POLITICS
Why British Euro-enthusiasm is in a class of its own
NOEL MALCOLM
When I announced in this column that I was planning to write a book called The Psychopathology of Euro-enthusiasm, I later discovered that several readers had taken my little joke seriously. People I met would ask solicitously how my research was going, and Euro-enthusiasts of my acquaintance would show a marked reluct- ance to discuss their emotional lives or their religious beliefs in my presence. I was almost beginning to think that there might be a book in it after all. And now the two articles in last week's Spectator on Arabists and Orientalists have all but convinced me. If Professor Edward Said can become famous for a book entitled Orientalism, surely there is room for one teeny-weeny volume on Europeanism?
Professor Said's theory is based on a sort of sophisticated Marxism. He thinks of Orientalism as a neo-imperialism of the mind: the Orientalist appropriates the cul- ture of the East, while never ceasing to regard it, deep down, as something diffe- rent and therefore inferior. The European- ist (by which I mean the professional Euro-enthusiast) is quite the reverse of this. He regards the culture and institutions of Europe as different, and therefore superior. If imperialism is the sadism of international politics, the expression of a will to dominate, then Europeanism must be its masochistic streak.
But it is class, much more than sex, that provides the best model for explaining what makes Euro-enthusiasm tick. Indeed the odd thing is that although class-based Marxist theories provide a pretty feeble explanation of why anybody ever became an Orientalist, they are very close to the bone when it comes to accounting for the origins of Euro-enthusiasm. And this in turn may help to explain why campaigning Europeanism in British politics is such a virulently priggish phenomenon. In less class-obsessed societies, such as Italy or Germany, being a Euro-enthusiast is just an extended version of other forms of well-meaning high-mindedness — like being in favour of the United Nations or Esperanto. But in this country there is usually more to it than that; one senses that the Europeanists are working off other, more deeply ingrained resentments. To adapt Ian Buruma's comment in this jour- nal last week: whenever a Euro-enthusiast extols the Other, it might be good to examine his attitude to his Own.
For many Englishmen, classlessness be- gins at Calais. Not that foreign societies do not have any class distinctions — merely that we are not interested in their distinc- tions, and they are not concerned with ours, or lack the skill to observe them. In the eyes of the foreigner, all Englishmen (with the exception of a few football hooligans and beer-and-sangria slobs) have always been respectable middle class. And this, for many people chafing at the wrong end of the English class system one or two generations ago, was a wonderfully liberat- ing experience. If Mr Edward Heath's long-promised autobiography ever gets written and published, I suspect that one of the most revelatory sections will be the one where he describes his summer holiday in Germany in 1937, when he stayed with an avuncular retired schoolmaster in Bavaria. The origins of Mr Heath's sense of 'Euro- pean' identity go back, I would guess, to that golden summer in a social world which neither knew nor cared what the precise significance was of his strangulated vowels.
This variety of class-influenced Euro- enthusiasm is fairly predictable and famil- iar. It is, after all, only a sort of liberal- minded equivalent of that socialist interna- tionalism which used to rush to the heads of Liverpudlian trade unionists after they had been treated as important delegates in Warsaw or Odessa. But there is another kind of class-related European sentinient in this country which has probably played a larger role in the 'pro-Europe' wing of the post-war Conservative Party. This syn- drome occurs with people who can experi- ence the class system from the other end of the telescope; the Euro-enthusiasm here is not a matter of escaping from class pre- judice, but of expressing it in a more subtly sublimated way.
The generation I am thinking of here let us call it the Hurd-Howe generation attained adulthood just in the aftermath of the second world war. It was a period when many of the cosmopolitan pleasures which the upper classes in this country had taken for granted, such as good restaurants, good wine and holidays in the south of France, had become precious luxuries. So much of English life seemed to have become grey, cramped, reduced and rationed — and if not proletarianised, then at least lower- middle-class-ised. But at the same time the sense of social duty among the public school education classes had never been stronger; to make sneering remarks about the tenantry was almost the sin against the Holy Ghost. So when people found that London restaurants with French names were now serving the sort of stuff that would have been Joe Lyons fare before the war, these people did not sneer at it for being lower-class food; they sneered at it for being English food instead. And when they 'went into Europe', if only in a battered Morris Minor in the early 1950s, and found that even on their meagre funds they could drink good wines and go to the opera, instead of thinking of themselves as enjoying the traditional pleasures of the upper classes, they thought they were discovering an exciting new culture identi- ty. They were not little latter-day Milords, oh no; they were Europeans.
Those, then, were the two high roads to Europe: the escape from class snobbery on the one hand, and the sublimation of it on the other. So can we assume that if Mr Major's dream of a classless society is realised, the hidden springs of Euro- enthusiasm will falter and cease? Probably not. For in the intervening years the spread of mass tourism has already blurred the difference between those two high roads, turning them into a single multi-lane Auto- bahn, the fast route to never-never land.
And the cavalcade of Europeanism which trundles down that road is such that even the dullest official will start to feel important once he has clambered abroad. Here, for example, is a paragraph from last week's Independent on Sunday:
The other day I was in Germany for a conference on inter-regional co-operation. Four prosperous regions in the Community, Baden-Wurttemberg, Rhone-Alpes, Catalo- nia and Lombardy form an association. Linked by optical fibre cable, they feed each other with research and development data, training exchanges and high-tech industrial projects, all in a rich sauce of visiting theatres, orchestras and exhibitions.
Forget about old-fashioned food and wine; here is a diet of data on which a thousand officials can feast like termites. But that particular pleasure would take a second volume of The Psychopathology of Euro- enthusiasm to explain. More research is needed — to be generously funded in ecus, I hope, and published by a committee.
Previous page
