by Tony Judt
But the gloss was paper thin. In the inflated housing market of Europe’s most overcrowded metropolis, the bus drivers, nurses, cleaners, schoolteachers, policemen and waiters who serviced the cosmopolitan new Britons could no longer afford to live near them and were constrained to find housing farther and farther away, commuting to work as best they could along the most crowded roads in Europe, or else on the country’s expensive and dilapidated rail network. Beyond the outer limits of Greater London, now extending its tentacular reach deep into the rural south-east, there was emerging a regional contrast unprecedented in recent English history.
At the end of the twentieth century, of England’s ten administrative regions only three (London, the South East, and East Anglia) reached or exceeded the national average wealth per capita. All the rest of the country was poorer, sometimes very much poorer indeed. The North East of England, once the heartland of the country’s mining and shipping industries, had a gross domestic product per head just 60 percent that of London. After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist Länder of Germany, the UK in 2000 was the largest beneficiary of European Union structural funds—which is a way of saying that parts of Britain were among the most deprived regions of the EU. The country’s modest overall employment figures, a much-advertised source of pride for Thatcherites and Blairites alike, were skewed by the disproportionate size of the thriving capital city: unemployment in the North of England remained much closer to the worst levels in continental Europe
The marked regional disparities of wealth and poverty in Britain had been exacerbated by ill-conceived public policies; but they were also a predictable consequence of the end of the industrial era. In that sense they were, so to speak, organic. In Germany, however, comparable disparities were a direct if unintended consequence of a political decision. The absorption of the eastern Länder into a unified Germany had cost the Federal Republic more than one thousand billion euros in transfers and subsidies between 1991 and 2004. But far from catching up to the West, the eastern region of Germany by the late Nineties had actually begun to fall further behind.
Private German firms had no incentive to locate in the East—in Saxony or Mecklenburg—when they could find better workers for lower wages (as well as a superior transportation infrastructure and local services) in Slovakia or Poland. Ageing populations, poor education, low purchasing power, the westward departure of skilled workers and an entrenched hostility to foreigners on the part of those left behind meant that eastern Germany was distinctly unappealing to outside investors who now had many other options. In 2004, unemployment in the former West Germany was 8.5 percent; in the east it exceeded 19 percent. In September of that year the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party won 9 percent of the vote and returned twelve deputies to the parliament of Saxony.
The gulf of mutual resentment separating Wessies from Ossies in Germany was not just about jobs and joblessness or wealth and poverty, though from the eastern perspective this was its most obvious and painful symptom. Germans, like everyone else in the new Europe, were increasingly divided by a novel set of distinctions that cut athwart conventional geographical or economic divides. To one side stood a sophisticated elite of Europeans: men and women, typically young, widely traveled and well-educated, who might have studied in two or even three different universities across the continent. Their qualifications and professions allowed them to find work anywhere across the European Union: from Copenhagen to Dublin, from Barcelona to Frankfurt. High incomes, low airfares, open frontiers and an integrated rail network (see below) favoured easy and frequent mobility. For the purposes of consumption, leisure and entertainment as well as employment this new class of Europeans traveled with confident ease across their continent—communicating, like medieval clercs wandering between Bologna, Salamanca and Oxford, in a cosmopolitan lingua franca: then Latin, now English.
On the other side of the divide were to be found those—still the overwhelming majority—who could not be part of this brave new continent or else did not (yet?) choose to join: millions of Europeans whose lack of skills, education, training, opportunity or means kept them firmly rooted where they were. These men and women, the villeins in Europe’s new medieval landscape, could not so readily benefit from the EU’s single market in goods, services and labour. Instead they remained bound to their country or their local community, constrained by unfamiliarity with distant possibilities and foreign tongues and often far more hostile to ‘Europe’ than their cosmopolitan fellow citizens.
There were two notable exceptions to this new international class distinction that was starting to blur the old national contrasts. For jobbing artisans and laborers from Eastern Europe, the new work opportunities in London or Hamburg or Barcelona blended seamlessly with older-established traditions of migrant labour and seasonal overseas employment. There had always been men (and it was mostly men) who traveled to distant countries to find work: ignorant of foreign languages, regarded with hostile suspicion by their hosts and in any case intent upon returning home with their carefully saved earnings. There was nothing uniquely European about that, and Slovak house-painters—like Turkish car-workers or Senegalese peddlers before them—were not likely to be found dining out in Brussels, vacationing in Italy or shopping in London. All the same, theirs, too, was now a distinctly European way of life.
