Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  The streets are decorated not with frescoes but with trash cans and billboards featuring vaguely pornographic advertisements for Italy’s three competing cell phone companies, or for competing funeral homes (funerals with honor, or funerals at the lowest prices, guaranteed). There are few trees in the suburbs, no public spaces—and where there are public spaces, they are nearly empty, with no cafés, no churches. The piazza is no longer the center of civic life. And while the architecture in the historic city centers is carefully preserved by diligent curators, their streets and walls are covered with graffiti. No one cleans it off.26

  Italy’s coastlines, too, have been desecrated from end to end with urban sprawl, industrial parks, landfills, and unremittingly ugly tourist resorts. The waters have been polluted, often by sewage. This is not the inevitable consequence of economic development: The California coastlines are by comparison pristine, and California’s economy is roughly the size of Italy’s. This is a monument to greed, and shortsighted greed at that: by permitting the beauty of the coasts to be destroyed, Italians have ensured that in due course they will cease to be tourist attractions.

  But it is not just greed and shortsightedness at work here—Italians have not become more greedy and shortsighted than they were when The Merchant of Venice was written. Italy has clearly experienced a change in some kind of collective cultural vision. In the age of Michelangelo and Leonardo, the city planners of Florence supervised the development of the city in minute detail, concerned, above all, to cultivate the absolute value of absolute beauty. When Stendhal visited Florence, he reported that

  the tide of emotion was as intense as a religious feeling. My soul . . . was in a state of trance. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its very essence close at hand. . . . I had reached that most high degree of sensitivity in which the divine intimations of art merge with the sensuality of emotion. . . . I was seized by a fierce palpitation of the heart. I walked on fearing that I might fall to the ground.5

  In the late 1970s, the chief of psychiatry at Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova Hospital described a phenomenon she termed Stendhal’s syndrome—an intoxication with Florence’s high Renaissance beauty so intense as to inspire dizziness, fainting, even outright madness. It is still quite common among visitors, apparently.

  How is it that the inheritors of Italian culture have lost the genius for creating this kind of beauty? And what does it mean that they have? I had filed this question in its own mental category, but while I was thinking about Italy’s declining population, I received a letter from David Hazony, the editor of Azure, a journal published in Jerusalem. David immigrated to Israel from the United States as an adult. He is in his mid-thirties and the father of eight children. I had asked him why he had undertaken willingly to raise so large a family, wondering if his response might help me to understand why Italians, by and large, no longer feel this impulse. I had expected him to say something about his religious beliefs, but his answer made no reference to religion.

  People who live in civilizations with a strong sense of history are more likely to want to have more kids. If you are encouraged to think of your culture as something important within the flow of human history, something that is handed from one generation to the next, then you will feel a debt to the past and an obligation to the future, and you are more likely to relate to the project of having kids with a certain degree of seriousness. Raising children is hard and mostly thankless, so you need a good reason to do so, even if it’s to some extent instinctive or intuitive. It is through kids that people express a certain fundamental loyalty to something greater than themselves. Conversely, societies that discourage reverence for the past, that discourage loyalty in general, will almost automatically undermine any kind of vision for the future—since once you have disregarded the past, you have no reason to think that the next generation will not similarly discard whatever you have done. The result: People are more likely to have fewer kids.6

  I doubt this is a complete explanation for Italy’s declining birthrate. Clearly the problem is complex and multifaceted. But having seen the architecture of contemporary Italy, I wonder if he might not be on to something.

  ARE THE AXIS POWERS PUNISHING THEMSELVES?

  Although strictly economic explanations do not seem adequate to explain Europe’s large-scale population trends, countries that invest in policies to make it easier to have and raise children do tend to have higher fertility rates than those that don’t. The showcase example is France, which now has a total fertility rate of 1.89, the highest rate in Europe save Ireland. Women in France are entitled to four months of paid maternity leave, with job protection and a range of benefits to offset the costs of education, housing, and transport. The more children a Frenchwoman has, the more benefits she receives. In recent years, France’s natural population growth—that is, growth excluding immigration—has accounted for nearly all of Europe’s natural population growth. Swedish fertility, too, spiked when the state began offering extensive financial benefits to mothers.

  In 2003, Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right government introduced a scheme to bribe couples into having a second child with a 1,000-euro bonus. Few have taken it—the amount is considered insultingly trivial by most Italian women, as indeed it is. The Italian government is making no plans to invest in social services needed by working mothers.

  Why is Italy reluctant to take steps that might reverse, or at least slow, its declining birthrate? Because these schemes instantly call to mind Mussolini’s campaign to raise the Italian birthrate. Mussolini, believing a nation’s dominance to be tied directly to its population, sought to increase Italy’s population by 20 million people. “Fertile people,” he declared, “have a right to an Empire, those with the will to propagate their race on the face of the earth.”7 To encourage marriage, he decreed a tax on all bachelors. He implemented a scheme of financial aid for large families, offering bonuses to the families of soldiers and civil servants for each new child. Childbearing contests were held: the winners were applauded as national heroes, reviewed on parades, given medals, and sent on promotional tours of Italy; their faces beamed from the covers of Italian magazines and newspapers. Abortion and contraception were severely criminalized. Italian women were inundated with unrelenting propaganda encouraging domesticity and maternity. It is no surprise that schemes for increasing fertility are now, in the Italian mind, intimately associated with the memories of Fascism.

