The Road to EUtopia
What is the Europe of this book? Most simply, Europe comprises the twenty-five countries of the European Union, with a single currency, a European Parliament, a European Court, a population of nearly half a billion, and a nine trillion dollar economy. Europe also includes those countries, like Switzerland and Norway, not formally part of the EU but culturally and politically similar, and others, like Croatia, Romania, and Bulgaria, eager to join. But Europe is more than the sum of its nations and languages and histories. “Europe is not a natural unity,” the historian Christopher Dawson wrote, but rather “the result of a long process of historical evolution and spiritual development.” It is a “medley of races,” and European man represents “a social rather than a racial unity.” Europe is an idea, then, a set of values and beliefs, a certain way of looking at the world that defines the West in general.
Yet in the last few centuries there have arisen variations and developments of Western values and ideals that have increasingly come to define Europe and its vision of itself as a superior cultural and political order, one that can avoid the injustices and failures of the past and harness more justly and efficiently the burgeoning forces of globalization and technology and the “global consciousness” both are creating. Nor are these ideals and values confined to the geographical and political reality of contemporary Europe and the nations of the EU. These same values and beliefs, in fact, are held by many in the United States, and represent a model that some Americans urge us to adopt, and others counsel us to resist.
The following pages are concerned with those ideas, values, and beliefs that constitute this European model, not just with the individual nations and peoples that make up Europe, though of course they will figure in the discussion insofar as they act on those beliefs and create institutions and policies that embody them. By keeping this focus in mind, we can avoid simplistic contrasts between a monolithic “Europe” and an equally monolithic “America.” Many Americans, liberals generally, approve of the European model as something to emulate. Partly this reflects the place Europe has traditionally held in the imagination of some Americans. Like the Yankee ingénues in a Henry James novel, they have admired the Old World of sophistication, culture, and civilization that contrasts with the New World of crude, go-getting, frontier brashness. But these days this admiration more fundamentally reflects the belief that Europe provides a more humane and sophisticated set of social and political values.
In the presidential election of 2004, for example, Democratic candidate Senator John Kerry, who speaks French and spent childhood vacations in France, was touted as the candidate who, sharing the European distrust of force and preference for the management of crises through transnational institutions, could be more effective in relating to our European allies. In the words of French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, Kerry is “a European at heart.” Thus as president, we were told, Senator Kerry could undo the damage done by the unilateralist, “Euroskeptic” George Bush. Bush’s critics identified him as that most American––and despised–– of cultural icons, a “cowboy” who, it was erroneously reported, had never even traveled to Europe.
In domestic policy as well, some Americans look to Europe for guidance on issues such as homosexuality, affirmative action, and the death penalty––indeed, in some recent Supreme Court decisions, justices have cited the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in support of their decisions. Many also tout the European dolce vita lifestyle as a more humane and fulfilling way to live compared to workaholic, money-grubbing Americans. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, believes Americans have a lot to learn from the French about family values––an opinion Claire Berlinski calls “laughable” given that the French are creating fewer and fewer families, and 10,000 elderly French in 2003 died during a heat wave, their bodies chilled in warehouses while their children vacationed on the Riviera. On many other issues, Democrats and liberals in general align with the same values and ideals that underlie the European model, as conservative Jonah Goldberg indicated when he complained that President Bill Clinton “thinks like a European.” As Timothy Garton Ash put it, “ ‘Blue’ [Democrat] America often turns out to be a European shade of pink. On several of the key social issues, American Democrats seem to be closer to Europeans than they are to Republicans.”
But just as many in America admire the European paradigm, many Europeans look to America as a model of economic and social order and foreign policy, and disagree with the drive toward a European unity defined in contrast to the United States. On these issues, one European nation sometimes opposes another, and within each nation are groups that disagree over various issues.
