One Europe, Under France?

...What those other cultures see—what Islam in particular sees—is Christianity on the march, for human rights is pared-down liberalism, just as liberalism is pared-down Christianity...

...Religion may be too strong a term for the antifascism of the New Europe's ruling class, but "article of faith" is not...

...Cujus regio ejus religio...

...These "grounds" provide slippery categories because, as Siedentop understands, there are also group-rights ideologies that make such arguments from different principles...

...The philosophical argument is fascinating...

...But given that most of them don't believe in Christianity, it's hard to see how that would do them any good...

...What's more, there's a political naivete in his wish that France spread its influence "by example and persuasion, rather than by the over-rapid accumulation of power in Brussels...

...It is a test of—and evidence of a crisis in—Western values...

...We would call these ideologies multiculturalism and political correctness...

...In a bizarre reversal of Marx, moral conflicts increasingly get expressed in the camouflage of economic terminology...

...The latter are based on a philosophy of individual rights that arises from the pre-Reformation church...

...To answer that question, Siedentop feels compelled to ask what a state is in the first place, what Europe is in the first place, and what the values are that unite it...

...The Christianity he means is basically Protestantism, which, "for all its aberrations, is a more self-conscious form of Christianity than Catholicism...

...The problem is that hero-citizens are suckers for charismatic leaders, and are "always at risk of being hijacked by populism...

...France is to the European Union what the United States is to NATO: the source of all its ideas and most of its motive force, the country without which nothing gets done...

...Given its track record in creating stability, assuring representation, and protecting liberty, one would assume the British model would have the upper hand...

...When every other European government, east and west, knuckled under to my-way-or-the-highway warnings about the need to shrink the state sector in order to compete in the global marketplace, France alone replied, "Baloney," and has been rewarded with a per capita income higher than Germany's and much higher than Britain's...

...If the integration of Europe is proceeding undemocratically, that's because elites want it to proceed undemocratically...

...Decades of postwar mismanagement left a dysfunctional state— which Margaret Thatcher fixed through constitutional vandalism, undermining recalcitrant local authorities, flouting every traditional prerogative not written explicitly into law, and concentrating power in the executive in a way that would be the envy of many continental nations...

...England retained an unusual degree of liberty only because its aristocracy was able to hold on to local power...

...Already there are signs of a re-medievalization of Europe...

...Free markets and free societies go together, but they have different philosophical groundings...

...France does have a tradition of political violence, but with the exception of Britain, every other European country provides it with stiff competition in that department...

...The problem for Europe, Siedentop thinks, is that France is home not only to Europe's most gifted elite but also to an elitist and bureaucratic political culture, in which secrecy and inside dealing create a permanent climate of suspicion...

...According to Siedentop, the battle over Europe is a battle between three models of the state: the British, the German, and the French...

...That is why, after ancient slavery disappeared, it was replaced by a form of subjection, serfdom, which itself proved to be only transitory...

...But France's role in Europe is too much of a good thing...

...Siedentop's affinity with Protestantism produces in him a strong identification with the American founding...

...That leaves the initiative to France, Europe's most efficient and most centralized political culture, with what Siedentop correctly calls "the most formidable, the best educated, and most determined political class in Europe...

...This schizophrenia's most telling symptom is the way economic language has replaced the language of politics...

...It may lack grandeur and nobility...

...Montesquieu held that, while small states can enjoy a degree of freedom, larger ones, in which diverse populations need to be hammered into conformity with state needs, can be governed only by bureaucratic despotism...

...Despite its high per capita GDP, France makes a lower net contribution to the EU than Britain, Germany, or Sweden...

...Did it...

...If the integration of Europe is proceeding somewhat undemocratically, that's because elites want it to proceed undemocratically...

...Why is the EU giving rise to such worries...

...few Europeans did, either...

...An alliance of sovereign nations...

...Variety among the newly embourgeoise European peoples is increasingly confined to its peasantries and proletariats—who have less and less say over the laws under which they live...

...In like fashion, four decades of reading American constitutional thought at Keble College, Oxford, has left Siedentop under the nostalgic impression that his native land is brimming even now with Madisons and Hamiltons and Jays...