The second exception was the British—or, rather, the notoriously Euroskeptic English. Propelled abroad by the meteorological shortcomings of their native skies and a post-Thatcher generation of budget airlines offering to ferry them anywhere in continental Europe, sometimes for less than the cost of a pub lunch, a new generation of Brits no better educated than their parents nevertheless entered the twenty-first century as some of the most widely traveled, if not exactly cosmopolitan, Europeans of them all. The irony of this juxtaposition of popular English disdain and mistrust for the institutions and ambitions of ‘Europe’ with a widespread national desire to spend their spare time and money there was not lost on Continental observers, for whom it remained a perplexing oddity.
But then the British—like the Irish—did not have to learn foreign languages. They already spoke English. Elsewhere in Europe linguistic resourcefulness (as noted above) was fast becoming the continent’s primary disjunctive identity tag, a measure of personal social standing and collective cultural power. In small countries like Denmark or the Netherlands, it had long been accepted that monolingualism in a tongue spoken by almost no-one else was a handicap the nation could no longer afford. Students at the University of Amsterdam now studied in English, while the most junior bank clerk in a provincial Danish town was expected to be able to handle with confidence a transaction conducted in English. It helped that in Denmark and the Netherlands, as in many small European countries, students and bank clerks alike would long since have become at least passively fluent from watching un-dubbed English-language programmes on television.
In Switzerland, where anyone who completed a secondary education often mastered three or even four local languages, it was nonetheless thought easier, as well as more tactful, to resort to English (no-one’s first language) when communicating with someone from another part of the country. In Belgium, too, where—as we have seen—it was far less common for Walloons or Flemings to be comfortably conversant with the other’s language, both sides would resort readily to English as a common communications medium.
In countries where regional languages—Catalan, for example, or Basque—were now officially taught, it was not uncommon for young people (‘Generation E’—for Europe—as it was popularly known) dutifully to learn the local language but to spend their spare time—as a gesture of adolescent revolt, social snobbery and enlightened self-interest—speaking English. The loser was not the minority language or dialect—which anyway had scant local past and no international future—but the national tongue of the surrounding state. With English as the default medium of choice, major languages were now being forced into the shadows. A
s a distinctively European language Spanish, like Portuguese or Italian, was no longer widely taught outside its homeland; it was preserved as a vehicle of communication beyond the Pyrenees only thanks to its status as an official language of the European Union.379
German, too, was fast losing its place in the European language league. A reading knowledge of German had once been mandatory for anyone participating in the international scientific or scholarly community. Together with French, German had also been a universal language of cultivated Europeans—and until the war it had been the more widespread of the two, a language in active daily use from Strasbourg to Riga.380 But with the destruction of the Jews, the expulsion of the Germans and the arrival of the Soviets, central and eastern Europe was turned abruptly away from the German language. An older generation in the cities continued to read and—infrequently—speak German; and in the isolated German communities of Transylvania and elsewhere it limped on as a marginal language of limited practical use. But everyone else learned—or at any rate was taught—Russian.
The association of the Russian language with Soviet occupation considerably restricted its appeal, even in countries like Czechoslovakia or Poland where linguistic contiguity made it accessible. Although citizens of the satellite states were obliged to study Russian, most people made little effort to master the language, much less speak it except when forced to do so.381 Within a few years of the fall of Communism it was already clear that one paradoxical effect of occupation by Germany and the Soviet Union had been to eradicate any sustained familiarity with their languages. In the lands that had for so long been trapped between Russia and Germany there was now only one foreign language that mattered. To be ‘European’ in eastern Europe after 1989, especially for the young, was to speak English.
For native German speakers in Austria, Switzerland or Germany itself, the steady provincializing of their language—to the point where even those whose own language derived closely from German, like the Dutch, no longer widely studied or understood it—was an accomplished fact and there was no point mourning the loss. In the course of the Nineties, major German firms like Siemens made a virtue of necessity and established English as their corporate working language. German politicians and business executives became notable for the ease with which they moved in anglophone circles.
The decline of French was another matter. As a language of commonplace daily use French had not played a significant role in Europe since the decline of the imperial aristocracies of the old regimes. Outside of France, only a few million Belgians, Luxemburgers and Swiss, together with pocket communities in the Italian Alps and the Spanish Pyrenees, used French as their native tongue—and many of them spoke it in dialect forms disparaged by the official guardians of the Académie Française. In strictly statistical terms, when compared to German—or Russian—French had long been on the European linguistic periphery.
But ever since the decline of Latin, French had been the language of cultivated cosmopolitan elites—and thus the European language par excellence. When, in the early years of the twentieth century, it was first proposed to introduce the teaching of French as part of the modern languages syllabus at Oxford University, more than one don opposed the idea on the plausible grounds that anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French. Well into the middle years of the century, comparable assumptions were still widely made—if not quite so boldly articulated—in academies and embassies everywhere. The present author can vouch for both the necessity and the sufficiency of French as a medium of communication among students from Barcelona to Istanbul as recently as 1970.
