The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  This large reservation aside, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe delivers one central truth. The emergence of significant immigrant communities arriving from allogenous worlds over which Europe once held sway, many raised in a faith long its principal adversary, was not willed or intended by any significant section of its population, which was never consulted. Even the employers who needed extra supplies of cheap labour typically regarded them as temporary expedients. But out of such passing calculations of advantage came lasting social changes. Whatever else mass immigration has been since the war, it was the antithesis of a project. Could it be viewed as the benign outgrowth of a spontaneous order, Hayek’s catallaxy that debars any constructivist purpose? Not even that, for Hayek had drawn the line at free movement of labour across borders, as too threatening to necessary social cohesion. Viewed historically, post-war immigration was the counter-finality of the years that saw the building of the Union, a process not of integration, but of disintegration—that coming-apart of the social fabric whose effects the French sociologist of labour Robert Castel has called ‘disaffiliation’.29 Belatedly, and inadequately, official measures have sought to stitch some of the rents together again, and official ideology has tried to make of unwanted necessity a post facto virtue, presenting the goal of a fully multi-cultural—that is, multi-confessional—diversity as a redemptive objective of the EU to come.30

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  The Union in which this aim is proclaimed operates, its citizens are constantly instructed, by consensus. That is the ‘community method’, the code of supranational conduct in Europe. Such consensus is confined to those with power, as the modus operandi of a continuing elite consolidation. It has nothing to do with popular consent, which it functions to circumvent. Its elevation to a supreme value in the pantheon of the EU is, nevertheless, at striking variance with the way that successive historians, no less committed to oligarchic principles in their day, conceived the role of diversity in European development. For them, it was essentially conflictual. What had given, and gave, the continent its peculiar dynamism were its internal conflicts, unmatched by any other in their number and intensity. But if that were so, where now did such dynamism lie? Martin Malia, writing a decade later than Morin, saw the problem far more clearly. Contemporary integration, he argued, was altering the internal nature of Europe more profoundly than any development since Carolingian times. For that nature had been defined—much more than by any community of values, whether a universal Christianity, a universal reason or a universal democracy—by division and conflict, as the motors of a creative evolution. Kant had realized this disturbing paradox. For him, it was nature’s law that human dispositions could be fully developed only ‘by means of antagonism’, or in the famous phrase, men’s ‘unsociable sociability’. But if Europe had now actually achieved a permanent peace, under common laws for all, what could substitute for such antagonisms? The ideal of European unity did not have a mobilizing power comparable to either nationalism or socialism. It was an affair of elites. Still, perhaps the task of creating the first multi-national democracy in history would require a creativity no less than that which once had brought the Europe of Christianity or the Enlightenment into being?31

  Prudently, Malia left unspecified the mechanisms that might renew the creative evolution of Europe’s previous history. Nothing in his vision suggested that the new task could be accomplished without dynamics comparable to the old—by agreement without division, invention without antagonism. Had he posed the question, what answers could he have ventured? For a long line of classical thinkers, from Machiavelli to Ferguson to Ranke, the form of conflict that most lent vigour to nations was war.32 After 1945, no European ever recommended it again. But Guizot had already seen another kind of antagonism as no less dynamic in its effects: conflict not between nations, but between classes. Here too Machiavelli, praising strife between classes in the Roman Republic as the secret of its greatness, had led the way. What has been its fate in the Union? Class struggle was, of course, the guiding principle of the revolutionary wing of the labour movement throughout the first half of the twentieth century. When, in the second half, the mass Communist parties of Western Europe were first quarantined and then cancelled as political forces, the reformist wing was left in command of the field, in the various social-democratic parties that persist today. Originally, they too had spoken of class, and in their own fashion had fought, however moderately, for labour against capital.

  But by the time that the regime change of the eighties set in, both the size and cohesion of the industrial working class were everywhere in decline, and the parties themselves had become electoral machines composed and controlled by upwardly mobile professionals, without roots or attachments in the world of manual labour. Intellectually, post-war social democracy was always relatively barren, borrowing what ideas it had from earlier liberal thinkers—Wicksell, Hobson, Keynes, Beveridge—but was still capable at least of a Crosland or a Meidner. But with the neo-liberal turn of the last decades of the century, full employment and welfare expansion were abandoned as practical objectives, as one social-democratic party after another adopted the reigning agendas of deregulation and privatization, compensated by a smattering of social side-payments. With this loss of their traditional raison d’être, they now face the risk of a widespread collapse of their voter support. In the European elections of mid-2009, the German brand of social-democracy got just 21 per cent of the vote, the French 16 per cent, the British 15 per cent, the Dutch 12 per cent; even in its classic Scandinavian strongholds, the Swedish version could manage no more than 24 per cent, the Danish 21 per cent. So weak has the identity of these parties become that they no longer even form a separate bloc in the European Parliament, having to dilute their grouping with ‘Democrats’. So detached are they from popular opinion, that they have not been able to maintain even the degree of tactical distance from the synarchy in Brussels that parties of the Centre-Right, more aware of electoral hostility to it, have on occasion shown. The thought of any kind of conflict, let alone class struggle, is anathema to them.