...When Arabs shut off the West's oil in 1973, France responded with a nuclear power system that was providing 60 percent of the country's energy by the end of the decade...

...Or a federation, a real "United States of Europe...

...When Britain and France agreed to build the Channel Tunnel, Britain negotiated with various environmental pressure groups and local bodies...

...Exceptions carved out of the EU's free-trade principles give France dozens of protected markets...

...The technocratic classes of all countries—like their aristocratic forebears eight hundred years ago—are coming to intermarry, to speak a common language (English), and to constitute an international court society...

...What the younger generation in Britain celebrated in Diana," writes Siedentop, "was, above all, her confusion...

...Britain, unlike America or France, has never looked to its bourgeoisie to provide it with a national self-image...

...Stop...

...The American-born Oxford political philosopher Larry Siedentop is neither of those...

...And here we come to what ought to be (but is not for Siedentop) the master explanation of European constitutional diffidence...

...And there is evidence that Europe's meritocratic elites don't think so either...

...Later, Siedentop credits liberalism with having "brought into question one traditional difference of status and treatment after another, a scrutiny which has cast doubt on whether birth, wealth, gender or even sexual preference are morally relevant grounds for treating people differently...

...hard questions about the EU tend to be either self-interested bureaucrats on one hand, or extremist cranks on the other...

...Although Siedentop doesn't say it, Britain has—suddenly and stunningly—become in many ways the least free country in Western Europe...

...The United States of Europe," he would shout, "will be the United States in Europe...

...It's impossible to say, because even today the people willing to ask Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Siedentop is frustrated by the black-and-white choice that is offered today between these two types of reasoning, and between the two visions of citizenship that arise from them...

...Could not survive" and "transitory" are rather dismissive descriptions of social arrangements that lasted for centuries...

...Nowhere was the New Britain on gaudier display than during the orgiastic mourning that followed the death of Princess Di...

...In this light, Siedentop is wrong to view the debate over Europe since Maastricht as a "dangerous confusion...

...Geniuses don't just arise wherever there is a need for them, of course, but we can take his point that the founding of the European Union is not merely political horse-trading on a grand scale...

...It may be less dangerous than it looks...

...It might be supposed," Siedentop writes, "that the desire to advocate or to oppose change would have created by now in Europe the counterparts of Madison, Hamilton and Jay...

...On the one hand is a classical (political) understanding of the citizen-as-hero...

...The Union's outdated Common Agricultural Policy is a windfall for the country's farmers...

...Europe's societies, however lousy their church attendance, are even today not "secular and materialistic": They're Christian...

...This is a complicated argument that leads in several directions...

...It's hard to tell whether equal treatment of gays, for instance, is being urged out of liberalism or the group-oriented ideologies that are liberalism's potential enemies...

...Siedentop lumps them in with the economistic arguments of the utilitarians, and also calls them "wants" theories (to distinguish them from "rights" theories...

...Take his urging of a larger role for lawyers in European public life, an urging that he backs up by citing the example of the United States: "It is their close association with the idea of social mobility which has made it possible for American lawyers to play a major political role without creating much protest about their role being undemocratic...

...It is Christianity that "provides the moral justification for the social role of the individual, who is presumed to have independent access to the deepest truth qua individual...

...On the other hand is a newfangled (economistic) understanding, that of the citizen-as-consumer...

...The country has exercised a de facto veto over the leadership of the new European central bank, and the new European currency, the euro, leaves the deutsche mark permanently overvalued against the franc, improving France's export position...

...The historical one is questionable at every turn...

...Siedentop wrote Democracy in Europe to "suggest what we ought to be thinking about rather than what we ought to be thinking...

...We may soon need to ask a question not asked in two and a half centuries: whether Europe can have liberty without an aristocracy...

...Tacky and shallow though it may be, it runs much less risk of riling up the canaille...

...It is certainly less confused...

...Tony Blair has extended this centralization beyond Thatcher's wildest dreams, abolishing hereditary peers' right to vote in the House of Lords, seeking to abolish the automatic right to trial-by-jury, and taking his country into war in Kosovo with a minimum of parliamentary friction...

