COMMENTS: A Letter from Europe

...They know that those armies are poised at the very heart of Europe, far beyond what by any stretch of the most flexible imagination could be considered the Russian borders...

...The basic idea of public responsibility for public weal is not brought into question...

...Thatcher would not dream of withdrawing subsidies from the British Railways, as Mr...

...The Second World War left Europe with its self-confidence shattered...

...It happened in the period that most Americans remember as the years of Eisenhower's "Peace and Prosperity...

...He is essentially a Third World leader, eschewing the European tradition of social responsibility and holding out a Third World vision—or, in American parlance, a "frontier" vision—of individual gain...

...Irrationally, it gives me hope that, a generation or two from now, the Eisenhower-Reagan episode might appear not as America's Third World turn but as its Third World episode...

...IV FOREIGN POLICY is a different matter...

...His willingness to devote vast sums to defense does not contradict that: all Third World leaders love to maintain disproportionate defense establishments, financed in great part by borrowing abroad...

...For some 40 years now Europe has been divided right down the middle, where the armies halted at the end of the Second World War...

...It could have been anywhere in the Third World —or in the U.S...

...Even Mrs...

...The trains and streetcars are not bits of nostalgia but a working transportation system, making possible cities that are basically pedestrian areas...

...They scatter, diligently erecting their individual homes on generous quarter-acre lots...

...In that decade, the world was rebuilding after the devastation of the war...

...The passing years have, however, made it obvious that neither scenario is likely to be acted out...

...has effectively abandoned the European civilizational pattern in favor of a Third World one...

...Yet if it can be resolved, the long-range question will remain: can Europe preserve its distinctive cultural pattern of the urban civilization that it once exported to all the world—or will it, too, be swallowed up by the urban sprawl that has spread throughout the Third World...

...It is hard to avoid the impression that, in their heart of hearts, most Europeans wish that Mr...

...The reaction to Mr...

...The streets are clean and comfortable...

...And the unthinkable has happened: the province of Vorarlberg has imposed a 60-mile speed limit on its insolent chariots...

...So the futile confrontation persisted...

...Ill THE SHIFT WAS SO SUDDEN that our mental image of America has not kept pace with it...

...The Soviet Union here is not a distant threat but a next-door neighbor...

...Reagan's policies and the approval with which they meet in the population at large become understandable...

...In the immediate postwar years, that arrangement might have had some justification...

...America gave back to Europe what Europe had lost—and, in the postwar years, Europeans, while grumbling, tended to accept uncritically what America had to offer, liberty, justice, chewing gum, tail-fins and all...

...That is the true culture shock: the realization that, in the decades since the suburban dispersal, the U.S...

...Coming to Europe, an American is still first aware of the similarity of what he encounters to his traditional image of America, not of the vast gap between that image and present-day American reality...

...The Munich Agreement was an acknowledgment of Europe's moral bankruptcy...

...Hence the ambiguity of European pronouncements...

...Vienna, which 10 years ago was building suburban clusters, is investing in the inner city...

...Reagan's policies, so incomprehensible in terms of a European cultural pattern, fit very neatly a Third World one...

...Gorbachev's trial balloon remained hidden behind the walls of the Kremlin, but he did not mention the topic again...

...The division of Europe has fueled the arms race for 40 years...

...In spite of its rhetoric, Europe's current conservatism is not actually antisocialist...

...Still in the last years before the suburban dispersal, Boston, with its elegant inner core of theaters, restaurants, and quiet residential streets, with its streetcars and its railways reaching out across a distinctly rural, farming area to other urban centers, remained recognizably a European city...

...Each took a responsibility for half the ruins...

...or South Boston...

...And, of course, it cannot...

...The sprawl is too extensive to sustain a culture—that requires a community—or to make a public transport system viable...

...The question is only one of the balance at which American strength ceases to be protective and becomes provocative...