  This was also true in Germany and Spain, the two other European nations where birthrates are now declining most precipitously. Franco, too, equated a people’s influence with the size of its population and took measures much like Mussolini’s to increase birthrates. The Nazis were obsessed with German population growth. Central to Nazi ideology was an emphasis on traditional gender roles, and from the time the Nazis came to power, their propaganda focused intensely on German women, urging them to stay at home and bear as many children as possible. Grants were awarded to “hereditarily healthy” German families with four or more offspring. Mothers of large families received the Cross of Honor of the German Mother. Fathers received cash awards. Whenever aggressive schemes are now proposed to raise the German birthrate—which is in steep decline, and lowest, interestingly, among German academics 8—vehement objections are raised, and these objections inevitably make reference to the Nazis.

  It is enormously suggestive that birthrates are dropping faster in the former powers of the Axis than anywhere else in the world. It is tempting to wonder whether, in some way, the experiences of the Second World War convinced people in these countries, at a deep, inarticulate level, that they do not deserve to exist.

  When one accepts (if only unconsciously) the precept that one’s life is essentially meaningless, and that one’s own culture and values are in no way so commendable that they deserve perpetuation, the impetus to risk one’s life or sacrifice one’s comfort to defend that culture and those values is strongly diminished in favor of seizing temporary d
aily pleasure and gratification. The impulse to replicate oneself becomes starkly attenuated. Contemporary man, writes Chantal Delsol,

  no longer seeks any joy he cannot have in the present. If he dismisses eternity and immortality, it is because he is tired of seeing the present sacrificed for an uncertain future. Too often duped, like someone whose hovel has been expropriated on the promise of a palace that never materializes, he now only wishes to take advantage of his brief but sure duration on this earth. . . . He will hear nothing of sacrificing his own inclinations in order to perpetuate a family business or preserve material things. . . . He has seen so many inherited certainties, institutions and behavior patterns turn out to be indefensible that it is without regret that he abandons all of these obligations.9

  Without regret, perhaps—but surely not without consequences.

  CHAPTER 7

  BLACK-MARKET RELIGION: THE NINE LIVES OF JOSÉ BOVÉ

  If anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions, if he has a pain in the bowel, even . . . he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden

  YET IT IS DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE in nothing. European men and women still confront the same existential questions, the same mysteries, the same suffering as everyone who has ever been born. They are suspicious now of the Church and of grand political ideologies, but they nonetheless by nature yearn for the transcendent. And so they worship other things—crops, for example, which certain Europeans, like certain tribal animists, have come to regard with superstitious awe. If asked, they will not say that they are worshipping their crops, of course. Officially, they do not worship anything. But in practice their activities take a particular and recognizable form, their rhetoric employs a distinct and familiar vocabulary, and their beliefs form part of a European religious tradition no less ancient than the Papacy.

  As a case study, let us look now at one particular purveyor to Europe of black-market religion, José Bové. The charismatic anarchosyndicalist was born—most recently—in 1953 in Bordeaux, in the southwest of France, where he is usually born, although he has been born, from time to time, in Flanders, and in Westphalia, and sometimes he has been born in Hungary. He has occasionally been born in Holland, and he has been particularly apt to be born in the Rhine Valley. The most recently born Bové is a great folk hero in France, a modern Robin Hood, they say, or when they are being more Gallic about it, a modern Vercingetorix, who in 53 B.C. raised an army against the Roman legions wintering in Gaul.27 Bové is applauded for standing up against what he calls “the totalitarianism of capitalism.” The founder of the powerful French farmer’s union, the Confédération Paysanne, and the leading spokesman for the international peasant movement Via Campesina, he advocates agriculture based on the family farm and what he terms “food sovereignty,” which he defines as a nation’s ability to grow, rather than import, its own crops. Bové seeks strict government controls on agriculture, as well as high subsidies and tariff barriers to protect the kind of local farming he favors. He has become one of the most vivid and visible spokesmen of the antiglobalization movement, and a leading critic of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

  Bové speaks English fluently, having at the age of three accompanied his impeccably bourgeois parents—who have no traditional farming roots whatsoever—to the United States, where they conducted research in agricultural chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. Few of Bové’s followers realize that his father leads French research into GMOs, and has notably saved Brazil’s orange industry by creating a transgenic orange immune to the insect-borne disease that once destroyed 300 million Brazilian trees. The elder Bové was until recently director of the French National Institute for Agronomic Research near Bordeaux, and his infrequent but exasperated public comments about his son’s activist agenda suggest that he wishes he had taken the time to genetically modify his own organism. It is tempting to view the younger Bové’s career entirely through the obvious oedipal prism. But there is more to the story.