...Since the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, EU members have pledged an "ever closer political union"—i.e., a European government, with (already) its own currency and (soon) defense...

...The European Union and European Culture BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL A decade ago, the French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen used to bring auditoriums full of his howling followers to their feet by attacking the European Union...

...Thoroughly modern Europeans think their regnant ideology is something called "human rights," but outside observers know otherwise...

...The West faces an identity crisis, Siedentop thinks, "a kind of liberal schizophrenia...

...More promising, Siedentop thinks, is the almost-quaint German model of corporate federalism, with power dispersed between the capital, the Lander, and a patchwork of local bodies...

...Most important, according to Siedentop, "the French have more to give to Europe than any other country because they believe in Europe as a cultural and a moral undertaking...

...If fascism is perceived by Europe's leaders to have arisen from an excess of democ-racy—and it is—then the excesses of democracy will go, and along with them, if necessary, the moral revolution that Siedentop describes as having begun in the hearts and minds of medieval burghers...

...Montesquieu didn't think so...

...Americans could be forgiven for not knowing what he was talking about...

...Useful though Christianity may be as a hermeneutic tool, it gained sway over Europe as a religion...

...Clearly he hopes the model for the new European state will be the polity that best preserves the political and cultural heritage of the continent...

...The central catastrophe of Western history is the twentieth-century rise of totalitarian ideologies, some of which—Nazism most spectacularly—came to power at the invitation of legitimately elected liberal democracies...

...If so, he picked the wrong country...

...In Democracy in Europe, he laments that the ground rules for what will be a country bigger, richer, and better educated than the United States are being drafted with negligible democratic input and scant constitutional sophistication...

...This last is France's payoff for "assenting" to German reunification...

...With the old class identities abolished, no checks and balances have arisen to take their place...

...The result, in Siedentop's view, is total social and political bafflement, a populace that marries upper-crust insouciance to proletarian vulgarity...

...France built the thing...

...The European Union began as a Franco-German industrial consortium (the European Coal-and-Steel Community) in 1951, turned into a managed-trade zone (the European Economic Community) in 1958, and today comprises 15 countries, with a dozen more—from Turkey to Estonia— stacked up like delayed planes, signaling for entry...

...The ideology of human rights—or whatever one chooses to call antifas-cism—may be an "economistic" simulacrum of Christianity...

...But an experience of totalitarianism has not been known for ennobling either its practitioners, its victims, or its opponents...

...With virtually all the continent's centrist parties backing monetary union and further integration, electoral opportunities open up on the radical fringe...

...When Westerners see [their own] emphasis on human rights spreading throughout the world, but interpret that spread as merely a matter of "common sense" or "obvious" human values or a "neutral" framework for adjudicating international disputes, they deceive themselves more than they deceive the defenders of other religions and cultures...

...But in following the line of linguistic least resistance, Siedentop thinks, we ignore a huge part of the story of the West—the part that makes Europe Europe...

...He succeeds marvelously at this stated aim, for which his distinction between econo-mistic and political reasoning is enormously fruitful...

...Then Siedentop implies that, because an individualist European moral culture developed earlier than an individualist European economic culture, the latter must embrace a welfare state, since as soon as the medieval city began to move away from treating the family as the essential economic unit, it was necessary to provide an alternative source of last-ditch aid...

...Even in its heyday, Britain's unwritten constitution, based as it is on local particularities and customs, would have been difficult to export...

...But under present circumstances, it's not worth the paper it's not written on...

...Here, his book takes up political philosophy of the most empyrean and challenging sort, a turn that will enthrall those who like to think about government in an abstract way, and bore those who don't...

...Siedentop may be alarmist...

...Its long history of liberty rested on its class system and a series of informal arrangements managed by its aristocracy...

...If Europe is not to have federalism, thinks Sieden-top, then the EU will face a problem that has not arisen in a serious way since Montesquieu identified it: the problem of size...

...Its starting point is that all souls' being equal in the eyes of God is the origin of western liberty and equality...

...And anyway, the British ruling classes, who, according to Siedentop, have taken their place as "the least constitutionally literate people in Europe," have proved unable to distinguish between corporatism and authoritarianism, and are engaged in a campaign of calumny against the German model...