...Thus, for example, while the use of communal resources to rehabilitate housing, in Europe or in America, can be considered generically social democratic—a conservative government would have lowered taxes and trusted an invisible hand to channel the released funds into construction—the European decision to invest public funds in urban housing can be considered Lassallean and the American decision to distribute them among individuals needing housing is in the Eisenacher tradition...

...or Mexico City...

...or Santo Domingo...

...But the pattern and the direction of development is the same, committed to maximizing individual affluence at the cost of social irresponsibility and decay...

...The example of Poland is too visible here...

...When, however, the Lassallean tradition of public responsibility for public weal is combined with an Eisenacher tradition of public responsibility for individual welfare—the "entitlements" of American parlance—the double strain on the tax base can become distressing and, in Europe, it has become that...

...While both sides have come to recognize the need for a cordon sanitaire, each continues to hope that it can be constituted solely out of territory currently occupied by the other...

...It is a consummation devoutly to be desired...

...Europeans take it for granted that the United States is a European country: that it provides the same ample measure of public support, only on a scale as much more opulent as American cars are bigger...

...Nor will the division become viable...

...If Americans chewed gum and put their feet up on tables, who was to fault them...

...Nor can any Soviet government ever entertain the possibility of a neutralized "eastern" Germany while a powerful German-American force remains stationed just across the Elbe...

...Ten years ago, it seemed painfully likely and, ironically, for the best of reasons...

...Massive funds, in part provided by the Marshall Plan, served to rehabilitate and add urban housing, blocks of apartments together with the communal support and transport that makes cities possible...

...In 1950, America still had cities and public transport to make them possible, with all the benefits cities can bring...

...Still, the roots go far deeper...

...On the one hand, Gorbachev floated a trial balloon in his first speech, mentioning the possibility of a peace treaty with Germany...

...By 1960 the erstwhile cities had become decaying slums amid faceless sprawl, their inhabitants dispersed too widely to support theaters...

...The dividing line along the Elbe is simply completely artificial...

...Public services crumble, communities with them...

...It is the pattern that matters...

...They see Reagan's domestic policy in a European context, and tend to approve...

...The culture shock comes months later, with the gradual realization that, in central Europe, it still really is so...

...By contrast, the Eisenacher vision assumed a functioning prince—at the time Bismarck—and under408 stood the task of social democracy as the use of social means to foster individual welfare...

...Certainly, there are the well-groomed suburbs in which many Americans have taken refuge, but those can be found, less extensive but no less opulent, in every Latin American city...

...It is the contradiction between a desire for a powerful America and a desire for an inoffensive one that makes European foreign policy debates such exercises in futility...

...It was the Americans who came to the rescue...

...Few of them are capable of comprehending that, in America, payments to individuals substitute for, do not duplicate, a solid social investment...

...Here, though, it is alive and well, the Boston we have once known—and it is not at all an anachronism...

...Soviet foreign policy hoped for an American weakening, leaving the Soviet-occupied half of Europe solidly in Soviet hands while transforming the American-linked half 409 into a "finlandized" buffer zone...

...By contrast, in the Third World urban sprawl swallows up cities and spills over the countryside, resulting in a pattern that is no longer urban or rural...

...Slowly, Europe is becoming aware that it, too, has preserved something precious that America is losing...

...Very broadly speaking, the Lassallean strain sees social democracy essentially as the bearer of the social responsibility that once had been the obligation of princes and remained unclaimed when liberal governments came to represent only the sum of individual interests rather than the common weal...

...Though America's immense affluence masked it for a time, America had opted for a Third World pattern...

...That affects the future of humankind no less, since the pedestrian polls amid a rural countryside creates a unique possibility for human growth...

...It is public responsibility for private weal that appears questionable, even to a great many people who have traditionally voted social democratic...

...That is today as obvious as it has long been unmentionable...

...Slowly, pedestrians are reclaiming the city...

...Not only did the nightmare of nazism arise out of its vaunted cultural tradition but, worse still, Europe could not muster the spiritual resources to counter it...

