Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  Moreover, the common European-American values upon which Timothy Garton Ash’s argument rests may not be quite as common as he suggests. In its widespread religiosity and the place of God in its public affairs, its suspicion of dissent, its fear of foreign influence, its unfamiliarity with alien lands, and its reliance upon military strength when dealing with them, the U.S. does indeed have much in common with other countries; but none of them is in Europe. When the international treaty to ban land mines was passed by the UN in 1997 by a vote of 142-0, the U.S. abstained; in company with Russia and a handful of other countries we have still not ratified it. The U.S. is one of only two states (the other is Somalia) that have failed to ratify the 1989 Convention on Children’s Rights. Our opposition to the international Biological Weapons Convention is shared by China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Cuba, and Iran.

  Abolition of the death penalty is a condition for EU membership, whereas the U.S. currently executes prisoners on a scale matched only in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Congo. American opposition to an International Criminal Court has been supported in the UN and elsewhere by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, Israel, and Egypt. The American doctrine of “preventive war” now finds its fraternal counterpart in Muscovite talk of “preventive counterrevolution.”19 And as for the United Nations itself, the jewel in the crown of international agencies set in place after World War II by an earlier generation of American leaders: As I write (2005), a scurrilous, high-decibel campaign is being mounted from Washington to bring down Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, and cripple his institution.

  So what can Europe do? In the first place, resist the temptation to make a virtue of the present tensions. It is pointless to deny their existence. In past eras the role of Europe’s “other”—the close neighbor against whom Europeans measure their own distinctive identity—was variously occupied by Turkey and Russia; today that role is being filled by the United States. But like Garton Ash, I think it would be a mistake to followJürgen Habermas’s advice and try to build European unity around “transatlantic value differences.” Europeans certainly need to find a purpose and define their common role, but there are better ways to do it.

  One would be to get on with ratifying their proposed constitution or a workable substitute. This document arouses paranoia and anxiety in Washington (and London); but it is actually quite dull and anodyne. Much of it consists of practical prescriptions for decision-making procedures in a cumbersome body of twenty-five-plus separate sovereign states. The constitution also strengthens the role of European courts and extends the EU’s cross-border competence in criminal law and policing (a wholly laudable objective for anyone serious about fighting terrorists). But otherwise it just gives substance and application to the EU’s claim to “coordinate the economic and employment policies of the member states.” It is not a very inspiring document—its leading drafter, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, is no Thomas Jefferson—but it would do much practical good.

  Above all, it would enable Europe to continue playing to its international strengths in spite of American obstruction20 and the Bush administration’s efforts to pick off or otherwise pressure individual EU member states. For the EU today isn’t just an interesting blueprint for interstate governance without the drawbacks of supranational sovereignty. Europe experienced the twentieth century—invasion, occupation, civil war, anarchy, massacres, genocide, and the descent into barbarism—to a degree unmatched anywhere else. The risks inherent in a “war of choice” (Iraq), or the abandonment of international agencies in favor of unilateral initiative, or an excessive reliance on military power, are thus clearer to Europeans than to most other peoples: “Europeans want to be sure that there is no adventure in the future. They have had too much of that.”21 The United States, by contrast, had no direct experience of the worst of the twentieth century—and is thus regrettably immune to its lessons.

  American-style belligerent patriotism, as Garton Ash notes, is rare in contemporary Europe. This dislike of bellicosity goes well beyond traditional pacifism: Europeans no longer even think about interstate relations in martial terms. But pace American critics, this makes Europeans and their model more rather than less effective when it comes to addressing international crises. The U.S. is still rather good at the old-fashioned art of making war. But war making is the exception in modern international affairs. The real challenge is preventing war, making peace—and keeping it. And this is something at which Europe is going to be increasingly adept.

  The countries of the EU already provide the largest share of the world’s peacekeepers and international policemen. Europeans have a real, if limited, military capacity—though they will need to commit more resources to the planned 60,000-man “Euro-force” if it is to be effective. The best European troops—for example, the British army—have been trained for decades to work with occupied and warring civil populations, a skill with which the U.S. Army is shockingly unfamiliar. It will be a long time before the EU develops and implements a common foreign policy—though the new constitution would facilitate that, if only by creating a European foreign minister authorized to speak for the whole union. But when it does at last speak with a single voice in international affairs, the EU will wield a lot of power.

  The reason is not that the EU will be rich or big—though it already is both. The U.S. is rich and big. And one day China may be richer and bigger. Europe will matter because of the cross-border template upon which contemporary Europe is being constructed. “Globalization” isn’t primarily about trade or communications, economic monopolies or even empire. If it were, it would hardly be new: Those aspects of life were already “globalizing” a hundred years ago.22 Globalization is about the disappearance of boundaries—cultural and economic boundaries, physical boundaries, linguistic boundaries—and the challenge of organizing our world in their absence. In the words of Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the UN’s director of peacekeeping operations: “Having lost the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what creates the bond between humans that constitute a community.”23

  To their own surprise and occasional consternation, Europeans have begun to do this: to create a bond between human beings that transcends older boundaries and to make out of these new institutional forms something that really is a community. They don’t always do it very well, and there is still considerable nostalgia in certain quarters for those old frontier posts. But something is better than nothing; and nothing is just what we shall be left with if the fragile international accords, treaties, agencies, laws, and institutions that we have erected since 1945 are allowed to rot and decline—or, worse, are deliberately brought low. As things now stand, boundary breaking and community making are something that Europeans are doing better than anyone else. The United States, trapped once again in what Tocqueville called its “perpetual utterance of self-applause,” isn’t even trying.