  The result has been to leave antagonism between immigrants and locals as the one residual principle of conflict, virtually ubiquitous in the western regions of the Union, that is impossible to ignore or repress. In effect, what has happened is that ethno-religious tensions have displaced class antagonisms. The displacement is both a substitution and a corruption of them. Workers, instead of uniting against employers or the state, turn against fellow workers; the poor revile the poor. Nor, objectively speaking, is this pure false consciousness, since in slow-growing economies, immigration can indeed, as Caldwell observes, and contrary to official rhetoric, depress the wages of the least skilled, and increase the cost of welfare rolls. The marked turn to the right of so much of the European working class over recent decades—its electoral shift towards Thatcher in England, to Le Pen and later Sarkozy in France, to the Lega Nord in Italy—has been an expression of a change in its relative position in society. It is no longer at the bottom of the social hierarchy, because immigrants occupy the rungs below it; yet at the same time it is weaker and more insecure than before, in societies where industry is no longer much honoured and inequality has been steadily rising.

  Inequality within Europe; inequality between Europe and the worlds it once dominated. Immigration has deepened the first. But it is driven by the second. That inequality is far larger, and has drawn the millions from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America who now live in the Union, in search of less hunger, danger and privation. Their arrival is an escape from these, but it is not a remedy for them. Were Europe genuinely concerned by the fate of the rest of the world, it would be spending its resources on disinterested aid to the regions where immigrants come from, not casually importing and then ejecting their labour for its own convenience. But that would indeed require a collective will capable of a true project, instead of the blind workings of the market.

  Yet in a historical irony, out o
f these a slow change may be occurring in the contours of Europe. Pirenne argued that Europe was born as a distinct civilization when the Arab conquests split the Mediterranean, breaking the unity of the classical world into separate Christian and Muslim universes. His economic argument, based on the rupture of trade routes, has been questioned; at this level, Braudel would seek to rebind what he had undone. But few have doubted that the sweep of Islam, from Syria to Spain within a few decades, made what was no more than a geographical expression to the ancients into a cultural and political world separated from the southern shores of the inland sea. For Morin, Islam remained the external federator that not only had made Europe by enclosing Christianity within it, but against which Europe had made itself by repelling Muslim advances further north.33 What the contemporary growth of Muslim communities within Western Europe, in contact with their homelands, suggests is the possibility of an erosion of this historic configuration. For the moment, only a distension of Europe to the Euphrates is envisaged, and the Arab world is something other, much larger and older, than the Turkish state. But Tangiers or Tunis are closer to Madrid or Paris than is Ankara, and the demographic pressures of what were once the African provinces of Rome are greater. Europe might finally have achieved unity, only to find that its post-classical identity was beginning to dissolve, towards something closer to Antiquity.

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  Such speculations are for the long run, in which nothing can be counted out. The present landscape of the Union is another matter. Writing some four decades ago, Tom Nairn observed that ruling-class attitudes towards nationalism had varied historically: resolutely hostile in the time of the Holy Allance, gingerly favourable in the period of Risorgimento, ruthlessly instrumental in the era of high imperialism. With the post-war epoch had come the quest for a post-national hegemony, amid a great latitude for elite manoeuvres, in the absence of any popular internationalism on the left. Should the Common Market, as it then was, be regarded as comparable—certainly not to imperialism—but to the Restoration, or to the Risorgimento? The Marxists of the time were giving it a cold shoulder. But why should it not be regarded as a development of bourgeois society like free trade, the agricultural or industrial revolution, or the nation-state, which with all their cruelties had been judged by Marx progressive, if contradictory, developments? European capitalism appeared to be evolving in a half-blind, unintentionally positive direction, but the left treated it as if ‘time and contradiction had come to a stop’.34

  The Union of today has come some way from the Common Market of the early seventies. The scene it offers is not one that inspires much warmth or confidence in its peoples. Politically, it has hardened into an oligarchic structure ever more indifferent to expressions of the popular will, even to legal appearances. The original Treaty of Rome signed by the foreign ministers of the Six consisted of blank sheets of paper, since the text had not been finalized for the solemn occasion. Diplomatic inexperience, in such a bold new enterprise? Nearly half a century later, the procedure was repeated: ‘Although on 18 June 2004 the European Union’s leaders had supposedly agreed their “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe”, not one of them could have read it, since there was still no comprehensive version of the text to which they had agreed. The complete text of the treaty, 844 pages in typescript, would not be available until November, after they had signed it’.35 Niceties? It hardly needs repeating that when the Constitution was rejected in the only two countries that held a referendum on it, both founder-members of the Six, it was relabelled the Lisbon Treaty, and when that was rejected in the only country to submit it to a popular judgement, its voters were told they must reverse the decision, and do so before there was any risk of voters in the larger neighbouring country, whose opposition to it was well known, being able to express their views on the matter.