...Not, to be sure, overnight...

...The culture shock comes with the visual image of a street strewn with wind-blown litter and lined with decaying, half-abandoned housing, the faint smell of rotting garbage, shabby figures huddled in dank doorways, broken bottles in paper bags—and with the question: was it the Bronx...

...America was actually spending as much as Europe, but the pattern was different...

...No American or German government could possibly agree to a neutralization of Western Germany if a powerful Soviet expeditionary force continues to be poised at Germany's very heart...

...even at night they belong to the solitary walker...

...Unlike most Americans, Europeans generally do not labor under the illusion that Soviet armies are safely tucked away somewhere in "eastern" Europe...

...Reagan would arm to the teeth—but like him to say nothing about it, to avoid provoking the Soviets...

...Only all of traditional Europe, from the Bug to the Atlantic, from Poland to Portugal, is strong enough to provide a reliable buffer...

...For years, each of the great powers nurtured a hope that if it could only sustain the division of Europe long enough, the other side would grow weary and withdraw...

...But Europe was morally bankrupt and knew it...

...The European pattern had been one of a purposeful use of communal resources to sustain an attractive urban environment —basically a walking-distance community— capable of generating and sustaining trade and culture, amid an agricultural countryside...

...What remains is the faceless sprawl...

...That ambiguity, though, is a matter not just of European perspectives but of European political reality...

...The true villain, as throughout the Third World, was the decision to boost individual affluence by abandoning social responsibility...

...I believe that, unless the world blows itself up first, this is indeed the likely course...

...The trains stopped running...

...II THE CULTURE SHOCK COMES With the recognition that the American culture pattern today corresponds far more to the Third World than to the European model...

...What remains is a mass of dispersed individuals, fostering individual opulence amid social disintegration...

...Going to the theater still is what it was in Boston in the '40s—and the play is likely to be reported in the next day's paper and discussed in cafes and in the streets...

...That would leave Europe divided, only shifting the dividing line in one direction or the other, and that simply is not acceptable...

...V THIS IS THE SHORT-RANGE PROBLEM, perhaps for one generation...

...Ironically, this is something that Europeans find difficult to understand...

...They can muster little sympathy for the plight of, say, the American farmer: anyone who indulges in the luxury of a private automobile instead of riding a train appears as having no claim to public aid...

...The unoccupied littoral is viable only thanks to the American defensive umbrella, and its prosperity could vanish at a stroke if the American presence were to become either too weak to discourage the Soviets from, or so strong as to provoke them to, a preemptive strike, military or economic...

...The decolonization of Europe must come: without it, there can only be nonwar, not peace...

...That, though, has been changing...

...The car made the suburban sprawl possible, but not necessary...

...It is, however, distinctly anti-Eisenach...

...Still, even where they are most knowledgeable, European statements of foreign policy reflect the ambiguity of Europe's own position...

...It is high time to sign a peace treaty with Germany, withdraw all foreign troops, and let Europe work out its own salvation...

...Certainly, the United States is astronomically more affluent than other Third World countries, with a per capita national product 407 below only that of Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates and vastly exceeding that of India or of Mexico...

...Will Europe now follow America along the Third World pattern...

...Europeans, passing directly from their unconsummated love affair with the automobile to the recognition of its devastating effect, can be excused for seeing it in that role...

...Here the funds were dispersed in the form of payments to individuals, for the most part as veterans' benefits...

...The confrontation can only continue until a final conflict...

...Unless . . . That is the unmentionable option brought to the forefront by two rather unlikely sources...

...People do not pass each other unheeding in cars: they run into each other at the center of town where theaters, concert halls, and museums flourish...

...The cat is out of the bag: the division of Europe cannot be stabilized, it can only be abolished...

...there were no more streetcars as the motor car, breathing noxious fumes, reigned supreme...

...American postwar policies were aimed at fostering private weal, not at sustaining an attractive communal environment...