  Bové attended a Catholic secondary school near Paris, from which he was expelled—significant enough, as we shall see—for rejecting Catholic doctrine. He declined a university education, instead joining a group of conscientious objectors to military service. This led him to the protests against the militarization of the Larzac, a limestone plateau in the south of the Massif Central, where French farmers fought against the extension of military camps between 1971 and 1981. Arrested for invading a French army base during a 1976 protest, Bové spent three weeks in prison. Following this, he attended a “direct action” training camp in Libya sponsored by Muammar Qaddafi. (“Direct action” is a common leftist euphemism for violence or, in fact, terrorism, as in the French Leninist terrorist group of the same name, Action Directe.) No one has any idea what he did there, or if they do, they are not saying.

  Bové formed the Confédération Paysanne in 1987, becoming one of its three principal spokesmen, and certainly its most telegenic. He led the destruction of GMO rice plants at the Nerac research lab early in 1999, then pillaged a Novartis seed production facility and the greenhouses of a public research center. He has been credited with hijacking shipments of biotechnology-grown corn.

  The Larzac is where Bové now lives, and the Larzac was the site of a massive demonstration against the World Trade Organization in August 2003. It was in the Larzac that Bové learned the fundamentals of sheep farming. In between public appearances and prison time, Bové produces what I am told is an excellent Roquefort.

  THE FIRST LIFE OF JOSÉ BOVÉ

  It is not clear when exactly the first José Bové was born. The year, perhaps, was A.D. 560. The place was Bourges, we believe, in the Loire Valley. The man first came to the attention of St. Gregory, Bishop of Tours, in 591; he writes of him in his Historia Francorum.1 We do not know the man’s name, so let us call him the ur-Bové. The ur-Bové, afflicted by madness induced by a swarm of flies, made his way to Arles, where he became a hermit devoted to prayer. When he emerged from his ascetic seclusion, he pronounced himself possessed of the gifts of healing and prophecy. Indeed, he declared, he was Christ himself. His unlettered contemporaries agreed, flocking to him in great numbers to be healed by his touch. He displayed such powers that Gregory sensed the hand of the Devil.

  His followers brought him gifts, which he distributed to the poor. He insisted that his followers worship him, and they did. Later, he organized them into an armed band; he led them through the French countryside, ransacking and pillaging, ultimately arriving at Le Puy, where his stark naked messengers streaked into the city, vaulting and somersaulting, to announce his arrival to the bishop. The bishop sent a party to meet the ur-Bové: they chopped him into pieces.

  Gregory was much dismayed by these events; connecting the advent of the false prophet with the occurrence of famine, he concluded that the end was nigh.

  That is all we know of the ur-Bové.

  THE DARK ANGEL OF THE ANTIGLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT

  The Great Peasant Revolt of 1999 began in August after the United States imposed tariffs on French cheeses and pâté de foie gras as a reprisal for the European Union’s ban on American hormone-treated beef. To symbolize his vexation, Bové took his tractor and, in the term he favors, “deconstructed” a McDonald’s in Millau, near his home in the Larzac. Some 300 people joined him, and a good time was had by all, except, of course, by the owners of the McDonald’s (who were French, not American). All present reported a festive atmosphere. The day concluded agreeably in Millau’s outdoor cafés.

  Today, McDonald’s; tomorrow, the world. Bové instantly became the new darling of the antiglobalization movement. The sack of the McDonald’s was not, he hastened to explain, an anti-American action per se. “This is a fight,” he explained, “against free-trade global capitalism. It’s about the logic of a certain economic system. . . . It can be a struggle against any country, this one or that one. ” 2 Those around him have not necessarily understood this subtlety;
since then, wherever he has appeared, effigies of Uncle Sam have gone up in flames.

  Bové was sentenced to three months in prison for his role in the uprising. He was photographed, famously, on the steps of the court-house, handcuffed arms above his head, beaming broadly, his extravagant mustache fanning out from his face like a revolutionary banner. “This image,” writes a Bové admirer, the French journalist Gilles Luneau, “has become a historic symbol; it illustrates a world where we live in chains, where revolt is both necessary and legitimate.”3 Bové refused to pay bail to escape going to jail, but supporters the world over sent checks to free him. The Confédération Paysanne set up an office in front of the prison gates. Hundreds of visitors came every day to sign petitions on Bové’s behalf. Daily, demonstrators throughout France demanded his release. On Bastille Day, Bové was pardoned by President Jacques Chirac, and in the end served only forty-four days of his sentence. In the spring of 2000, in mimicry of Bové’s protest, a bomb was detonated at a McDonald’s in Brittany, in the northwest of France. A young Frenchwoman, Laurence Turbec, was killed.

  Following his release from prison, Bové adopted a dizzying global schedule of protests and publicity appearances in the service of antiglobalization causes. He attended the 1999 demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, where he ate a Roquefort sandwich in front of a McDonald’s that was then, inevitably, vandalized. He later described the riots there—which led the governor to declare a state of emergency and call in the National Guard—as “glorious events.”4 My mother, who lives in Seattle, wasn’t so sure. Her first taste of martial law left her nonplussed. I believe she described the protesters as “animals.”