  This essay was the culminating article in a series published in the New York Review of Books between 2002 and 2006 in which I discussed the U.S. under George W. Bush, its declining international standing, and the counterexample of Europe. It may be of interest that the most heartfelt response to this piece came from American readers deeply offended at aspersions cast upon the image and products of Starbucks.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER XXIII

  1 The U.S. television network that recently broadcast a passing glimpse at Janet Jackson’s anatomy was excoriated for its wanton lapse of taste; but the avalanche of accompanying commercials for products designed to enhance male potency passed quite without comment. The female breast, it seems, can rot a nation’s moral core; but malfunctioning penises are wholesome family fare.

  2 See Robin Blackburn, Banking on Death: Or, Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions (London, New York: Verso, 2002) 201, table 3.2.

  3 For the 2003 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report, issued by the OECD on December 6, 2004, see www.pisa.oecd.org.

  4 See Andrew Sharpe, Appendix T
able 2, “Output per House Levels in the OECD Countries Relative to the United States” for 2003; Centre for the Study of Living Standards, International Productivity Monitor, 9 (Fall 2004), at www.csls.ca/ipm/9/sharpe-tables.pdf.

  5 Note, too, that the steadily rising cost of private medical insurance in the U.S. puts at least as much of a burden on American firms as social taxation and welfare privileges place upon their European counterparts—while providing none of the attendant social benefits.

  6 Katrin Benahold, “Love of Leisure, and Europe’s Reasons,” New York Times, July 29, 2004.

  7 Following the OECD definition of a family income, less than 50 percent of the mean personal income of the nation.

  8 Appetizing or not, the American economic model could never be replicated anywhere else. Americans are the world’s consumers of last resort. But their national deficits on budget and current account are reaching unprecedented levels. The collapsing dollar is sustained only by foreigners’ willingness to hold it: Americans are currently spending other people’s money on other people’s products. Were the U.S. any other country, it would by now be in the unforgiving hands of the International Monetary Fund.

  9 The Deserted Village (1770).

  10 As is Reid’s description of David Beckham as “Europe’s Michael Jordan.” Beckham is a journeyman footballer with a first-class hairdo and a celebrity wife. He would never have made the cut in the days of Pele, Johann Cruyff, or Ferenc Puskas. His prominence on European sports pages illustrates the power of transcontinental marketing, but in this as other respects Beckham is just a depressing monument to the spirit of our age: He is, in Camus’s phrase, a “prophète vide pour temps médiocre.” The pertinent analogy here is not Michael Jordan but Dennis Rodman.

  11 In any case, America’s present indebtedness is at least as much a lien on the future as Europe’s welfare commitments. And Americans who point fingers at the European pension gap should recall that were United Airlines, General Motors, or any other semisolvent company to abandon its unfundable pension commitments, it is U.S. taxpayers who would be left with the tab.

  12 For a thoughtful and rather more optimistic account of the French case, see Herman Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

  13 Perhaps not so very harmonious: Already West European leaders are asking why they should make generous budget transfers to new members like Slovakia, only to see the latter use these subsidies to hold down their local corporate tax rates and thereby steal business and factories from their more expensive Western colleagues.

  14 The Turkish dilemma is complicated, and well-meaning European liberals can find themselves on both sides of the debate. For a sensitive and cogently reasoned summary of the case for keeping Turkey at a certain distance, see the interview with Robert Badinter, a former French minister of justice and long-standing Europhile, “L’adhésion de la Turquie serait une décision aborrante,” in Le Figaro, December 13, 2004.

  15 At the last Labour Party conference, rather than try to defend his reasons for going to war in Iraq, Blair simply informed the audience that he “believes,” that they must share his “faith,” and that in any case (like Martin Luther: “Here I stand, I can do no other”) he would not budge.

  16 Indeed he cites a popular joke: Britain was promised that Blair’s Third Way would bring with it American universities and German prisons— what it is actually getting are American prisons and German universities.

  17 Frederick Studemann, “US Conservatives Cast Wary Eye at EU Treaty,” Financial Times, November 5, 2004. The new tone of anxiety about a renascent Europe can even be found in august journals of mainstream foreign policy debate. See, for example, Jeffrey L. Cimbalo, “Saving NATO from Europe,” in Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004.

  18 See Bowman Cutter, Peter Rashish, and Paula Stern, “Washington Wants Economic Reform in Europe,” Financial Times, November 22, 2004.

  19 The phrase is used by Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovski to describe President Putin’s emerging strategy for addressing “containment” challenges at Russia’s edges. I am indebted to Ivan Krastev of the Central European University in Budapest for this reference, in his unpublished essay on “Europe’s Fatal Attraction.”