...The French habit of official secrecy has been brought to Brussels...

...We have plenty of excuses for using these terms, ranging from the technological complexity of modern life to the predominance of global and trade issues, which lead governments to an impatience with constitutional niceties that is more typical of war or diplomacy than of day-to-day politics...

...I'll take that one, please...

...Corruption scandals are frequent, and Germany had recently to wage bureaucratic war on the EU's accountants to gain the release of country-by-country data on tax contributions and service outlays...

...It is only natural that, viewing the history of Europe as he does, he sees that "the uni-versalism of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution captures the character of European civilization more successfully perhaps than any political document that Europe itself has produced...

...Not a bit of it—because, at the very moment when Europe's constitutional arrangements are being set in stone, Britain finds itself in a constitutional crisis...

...Siedentop is like the mirror image of the American tourist, who goes to a France that is (in fact) full of televisions and shopping malls and seeks out the museums, bistros, and villages that put him in mind of his favorite nineteenth-century novels, so he can come back and complain that France is so much nicer because it's "untouched" by televisions and shopping malls...

...Then, Communist parties "were able to impose a despotic control of the state, not just with the help of Russian power, but by means of a demonology which threatened ordinary people by insisting that the only alternative to Communist rule was the return to power of their previous 'bourgeois' oppressors...

...As a result, the peoples of Europe haven't a clue about the future—or the present—of European integration...

...The average leader of the EU will hear the phrase "not as nauseating as fascism," and say, "Whoa...

...In Tocqueville's time, maybe...

...Will the EU be a unitary state...

...But the German constitution is (thank goodness) designed to stifle rather than promote creativity, more suited to governing than to nation-building...

...But there is no guarantee that local elites can resist an inexorable centralization of powers, for the local downtrodden are constantly "going over their heads," appealing to higher authorities both for redress of grievances and for relief from the humiliation of being ruled by people they know...

...At times the European Union looks to other member states like Greater France...

...Sieden-top warns, though, that this latter vision of citizenship "treats people simply as role-players, and can lead to a political outcome which, if not as nauseating as fascism, takes an equally high toll of free-will and the human capacity for self-improvement...

...Ur-Euro-peans of the medieval cities treated others as individuals not because such treatment answered to a chain of reasoning but because they felt enjoined to do so by a God they loved or feared...

...where representative bodies are at issue, "persuasion" and accumulation of power are near synonyms...

...The former are based on utilitarianism...

...If non-democratic structures are being put into place under cover of democratic language, then it's pretty much what one would expect in the circumstances...

...For instance, Sieden-top writes, In the longer run, feudalism (which was assailed on many fronts) could not survive in Christian Europe, the norms of which rested on the contrary assumption of moral equality...

...Ennobling or not, enduring or transitory, simon-pure or unusually prone to hypocrisy, this new faith is one that political leaders do hew to with both love and fear...

...Power is perceived as lying always in the hands of les autres, and French history has been marked as a result by regular spasms of "direct action"—to use the French euphemism for political violence...

...But he is right to claim the cost of any misstep could be high...

...But what kind of government...

...Having left America in 1960, Siedentop seems oblivious to the new constitutional order that has arisen while he's been in England...

...This is a horror that the word "tyranny," as the Founding Fathers understood, doesn't quite encompass, and a reckoning with it must underlie any responsible constitution-making in our time, particularly in Europe...

...The EU capital at Brussels is now "an appendage of Paris and of the French political elite," and France gets its way on almost everything...

...A perverse example of local populations sacrificing their liberty because they prefer the "rule of strangers" is the smaller eastern European states immediately after World War II...

...Siedentop thinks Europeans need to acknowledge the Christian roots of their social and political habits in order to clear up this sort of confusion...

...Or: "To a surprising extent, American judges have been reluctant entrants into policy-making, but have been forced by some other characteristics of the American political system— in particular, by the reluctance of the elected branches of government to settle particularly controversial public issues such as abortion...

...He means "liberal," of course, in the classical European sense of individualistic freedom, not in the American one of progressive leftism...