Within thirty years all that had changed. By the year 2000, French had ceased to be a reliable medium of international communication even among élites. Only in the UK, Ireland and Romania was it the recommended choice for schoolchildren embarking on a first foreign language—everyone else learnt English. In some parts of former Habsburg Europe, French was no longer even the second foreign language offered in schools, having been displaced by German. ‘Francophonie’—the worldwide community of French speakers, most of them in former colonies—remained a linguistic player on the world stage; but the decline of French in its European home was beyond dispute and probably beyond retrieval as well.
Even at the European Commission in Brussels, where French had been the dominant official language in the Community’s early years and where native French speakers in the bureaucracy thus exercised a significant psychological and practical advantage, things had changed. It was not so much the accession of Britain itself that brought about the shift—the seconded civil servants from London were all fluent in French—as the arrival of Scandinavians, who were fluent in English; the expansion (thanks to German unification and the accession of Austria) of the German-speaking community, now shedding its post-war reticence; and the prospect of new members from the East. Despite the use of simultaneous translators (to cover the 420 possible language combinations of the 25-member Union), communication in one of the Union’s three core languages was indispensable for anyone wishing to exercise real influence on policy and its implementation. And French was now in the minority.
Unlike the Germans, however, the French authorities did not respond by switching to English in order to ensure their commercial and political effectiveness. Although more and more young French people studied English and traveled abroad in order to use it, the official position became decidedly defensive: no doubt in part because of the uncomfortable coincidence of the decline of French language usage with the diminution of the country’s international role—something the UK had been spared because Americans too spoke English.
The initial French response to intimations of linguistic diminution was to insist that others continue to speak their language: as President Georges Pompidou had put it early in the 1970s, ‘Should French ever cease to be the primary working language of Europe, then Europe itself would never be fully European’. However, it soon became clear that this was a lost cause and intellectuals and politicians opted instead for a siege mentality: if French were no longer spoken beyond the country’s borders, then at least it must have an exclusive monopoly within them. A petition signed in July 1992 by 250 prominent personalities—including the writers Régis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut, Jean Dutourd, Max Gallo and Philippe Sollers—demanded that the government require by law the exclusive use of French in conferences and meetings held on French soil, films made with French funding, etc. Otherwise, they warned, ‘les angloglottes’ will have us all speaking English ‘or rather, American’.
French governments of every political persuasion were all too happy to oblige, if only pour le forme. ‘A battle for French is indispensable’, declared the Socialist Minister Catherine Tasca. ‘In international organizations, in the sciences, and even on the walls of our cities’. Two years later a conservative culture minister, Jacques Toubon, took up the theme, rendering explicit what Tasca had left unstated: that the object of anxiety was not just the decline of French but also and above all the hegemony of English. It would be better if the French learned something else—anything else: ‘Why’, asked Toubon, ‘should our children learn an impoverished English—something they can anyway pick up at any age—when they should be acquiring a deeper appreciation of German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese or Russian?’
Toubon’s target—what he contemptuously dubbed the ‘mercantile English’ that was displacing French (‘the primary capital, the symbol of the dignity of the French people’)—was already moving out of reach even as he took aim. Intellectuals like Michel Serres might complain portentously that the streets of Paris during the Occupation had fewer names in German than they had today in English, but a younger generation reared on films, television shows, video games, internet sites and international pop music—and speaking a mobile French slang full of borrowed and adapted words and phrases—could not have cared less.
Legislation intended to oblige the French to speak French to one another wa
s one thing—albeit honored largely in the breach. But the attempt to require foreign scholars, businessmen, think-tankers, lawyers, architects and everyone else to express themselves in French—or to understand it when spoken by others—anytime they gathered on French soil could only have one outcome: they would take their business and their ideas somewhere else. By the turn of the new century the truth had sunk in and most (though by no means all) French public figures and policy makers had resigned themselves to the harsh realities of twenty-first-century Europe. The new European élites, whoever they might be, did not and would not speak French: ‘Europe’ was no longer a French project.
In order to understand what sort of a place Europe was at the end of the second millennium it is tempting to trace, as we have done, its internal divisions and rifts and ruptures—echoing, unavoidably, the continent’s profoundly schismatic modern history and the incontrovertible variety of its overlapping communities, identities and histories. But Europeans’ sense of who they were and how they lived was shaped just as much by what bound them as by what divided them: and they were now bound together more closely than ever before.
The best illustration of the ‘ever-closer union’ into which Europeans had bundled themselves—or, more accurately, been bundled by their enlightened political leaders—was to be found in the ever-denser network of communications to which it gave rise. The infrastructure of intra-European transportation—bridges, tunnels, roads, trains and ferries—had expanded quite beyond recognition in the course of the last decades of the century. Europeans now had the fastest and (with the exception of the justly maligned British rail network) the safest system of railways in the world.