...At the very opposite end of the spectrum, the much persecuted dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, Charta 77, released a document, ostensibly a letter to one of the periodic "Peace" congresses due to meet in Holland, calling for a German peace treaty and the withdrawal of all foreign armies from Europe...

...Forty years after the war's end, the time has long since come to sign a peace treaty with Germany, to withdraw all foreign armies, and to let Europe be Europe...

...The Americans nurtured the opposite dream, of "western" Europe firmly in the American fold and Soviet-occupied Europe transformed into a neutral, finlandized buffer zone...

...What in the 1940s still had been essentially a European country across the seas has, by the mid-1980s, become a very affluent Third World one...

...America's postwar taxation did not keep pace with inflation, and the proportion of tax resources devoted to the common weal rather than to boosting individual affluence plummeted...

...Young, naive, self-confident, they appeared as the heirs of Europe's lost youth, of the bright vision of liberty and justice for all that had once been Europe's heritage...

...Was the auto the villain...

...I have given up trying to explain that the village of Cucumber Junction, Iowa, just might not be serviced by superb trains running on an hourly scheme—or that the American farmer does not have social medical coverage, stipends for his children in school, or a guaranteed generous oldage pension at 62...

...Still, it is the only viable alternative to a confrontation that in the end can only blow us sky high, and the Charta 77 document, for all its artless form, openly acknowledged it...

...Thanks to it, the traditional urban culture survives here...

...There were only two powers...

...The topic is still too sensitive...

...Ironically, it was not the decay of the cities but the 410 devastation of the countryside, no less a product of the automobile-based sprawl, that shook Europe's earlier conviction that the American pattern was the wave of the future...

...With that recognition, Mr...

...Older Americans— and, by some strange cultural osmosis, many of the middle generation as well—still carry in their minds that image of America as essentially an urban civilization, with densely settled towns capable of generating trade and culture, serving as foci of an agricultural countryside...

...For the latter is Europe's domestic problem...

...They sat on their tanks, so full of life and confidence, chewing gum and licking ice cream cones...

...European pronouncements on foreign policy can be as pompously obnoxious as the worst Washington has produced in the past four years—it is gratifying to discover that the arrogance of ignorance is not a Washington monopoly after all...

...Reagan's domestic policies tend to appear as what they would be in Europe, a corrective for what is perceived as an imbalance between the Lassallean and the Eisenacher emphasis, and they find a good deal of approval, even if not always understanding...

...The longing for open spaces can be satisfied with a pattern of urban apartments and weekend cottages...

...It is not a matter of America—yes or no...

...Europe lay in ruins...

...The reaction to the Charta 77 document was predictable: the signers were promptly detained by the police— while in the West the press, which normally gives them a rather complete coverage, passed over the document in silence...

...Not even West European Communists—who love their affluence every bit as much as their Christian Democratic brethren—could desire to be included in the Greater Soviet Co-Prosperity Sphere...

...Individuals do not build apartment houses or streetcar lines...

...Forty years later, though, that arrangement has become hopelessly anachronistic, and the periodic upheavals in central Europe make the point...

...In Europe, the effect of the Lassallean emphasis is clearly visible...

...Reagan appears ready to do with Amtrak...

...No self-respecting European soldier would be caught with an ice-cream cone: soldiers drink beer and play the accordion...

...Europe was systematically refurbishing its cities...

...The attempts to stabilize it, whether by arming or by disarming, are inevitably futile...

...It seems far more likely that the German peace treaty will be signed to celebrate the 50th rather than the 40th anniversary of the war's end...

...Whether the city as we have once known it in Boston and New York can reemerge from the all-dissolving sprawl seems problematic...

...In a picturesque metaphor, it would not be wholly inaccurate to say that Europe suffers from the patchwork compromise between the Lassallean and the Eisenacher faction of social democracy at the Gotha Congress, criticized already by Karl Marx...