We often hear, for example, that Europeans are universally opposed to the death penalty. Italian president Carlo Ciampi claims that opposition to capital punishment is the “most eloquent signal affirming a European identity.” The existence of capital punishment in America is one of the most frequently cited examples of how benighted Americans are in comparison to the more humane and civilized Europeans, who see capital punishment as “simply barbaric,” in the words of one-time French minister of justice Robert Badinter.
Yet among the European non-elite, opinions on capital punishment are often more similar to Americans’ than are the views of the academic, political, and media elites with whom our own reporters and intellectuals tend to interact. When California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to stop the execution of a convicted multiple murderer and founder of a vicious street gang, the city council of his hometown of Graz in Austria voted to remove his name from a municipal stadium––even though one poll showed that 70% of Graz’ citizens opposed the move. And in the EU states from Central and Eastern Europe, support for the death penalty remains high among citizens and politicians alike. In the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia a majority of citizens support the death penalty, while both Poland’s president and Hungary’s former Prime Minister have called for its restoration.
Or consider the European disdain for vulgar American popular culture, as reflected in the French government’s restrictions on American movies via its Ministry of Culture, or in the anti-free-trade restrictions on “cultural products” in EU commercial treaties, or in French theater director Ariane Mnouchkine’s famous description of EuroDisney as a “cultural Chernobyl.” Yet not just movies, but American popular music, clothing styles and brands, companies, food, and in some places even American holidays like Halloween and Valentine’s Day have become part of European culture. In 2005, the most popular movie in France was Star Wars: Episode 3. The all-time biggest hit in France is still Titanic. American popular culture permeates the taste of the French, from the several hundred McDonald’s and Starbuck’s franchises to the popularity of Britney Spears, the person most googled by the French in 2004. American high culture, too, attracts many Europeans, from the several thousand English-language books translated into European languages, to museum shows, like the 2004 Museum of Modern Art show in Berlin, which attracted a million visitors.
Perhaps the greatest division between the European mass and elite concerns the supposed evolution beyond nationalism into the supranational “Europe” of the EU. This disdain for the nation may run no deeper than the bureaucrats in Brussels. According to the European Values Study, 90% of Europeans surveyed identified with their city, province, or country, while only three percent identified with Europe. What Tony Judt calls the “chronic absence of interest [in the EU] on the part of the European public” is reflected in voting patterns: between 1979 and 2004 voter participation in elections for members to the European Parliament fell an average of 20 percentage points, and the difference between the number of those participating in European Parliament elections and those voting in national elections ranged from 20 percentage points to a high of 43 in Sweden, a dismal level of participation duplicated in the new member states from Eastern Europe. Well-educated, sophisticated EU functionaries and cosmopolitan intellectuals who benefit from the EU’s increased opportunities for supranational work, leisure, entertainment, and travel may believe that Europe has entered a “postmodern” world beyond the parochial loyalties of the nation and the dangers of patriotism, but the vast majority of Europeans who can not take advantage of those opportunities still find their identities within the borders of their own nations. As Tony Blankley concludes, “The continuing attraction of nationalism is perhaps why voting in European parliamentary elections is so low, and why there is so much public resistance to a European Union Constitution.”
Clearly, attitudes within Europe about America, political issues, and cultural values are more various and complex than the simplistic America vs. Europe conflict suggests.
As well as conflicts between masses and elites within individual countries, there are important disputes between European nations over issues we sometimes think define Europe in general. Everyone knows that Europe is less religious and more secular than America––during the debate in 2003 over mentioning Christianity in the Preamble to the European Constitution, a French diplomat said flatly, “We don’t like God.” Religion is indeed on the wane in Western Europe––church attendance averages less than five percent–– yet many other European countries are still quite religious. Poland, for example, ruffled European Union feathers by taking the lead in trying to get the EU constitution to acknowledge Europe’s Christian roots (the attempt failed). More recently, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Poles displayed an anti-abortion exhibit that linked abortion to Nazi concentration camps. A Polish European Parliament member has said, “We want to see Europe based on a Christian ethic,” something no Republican in a supposedly evangelical-dominated United States would dare to say publicly.
