Fools’ paradise
Mark Steyn says that complacent Europhiles just love the status quo, but the EU is a solution to yesterday’s problems New Hampshire
When to the moment I shall say ‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’ Then mayst thou fetter me straightway Then to the abyss will I depart!
Most of us bandy the term ‘Faustian’ fairly loosely I do myself in this week’s Star Wars review. But Goethe’s version of the actual bet is much more particular than it’s generally summarised as: when Mephistopheles shows up, he promises he’ll do anything Faust wants of him. But if Faust ever becomes so content, so happy with ‘the moment’ that he wants time to linger awhile — that he wants to live in that moment for ever — then he will depart to the abyss and the devil will have his soul for all eternity.
That’s a bigger problem today — not the devil-getting-your-soul part (we’ll wait and see on that) but the living-in-the-moment bit.
Permanence is the illusion of every age, but it’s especially powerful in our time, reinforced by electronic media and other marvels that make ours much more of a present-tense culture than that of our grandfathers or great-great-grandfathers. That was the some what self-congratulatory message of the VE Day anniversary: 60 years ago, the Germans were operating a vast bureaucracy created to process the mass murder of Jews; the rest of the Continent was at each other’s throats. Now a bare half-century later Europeans live in harmony, spending so much on cradle-to grave welfare that their decrepit militaries couldn’t invade each other even if they want ed to, which, given that it would cut into their two months’ paid holiday a year, they don’t. True, the Germans are now as obnoxiously pacifist as once they were aggressively mili tarist, but who can argue that if one has to err in one direction or another, today’s isn’t preferable?
So ‘Europhiles’ say to the moment, ‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’ That’s what the European constitution boils down to — an attempt to freeze the moment, to make time stand still in a permanent EUtopia so fair it should be constitutionally required to linger eternally. Virtually the entire European governing class has made no useful contribution to the French and Dutch referendum cam paigns except to insist that this moment is for ever — or as the Netherlands’ foreign minis ter Bernard Bot reprimanded his ingrate electorate, ‘You have to understand the nature of the times in which you live.’ The electors of North Rhine-Westphalia certainly understand the nature of the times in which they live. If it were just a matter of kicking Gerhard Schröder’s sorry ass around the room, I’d be all in favour of last Sunday’s election result. But, in fact, voters in the Ruhr were punishing his party for their temerity in proposing even a teensy-weensy, tentative, tepid reform of their arthritic welfare state. They may have ended four decades of SPD rule, but they did so in order to vote against change. The Christian Democrats and Liberal Democrats are merely passing beneficiaries of the electorate’s determination to live in denial for as long as they can get away with it. It was a vote for the present tense, a vote to say to the moment linger awhile, another decade or three.
But why would it? It’s a moment. Sixtythree years ago, having taken Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, the Japanese tied 22 British watchkeepers to trees, beheaded them and then burned their bodies in a pit. ‘The Japs were bastards,’ a Canadian MP observed the other day, and promptly got hammered by the media for his insensitivity (‘bastards’) and racial epithets (‘Japs’), even though, historically speaking, his remarks were incontrovertible. We object to him only because, from our moment, we can no longer truly imagine that other moment, a mere six decades ago, when the uniformed Japanese military carried on like Iraqi ‘insurgents’ and, even more unimaginably, we settled things by nuking ’em. True, it’s hard to imagine circumstances in which the Japs will ever again be hacking off British heads or American nukes will be falling on Japanese cities. But that in itself should make us appreciate that the assumptions of our own age will prove just as transient.
In 1914, they thought the Habsburgs and Romanovs were for ever. Seventy years on, the experts insisted the Commies were likewise here to stay. As big-time Ivy League his tory prof. Arthur Schlesinger put it in 1982, ‘those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse’ are ‘wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves’. Another 20 years and despite the splintering of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the birth of free(ish) states from the Baltics to Central Asia, the great thinkers move smoothly on and insist now that it’s the Middle East or Afghanistan or the Korea peninsula that will never change.
The Times this week ran an intriguing interview with Europe’s wannabe founding father, M. Giscard. ‘If France votes “no”, that might encourage a British “yes”,’ the sly old dog told the paper. ‘The British might then say, “Now we can take the lead in Europe”.’ What a wag. The French ‘non’ lobby is driven mainly by a bizarre fear that the Euro-constitution will impose ‘Anglo-Saxon capitalism’ on the Gallic paradise. Giscard’s argument that, au contraire, it’s voting ‘non’ that will deliver Europe to ‘les Anglo-Saxons’ is so nutty it just might work. But, either way, the salient feature of the Euro-constitution debate is how sour and joyless it is: in Soviet terms, Europe seems to have got mired in Brezhnev-era stagnation without ever quite experiencing the bright new Leninist dawn. Whether or not the constitution wiggles through, I’d say the entire European project is much nearer to 1992 than 1917. Even the shrill argument that the Euro-constitution is all that stands between the Continent and a new Holocaust confirms the view that the EU is a solution to yesterday’s problems.
But if you’re not buffeted by war and coups and revolution, it’s harder to spot history on the march and easier to swallow the illusion of permanence. Sick in bed a couple of months back, I started reading A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World by Will Hutton, and found it such a laugh I was soon hurling my medication away and doing cartwheels round the room. Hutton, you’ll recall, was a sort of éminence grise to Tony Blair, at least in his pre-warmongering phase. He’s the master of the dead language of statism that distinguishes the complacent Europhile from a good percentage of Americans, not all of them Republicans.