  20 The U.S. continues to impede European efforts to reach a nuclear settlement with Iran. Even on such a volatile issue, Washington has been more concerned about the risks of a successful European initiative than the benefits of a regional settlement.

  21 Alfons Verplaetse (governor of the National Bank of Belgium).

  22 On this, see the magisterial opening paragraphs of John Maynard Keynes’s essay The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Penguin, 1995).

  23 Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-State, trans. by Victoria Elliott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 139.

  ENVOI

  The Social Question Redivivus

  The little town of Longwy has a ghostly air. For many years it was an important center of iron and steel manufacturing in the industrial basin of the northern Lorraine and a proud stronghold of Socialist and Communist unions. Since 1975, however, the local industry, like steelworking everywhere in Western Europe, has been in trouble. Today the steelworks are gone, and so, at first sight, are their workers. At noon on a working day the town is quiet, with empty shops, a few sad-looking bars, and a deserted railway station occupied by a gaggle of drunks. The erstwhile steelworkers, grown old, wait out their lives in bars and cafés, or else stay at home with the television. Their wives and daughters have part-time, nonunion work either in new factories and offices distributed in the fields outside the town or else at commercial centers deposited optimistically at crossroads some twenty miles away. Their sons have no work at all and mill around at these same commercial centers looking at once menacing and pitiful.

  There are towns like Longwy all over Europe, from Lancashire to Silesia, from the Asturian mountains to the central Slovakian plain. What makes the shattered industrial heartland of northeastern France distinctive is the political revolution that has occurred there. In the legislative elections of 1978, when the Left was defeated nationwide, the voters of Longwy returned a Communist deputy to Paris, as usual. Twenty years later, in the legislative elections of May 1997, the right-wing National Front—which did not exist in 1978—came within three thousand votes of overtaking the local Communist candidate. A little farther east, in the similarly depressed industrial towns and villages around Sarrebourg that abut the German frontier, the National Front did even better: moving ahead of both Communists and Socialists, its candidates secured more than 22 percent of the vote in half the local constituencies.

  The neo-Fascist right, whose program constitutes one long scream of resentment—at immigrants, at unemployment, at crime and insecurity, at “Europe,” and in general at “them” who have brought it all about—did better still in the decayed industrial valley of the upper Loire west of Lyons, where one in five voters favored it, and best of all in the towns of Mediterranean France. In the greater Marseilles region nearly one voter in four chose the candidates of the National Front. If France had a system of proportional representation, the front would have not one but seventy-seven deputies in the new French parliament (double its number under a short-lived system of proportional representation introduced for the 1986 elections), and the Left would not have a parliamentary majority.

  All these regions, and many others where the Far Right is now the leading local party, were until very recently strongholds of the Left. The demographics of most such places have not altered significantly—former Communists, not newcomers, are now voting for Jean-Marie Le Pen. The community of these men and women has been destroyed, and they are looking for someone to blame and someone to follow. This is not Wigan Pier, the world of British industrial unemployment chronicled by George Orwell between the wars. There the economy buckled and the state withdrew from all but its most minimal commitments, but the community h
eld fast and was even strengthened in its shared belief in itself and the justice of its claims. In postindustrial France (or Britain and elsewhere) the economy has moved on while the state, so far, has stayed behind to pick up the tab; but the community has collapsed, and with it a century-long political culture that combined pride in work, local social interdependence, and intergenerational continuity.

  It is ironic but not mystifying that Le Pen, like other European demagogues, picks up some of his strongest support in frontier districts. Longwy and Sarrebourg are right next to the vanishing borders, once so contested, between France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. In today’s Europe you can live in one country, shop in another, and seek employment in a third. But the free movement of people, money, and goods that is so central to Europe’s much-advertised entry into a postnational, global era has not brought prosperity to this region—indeed, the most salient economic effect on the locality has been the loss of jobs in the customs service. The Europe debate, in France and elsewhere, is thus readily cast in terms of security, stability, and protection versus vulnerability and change, with Brussels serving as a lightning rod for a broad range of criticisms directed at globalization and the hegemony of the Anglo-American model of minimal state and maximized profit—what the French nervously and revealingly label la pensée unique.

  In fact the impact of a global economy on how Europeans, at least, will choose to conduct their lives has been exaggerated. The mantra “global market forces,” the latest weapon in the conceptual armory of the forces of change, does duty on a variety of fronts, replacing the superannuated ordnance of progress, inevitability, historical necessity, modernization, and so forth. But, like them, it promises and assumes too much. To take the most popular example: When applied as part of a critique of European social policies, global market forces are presumed to require that the high-wage economies of Western Europe rethink themselves, and fast, lest jobs and investment flee the pampered, overpriced European continent in search of cheaper labor and higher rates of growth elsewhere, notably in Asia. But economic growth rates among the Asian “tigers” are slowing down, and understandably; like the high growth rates in postwar Socialist countries, they depended on the extensive mobilization and exploitation of resources, human and natural. An indefinitely increasing input of labor and local capital is not sustainable—and this even before we consider that such rates of transformation are only achieved, as in the countries of real existing socialism, by vigorous control and repression.