  The contempt for elementary principles of democracy shown by the elites of the Council and Commission and their subordinates, not to speak of an army of obedient publicists in the media, is reciprocated by the disdain of the masses for the Parliament that supposedly represents them, who ignore it in ever increasing numbers—electoral participation sinking to an all-time low of 43 per cent in 2009, down a full 20 points since the first such poll in 1979. Internationally, the same elites collude with negationism in Turkey, sanction ethnic cleansing in Cyprus, abet aggression by Israel, and subserve the occupation of Afghanistan. Socially, the EU now has a wider span of income inequality than the US, and harsher inter-ethnic relations. Economically, its performance since the crisis of the neo-liberal regime has so far been worse than that of America, and popular reactions to it more conservative.

  Such, more or less, is the conjuncture in the summer of 2009. Like any other, it is subject to change, perhaps without notice. But the current drift of the Union will take more than an alteration of atmosphere to bend or reverse. European integration was conceived in the fifties on one set of premises. It has crystallized around another. Monnet, who set it in motion, imagined it as the positive creation of a supranational federation capable, not simply of freeing factors of production across unified markets, but of macro-economic intervention and social redistribution. He would not have been reassured by what has become of it. Hayek, who watched its inception with silent reserve, and never expressed much support for it––how could he be expected to abide a Common Agricultural Policy?––wanted integration as a negative prophylaxis, the demolition of barriers to free trade and estoppage of popular interference with the market. He would not have been satisfied by today’s EU either. But of the two visions, it has evolved into a form much closer to his own.

  The reasons for that evolution have lain in the general metamorphosis of capitalism as an international order since the eighties, and the extension of integration to the east twenty years later. Decisive in this process was the global deregulation of financial markets that has precipitated the present recession, even if its underlying causes go deeper, putting the neo-liberal system of the period for the first time under pressure. After the immediate shock to its prestige, however, the ideological struts of the system have so far proved resistant. In the west, public ownership as a value has remained taboo, even as public funds have been rushed on a massive scale to bail out predator banks and floundering industries. In the east, privatization continues to head the agenda. Blocking any reversion to more ‘coordinated’ versions of capitalism, closer in arrangements to the early years of the Community, are not only a formidable array of market and institutional interests, but the steady weakening of labour movements, and gutting of what was once their parliamentary expression in the assorted social-democracies of the continent. The latest decisions of the European Court, injected with the new rigorism of converts to liberal principles from the east, have struck down labour protections considered untouchable even in the nineties.36

  Economically speaking, the Union remains, with its dense web of directives, and often dubious prebends, far from a perfect Hayekian order. But in its political distance from the populations over which it presides, it approaches the ideal he projected. What he did not anticipate, though it would perhaps not have surprised, and certainly not disconcerted him, is the disaffection that the regime he envisaged has aroused in the masses subject to its decisions. Yet if weaker spirits might worry about such alienation, he would have had some reason to remain unruffled. To the question whether a political order can be viable with so little popular participation, such low levels of active support, an answer could come from the United States. There, in 2008, the election of a black president was greeted as the dawn of a new epoch, galvanizing voters—above all young voters—to the polls, in a political awakening without precedent since the New Deal. In reality, no more than 56.8 per cent of the electorate bothered to show up for the historic decision, a mere 1.5 per cent above the turn-out that elected Bush in 2004, and well below the 60.8 per cent which put Nixon into power in 1968. Low-octane systems can run on very modest amounts of fuel.

  Among the cond
itions of such regimes are an absence of much substantive divergence between political parties, and a widespread depoliticization of the population. Reversing historic relations, the first is now even more pronounced in the EU than in the US, where partisan antagonisms remain greater, even if rhetorical clashes typically exceed practical differences, whereas in Europe Centre-Right and Centre-Left have often become all but interchangeable, at times even indistinguishable. Such a reversal does not hold in quite the same way for the second. There, the traditional contrast between the two sides of the Atlantic has certainly dwindled. The abdication of what were once parties of the left before the advance of neo-liberalism, into whose carriers they quickly converted themselves, could hardly have failed of this effect. Once the space of political choice is narrowed so drastically, a certain decathexis of the public sphere is bound to ensue.