March 25, 2007
The European Union’s Birthday Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:50 PM EST This weekend is the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of what became the European Union. The E.U. began with six members, a different name (the European Economic Community), and a much smaller purpose. Having begun life as a mere free-trade area, it now has 27 members, some of the attributes of a federal state, ambitions to further integration, and no constitution (although not for want of trying). For internal purposes, the E.U. is an escape from the nightmare of history, especially from the world of genocidal warfare recently waged by European nation states. It also has pretensions to being the best and most attractive model for modern societies, and some of these pretensions are on view this weekend, as the E.U.’s celebrants bloviate in the European press. If the E.U. is the model for the future, it is a model in distinction to other possible models, and the United States being one such, there is a temptation for E.U. enthusiasts to accentuate the differences between the E.U. and the U.S., to the E.U.’s advantage. So the E.U. becomes a generous and decent social market society, rather than the heartless and inegalitarian American market society; it becomes the champion of international law rather than a violent cowboy culture addicted to the hasty resort to force; etc. There is something to be said for the Europhile vision, along with something to be said against it. One thing to be said against it, as mentioned above, is that habit of magnifying differences with the U.S., which in many ways shares a common cultural inheritance with the E.U., and minimizing differences between the histories of the states within the E.U. For example, Will Hutton, one of the Euro-bloviators and the editor of the Observer, today writes that “Europeans believe in the great Enlightenment trinity of values—freedom, equality and fraternity. The French revolutionaries of 1789 speak for the British as well. You may object that hunger for freedom is universal. So it is. But it is Europeans who went through the Enlightenment together, freed themselves from the constraints of monarch and church and so dared to know, in Kant’s great phrase, and then embraced the Enlightenment inheritances. . . . The United States may be the other great Enlightenment creation, but it is only liberal America that believes in the complete trinity of Enlightenment values—and liberal America’s eclipse, until very recently, has exposed the gulf between Republican, conservative America and Europe. For them, the only value that counts is liberty. No European culture would want to make such an incomplete statement about the pillars that underpin a just civilisation.” So, all Europeans believe, and have believed, similar things, which only some Americans believe. Really? Americans, of course, do value equality under the law; economic inequality is advancing within the E.U. as it is within the U.S.; we have our own senses of fraternity; and Europeans’ senses of fraternity are both various and imprecise. The U.S. has an uglier history of racial inequality than do E.U. states, unless you think about Poles, Jews, the Roma, and the Irish, etc., as races, which some Europeans have, in which case the U.S. record is less strikingly odious. The U.S. future on race more narrowly defined is not obviously grimmer than the E.U.’s future. As for all Europeans sharing all of these values more with one another than with Americans, I am not clear that Englishmen have more in common with, say, Romanians than they have with Americans. Over the last few weeks, fascistoid mobs have been shouting anti-Semitic slogans and occasionally committing arson in Budapest (other mobs, with different politics, did comparable things in France a summer or so ago). Does England really have more in common with Hungarian political culture, and for that matter with French political culture, than with the U.S.? And which Hungarian and French political cultures? In Hungary, did the Arrow Cross and the Anglophile magnates have the same political culture? Did Bonapartists, Legitimists, Dreyfusards, and anti-Dreyfusards share one political culture in France, and share it with all Britons?
Another problem with Europhile bloviating is that if you are escaping from the nightmare of history, you can be tempted to suppress a lot of history in the process. Hutton opines that “The creation of the E.U. is one of the best things we Europeans have done.” Maybe, but Europeans have done relatively few things together as Europeans, and much of the best of what Europeans did collectively they used to imagine they had done as members of particular nations. Some of them still imagine things that way. If Will Hutton had chosen to imagine himself as British, rather than European, he could have observed that among the best things the British had done were, say, stopping Philip II from setting up what was once called a universal empire, in Philip’s case one to be lit by the light of burning heretics—this was done in conjunction with some other Europeans, for example, the Dutch, but against the efforts of different Europeans. Then there was stopping Louis XIV from doing more or less the same thing, also stopping Napoleon from setting up a universal empire, and stopping Kaiser Bill and Adolf Hitler from setting up universal empires, in the latter case one also illuminated by human torches. If one departs from the peculiar and once-famous British specialty of thwarting universal empire, there’d also be suppressing the slave trade, stamping out suttee, etc. There would be much darker entries in the ledger, but the accomplishments would remain, even after restating them in less atavistically jingo language than I have chosen to use. Alas, since these were all the accomplishments of some Europeans against other Europeans, there is no obvious way to make them “European” accomplishments. And the English case is only one such. What will happen to the passionately nationalist heroes of, say, the Risorgimento when the E.U. writes its history? How about Jeanne d’Arc? How will Polish history read? On the evidence of Hutton’s (and similar) tones, if the E.U. is to have a history, many seem to think that it will be advisable to deemphasize a lot of the European history that has actually happened.
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