Europe Adrift

...The crisis has dramatized beyond any doubt that Wail Street and Washington are and Commonweal 2 0 April24, 1998 will likely remain the bedrock for the global political economy...

...They want to "judge not" but often feel they are being judged and forced to judge by activists on the gay and lesbian front...

...Meanwhile, the major European players, buoyed by the extraordinarily strong American economy into sufficiently small budget deficits, apparently will be able to meet the requirements for the European Monetary Union...

...There are exceptions, and in the religious camp Wolfe finds one big one: otherwise tolerant heterosexuals are benumbed and bemused by, or resentful of, homosexuality...

...With images of rioting unemployed in France and protesting farmers and foxhunters in England fresh in people's minds, few people today are venturing to suggest that Europe is about to replace America as the economic and financial engine of the world...

...Otherwise, Europe might well go bananas...

...This is not out of the question...

...They represent fluid, dynamic, viscous forces that can be reshaped and that can reshape themselves with more diversity and richness than the culture warriors will let them...

...His book will not force a cease-fire from the warriors or beguile them into one...

...Here is where l think Wolfe, an instinctively moderate person who uses methods that imply moderation, comes close to failing us: his suburbanites are chatting in circumstances where there are not many signs of stress or distress...

...The energy that Newhouse sees driving the geographical realignments is principally economic...

...Just why majorities chose that issue as the place to hold the line for prejudice Wolfe can't quite get clear from his interviewers...

...What neither they nor Newhouse bring up is that such realignments have a lot to do with the responsibility of national governments to provide social security benefits for people in regions that are not havens of prosperity...

...It would be naive, however, to think that it's simply a question of replacing one set of boundaries with another, or even one vision of government with another...

...He relies heavily on numerous private interviews with European diplomats and unnamed cognoscenti...

...La France aux Franr The momentum of Newhouse's superregions is caught up in this ominous dynamic...

...They fantasize about creating new regional entities with their robust neighboring economic partner regions...

...Far away, Serbs now fight Croats, so their cousins here suddenly draw on passions they did not know they had...

...Essentially, there are two of these---one swoops from London, down through Brussels, brushing Amsterdam but well east of Paris, through Lyons and the Ruhr valley...

...book relevant to this theme is The One and the Many: America's Search for the Common Good (Harvard...

...One wonders what kind of decision would be arrived at if Europe needed to speak with one voice...

...The vast majority of the voters wholeheartedly approve of the governmental benefits and protections espoused by the political Left...

...Seven years later, it seems that Attali got it almost exactly wrong...

...During the harrowing developments following the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, when America attempted to take a back seat, European leadership revealed itself to be dangerously dysfunctional...

...One need only to recall, however, how embarassingly flat-footed most of the pundits were caught with the fall of the Berlin Wall to find oneself somewhat skeptical about their oracular pronouncements here...

...This banana intersects with another one that bends from Barcelona along the French Riviera through southern Germany and northCommonweal 2 | April 24, 1998 ern Italy...

...The superregions of Europe are defined precisely by their being the corridors of economic power and prosperity...

...The ritual logic is to send them out in to the desert somewhere...

...Moreover, Kennedy gave blacks little protection from lynch-mob violence...

...National borders, as Jean Renoir reminded us in The Grand Illusion, are imaginary constructs that often veil more powerful distinctions and allegiances...

...No amount of redrawing borderlines is going to escape this bind...

...As Martin Luther King, Jr., explained: "We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands...

...In his informal and intuitive way, Wolfe provides a new agenda for those who will seek to do more precise pollings, more ample interviewing, and more revisionist judging...

...Here he picks up where he left off, narrating the history of the years 1963-65, when the movement won its two most impressive legislative victories--the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965...

...His is by no means a first word and by no means the last...

...With the approach of the new millennium, a new unified Europe would, akmg with Asia, play the leadership role in world events and the new global economy...

...All of the countries of Europe have shown evidence of the sympathy among disturbingly large portions of the electorate with the politics of scapegoating...

...It is far from a millennially triumphant Europe that John Newhouse depicts in Europe Adrift...

...What culture warriors call disagreement tends instead to be confusion...

...But the track record is not encouraging...

...Intense internal political conflicts await each and every effort to integrate and prime the sluggish and fractured European political economies...

...The far Right says out loud what apparently many other Europeans say under their breath: Raus Ausla'nder...

...The effort, however, has revealed deep underlying social, political, and economic divisions within and among the not-so-united states of Europe...

...Jorge Pedraza is a professor of French and Comparative Literatmv at Willhmls College...

...While England strenuously backed America, much of Europe remained uncomfortably noncommittal, and France snapped at America's heels from a safe distance along with Russia...

...America and Russia, crippled by intractable internal social and political conflict, would be pushed to the periphery of tile new world stage...

...The political emergence of these regions takes place within the ongoing l e f t / r i g h t , electorate/business deadlock in Europe...

...The arguments put forth by business and the political Right that Europe is becoming economically uncompetitive because of "handouts" to the undeserving, however, also resonates in economies persistently dogged by 13 to 14 percent unemployment...

...Culture wars, have we not noticed, are not conversations or arguments...

...A community may express itself genially on racial issues, but when sudden racial change comes, everytlling is cast in a new and often blinding light...