That said, even as a fully paid-up Eurobore, Hutton is at pains to establish how much he loves America: ‘I enjoy Sheryl Crow and Clint Eastwood alike, delight in Woody Allen.... ’ I’d wager he’s faking at least two of these enthusiasms. As for the third, Woody Allen is the man the French government turned to for assistance with a commercial intended to restore their nation’s image in America after anger at post-9/11 Gallic obstructionism began to have commercial implications for France. In the advertisement, Woody said he disliked the notion of renaming French fries ‘freedom fries’. What next, he wondered. Freedom kissing? That the French government could think that an endorsement by Woody Allen would improve their standing with the American people is itself a sad testament to the ever widening Atlantic chasm.
But, having brandished his credentials, Hutton says that it’s his ‘affection for the best of America that makes me so angry that it has fallen so far from the standards it expects of itself’. Many Americans of Left and Right could write a book like that but, as things transpire, the great Euro-thinker is not arguing that America is betraying the Founding Fathers, but that the Founding Fathers themselves got it hopelessly wrong. This becomes explicit when he compares the American and French Revolutions, and decides the latter was better because instead of the radical individualism of the 13 colonies the French promoted ‘a new social contract’.
Well, you never know. It may be the defects of America’s Founders that help explain why the US has lagged so far behind France in technological innovation, economic growth, military performance, standard of living, etc. Entranced by his Euro-moment, Hutton insists that ‘all Western democracies subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are liberal or leftist’. Given that New Hampshire has been a continuous democracy for two centuries longer than Germany, this seems a doubtful proposition. It would be more accurate to say that almost all European nations subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are statist. Or, as Hutton has it, ‘the European tradition is much more mindful that men and women are social animals and that individual liberty is only one of a spectrum of values that generate a good society.’ Precisely. And it’s the willingness to subordinate individual liberty to what Hutton calls ‘the primacy of society’ that’s blighted the Continent for over a century: statism — or ‘the primacy of society’ — is what fascism, Nazism, communism and European Union all have in common. In fairness, after the first three, European Union seems a comparatively benign strain of the disease — not a Blitzkrieg, just a Bitzkrieg, an accumulation of fluffy trivial pan-European directives that nevertheless takes for granted that the natural order is a world in which every itsybitsy activity is licensed and regulated and constitutionally defined by government. That’s why Will Hutton feels almost physically insecure when he’s in one of the spots on the planet where the virtues of the state religion are questioned. ‘In a world that is wholly private,’ he says of America, ‘we lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our individual subjective values to guide us.’ He deplores the First Amendment and misses government-regulated media, which in the EU ensures that all public expression is within approved parameters (Left to centre-Left). ‘Europe,’ he explains, ‘acts to ensure that television and radio conform to public interest criteria.’ ‘Public interest criteria’ doesn’t mean criteria that the public decide is in their interest. It means that the elite — via various appointed bodies — decide what the public’s interest is. As Will Hutton is a member of the elite, this suits him fine. But it’s never going to catch on in America. On the other hand, while America may be a swaggering imperialist cowboy when it comes to bombing and shooting and so on, it’s a shrinking violet when the dust settles: Britain bequeathed Westminster constitutions to dozens of countries. America, by contrast, apparently has no desire to seed US-style constitutions around the world, and seems content to let UN agencies impose quasi-European social democratic models on new nations. Unlike the blinkered but confident Hutton demanding that the world submit to failed Euro-nostrums, America recoils from making the most of its unique moment.
Europeans never feel obliged to defend their mystical belief in statism: though they claim to be post-Christian rationalists, it’s mostly a matter of blind faith. That’s what Goethe understands: that a devotion to one’s own moment is a false religion. I’m not sanguine about America’s prospects, but the great thing about US federalism as opposed to European centralisation is that you get to measure competing philosophies side by side. This week, for example, San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, was bemoaning the ‘kid crisis’ in his town: it has the worst adultchild ratio of any US city — just 14.5 per cent of the population is under 18. ‘It goes to the heart and soul of what I think a city is about — it’s about generations, it’s about renewal and it’s about aspirations,’ he said. ‘To me, that’s what children represent and that’s what families represent and we just can’t sit back idly and let it go away.’ It’s a bit late for that. San Francisco hasn’t been ‘about generations’ or ‘about renewal’ for four decades. Instead, it’s lived in its moment, selling itself to America as a Mecca for a cult of self-worship. That’s fine as long as it lasts, but by definition it can’t last long — and then ‘to the abyss will I depart’. While San Francisco looks as though it’s been inflicted with a Biblical curse of mass barrenness, the Republican red states continue to outbreed the blue, with grim implications for the Democratic party. The problem with Europe is that there are no red states except Muslim Albania.
M. Giscard is 79, roughly the same age that some of those British watchkeepers in the Gilbert Islands would be now if they’d survived their capture by the Japanese. It’s only the vicissitudes of fate that make one a footnote to an incomprehensible past and allows the other to strut around claiming to be the man of the future, ‘Europe’s Jefferson’. Europe could use a Jefferson right now, but such a figure would be unlikely to meet Will Hutton’s ‘public interest criteria’. Whatever the French and Dutch vote, a culture that subordinates the will of the people to the ‘primacy of society’ is unlikely to take no for an answer. The EU’s moment is already over but, like the band at the grand balls in St Petersburg in 1917, nobody knows any new tunes.
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