothy Garton Ash's Free World...
...This, he says, is illustrated by such items as the failure of the European constitution to acknowledge any of Europe's Christian heritage and by incidents such as the mocking of the Eucharist as a "religious snack" on European TV...
...As he continued 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 the lie, he was also continuing his life as a dedicated Communist, for Soviet agents were instructed, by their handlers, never to reveal their covert existence and, if exposed, to deny categorically any complicity whatsoever...
...Rifkin's rhapsodic paean to "the dream" he sees forming before our eyes in Europe has over-tones of an acid-trip gathering in Woodstock of professors of postmodern literary studies...
...The book is actually interesting in its digressions into the history of the concept of time in postRenaissance Europe, with allusions to Bacon, Descartes, and, of course, Immanuel Kant (no book on Europe these days seems complete without a deep bow to Kant's 1795 work, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch...
...As he mentions, no country in Western Europe has a birthrate higher than its death rate, 42 percent of Italians will be over 60 by 2050, and Europe's retired population will increase 55 percent in the next 25 years, while its working population will shrink by 8 percent...
...Bat Ye'or is no mere polemicist...
...Churchill strongly sup-ported the idea, first of Franco-German reconciliation, and then of the economic foundation-building that followed suit: the European Coal and Steel Community (1952) and the European Economic Community (1957...
...The title of Kagan's book suggested a dispute over how to deal with the world at large...
...A creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom," Ferguson writes, "is one conceivable result: while the old Europeans get even older and their religious faith weaker, the Muslim colonies within their cities get larger and more overt in their religious observance...
...Reid's The United States of Europe...
...And they did...
...In 1915, Vladimir Lenin wrote—slightly less sulfurously than usual—an article entitled "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe," in which he crisply opined, "From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism—i.e., the export of capital amid the division of the world by the `advanced' and MAY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65 BOOKS N R E V I E W `civilized' colonial powers—a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary...
...Europe for years had been trying to construct an entirely new economic unity that would rationalize business relations among European states...
...Bat Ye'Or's book is radical and confrontational, but in setting Europe's "creeping Islamicization" in the context not of haphazard immigration patterns but of deliberate Islamic design, she does the entire subject of Europe's future a major service...
...In perpetuating the lie, Hiss was really continuing the life he had led as a spy...
...Overall, however, Reid's book does a comprehensive job of suggesting areas where Europe has succeeded and about which informed Americans ought to know something...
Vol. 38 • May 2005 • No. 4