...Now that these resources have vaporized, what is left is a treacherous financial and political sinkhole that will remain for some time to come...

...The Asian miracle has revealed itself to be largely a mirage sustained by foreign capital...

...Wolfe would help us with a second volume, where he would find eight middle-class communities at white heat over racial, ethnic, or religious matters--the cr6che on the courthouse lawn, the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wail, or Sikhs wearing knives or Muslims wearing scarves to school--and listen to troubled and agitated citizens...

...His most recen...

...It is no surprise that many of the most egregious cases of violence against immigrants come from the south of France and Germany, at the meeting point of the superregion bananas...

...This political impasse gives way to another, crucial feature of the European political scene that Newhouse underemphasizes, that of racist xenophobia...

...In Parting the Waters, Branch documented Kennedy's cold, amoral pragmatism as he pressed civil rights workers to stop fighting segregation and focus instead on registering black voters--a callous attempt to get the vote out for l)emocrats...

...Newhouse works in the timehonored tradition of the clubby statecraft analysis that one would expect from a foreign-policy journalist for the New Yorker who is also a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, a consultant to the State Department, and a Beltway resident...

...F o r e i g n e r s - - e s p e c i a l l y those from Africa, the Indian subcontinent, or Eastern Europe--are loaded up with the freight of domestic economic and political frustrations...

...The novelty of Newhouse's analysis comes in his macro-political thesis of the decline of the traditional nation states and the rise of what he calls the "superregions" or "bananas...

...But it is too soon to say "after all" when we are still in the midst of things where majorities are potential recruits for those tending to profit from sidetaking in the culture wars...

...The biggest national crisis of 1963the murder of JFK--transformed the civil rights movement...

...The tales he tells are well-known, and even if Branch fails, at times, to explain the significance of his stories, there is still much to learn from the details...

...We Chicagoans used to be familiar with Serbo-Croatian picnics and weddings...

...This seems to show a much more realistic and indeed, since de Gaulle, familiar role for French if not European diplomacy...

...In other words, it's like gerrymandering districts by income in order to balance the budget...

...It was democracy at its best...

...Only the hideous attacks of 1963 on innocent black Sunday-school children and others in Birmingham provoked Kennedy to move on civil rights legislation...

...But he may help more of the leadership of that (now I have to say "putative") moderate four-fifths of the nation find symbols, definitions, leaders, and causes so that they can at least start conversations or arguments about the good and common life...

...One nation, yes, in a way...

...i Martin E. Marty directs the Pub/ic Religion Project of the University of Chicago, where he taught for thirty-five years...

...Mention abortion (as Wolfe almost doesn't) or homosexual rights and lifestyles (as he chooses to do), and a very different America is likely to be manifest...

...Often in middle-class luxury we profess tolerances and sympathies that fade when tested...

...Will a unified European leadership nonetheless exert a determining influence on global political matters...

...The rise of the political clout of the superregions is undeniable...

...History, argues Newhouse, is passing these outmoded fictions by replacing them with newer forms of collective id entification, based on more pressing current-day passions and interests...

...Attali predicted that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tides of history were now turning...

...In this year's confrontation with Saddam Hussein, France joined Russia in playing "good cop" to the Clinton administration's "bad cop...

...They won't make up a pack of conformists given to consensus, as the citizens of the 1950s were portrayed as being...

...As a whole, however, Europe failed to act in any coherent or unified fashion...

...Taylor Branch began telling the story of the civil rights movement in his magisterial Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954--63...

...ONE BIG, UNHAPPY FAMILY Jorge Pedraza he subtitle of John Newhouse's new book, "The Conflicting Demands of Unity, Nationalism, Economic Security, Political Stability, and Military Readiness Now Facing a Europe Seeking to Define Itself," brings to mind Millennium, a 1991 best-selling future forecast by Jacques Attali, the prolific French captain of industry cure cultural critic...

...Newhouse is right, nonetheless, that in the absence of the comfortable securities of the cold war, Europe is now having to face up to some its most difficult political problems...

...It is a great irony of history, but perhaps a deep reflection of how political change occurs, that the Southerner, Lyndon Baines Johnson, not the Northeasterner Kennedy, did the most of any president for civil rights...

...The ritual dance of strike-andconcession of French political life, for example, will have to find its translation in a new pan-European political language...

...Politicians and business leaders from these areas quite predictably chafe at their political and economic obligations to the central governments and poorer regions of their home countries...

...His portrait is of a Europe increasingly unsure of itself as it negotiates the troubled seas of political deadlock, social disaffection, military angst, and a disconcertingly protracted economic stall...

...Not the least of these will be the negotiation of the different political traditions in different countries as the monetary union begins to bite into the political autonomy of the member nations...

...Unlike Kennedy's technocratic and pragmatic approach to Commonweal 2 2 April24, 1998...

...how eager they are to be tolerant and the beneficiaries of tolerance...

...MAKE STRAIGHT THE WAY Kevin Mattson he civil rights movement was a rare time in American history when ordinary citizens placed their bodies on the line to challenge the nation's conscience...

...Just as important, the movement was politically adept in its ability to command the moral high ground, to persuade, and to wield power effectively...

...European unification might prove to be another costly or even tragic Grand Illusion...