It is in foreign policy, however, that the dispute over which paradigm to follow, that of America or the European Union, has been most intense––a division to which ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave memorable expression when he spoke of “Old Europe” and “New Europe.” Rumsfeld’s comment was made during the acrimonious and divisive disagreement among European nations over the war to remove Saddam Hussein. France and Germany, of course, fiercely opposed the war, their leaders doing everything in their power to subvert a UN Security Council resolution in support of overthrowing Hussein. On the same day in October 2002 that the U.S. Congress voted approval of the war in Iraq, the Norwegian Nobel Prize committee awarded pacifist Bush critic Jimmy Carter the Peace Prize. The committee chairman frankly admitted that the award was meant to protest a warmongering George Bush. And in February and March 2003, huge anti-war rallies filled the streets of European capitals.
Yet many Europeans supported the war against Hussein. In January 2003, eight European nations wrote a letter of solidarity with the United States’ intention to remove Hussein, and soon after, ten Eastern European countries did likewise, causing French president Jacques Chirac to sniff that these nations’ behavior was “not well-brought up.” Even in France, a few intellectuals and politicians spoke out in favor of removing Hussein, including Bernard Kouchner, founder of Medecins Sans Frontiers, and philosophers Andre Glucksmann and Bernard Henri Levy. In February 2003, twenty top French business leaders lobbied Chirac to end his opposition to the American-led War.
Indeed, many European nations have contributed to the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the former, NATO forces are increasingly involved not just in providing security but also in actively fighting the Taliban remnants. Even France and Germany, bitter opponents of the war in Iraq, have been quietly helpful. German intelligence allegedly passed on Hussein’s defense plans to the U.S. a month before the invasion, something the German government now denies. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Hussein’s foreign minister passed on intelligence to the CIA, using the French intelligence agency as a go-between. England, of course, has stood by the United States most steadfastly in Iraq. But many other European countries, including Poland, are still involved in that conflict. When sovereignty was restored to the Iraqis in 2004, sixteen of twenty-four NATO countries had forces in Iraq–– a support subject, of course, to the vagaries of domestic politics, as shown by Spain’s withdrawal after the Madrid train-bombings, Italy’s withdrawal after Romano Prodi’s election, and continuing anti-war sentiment in England. As Robert Kagan famously put it, Europeans are from Venus and Americans are from Mars, particularly the Europe of the European Union and its ideal vision; but clearly some Europeans are from Mars, just as some Americans are from Venus.
Despite these complications and reservations, however, there nonetheless remains a comprehensive vision of political and social order consciously touted by many European nations and embodied in the activities and ideals of the European Union. This is the “EUtopia” that offers itself as a model superior to “American conditions,” as ex-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder put it, using a code term that signifies everything negative and threatening about America. Indeed, this EUtopia is frequently defined specifically in opposition to the cultural, social, and political orders of the United States.
This increasingly stark and acrimonious division between Europe and America is sometimes lamented as something new, a decline laid at the feet of President Bush, the alleged unilateralist “cowboy” whose lack of diplomatic sophistication has alienated our one-time friendly allies. Such a charge, however, ignores Europe’s long tradition of suspecting American power and influence, particularly after the United States became a superpower and eclipsed European nations like England, France, and Germany that once swayed the world. Even during the unity forced by the Cold War, and the halcyon nineties after the fall of the Soviet Empire ended that conflict, disagreements and clashes have roiled America’s relationship with various European nations, particularly France. The European preference for government solutions to social and economic problems has long distinguished Europe from the United States and its reliance on individuals and the market: “Nobody in Europe,” English historian A.J.P. Taylor said in 1945, “believes in the American way of life––that is, free enterprise.” From the Suez Crisis of 1956 to the uproar over the deployment of Pershing missiles in 1983, which sparked a protest by two million Europeans, the interests of the United States and Europe have frequently conflicted.
Despite these disagreements, the continuing Soviet nuclear threat forced Western Europe to cultivate close ties to the United States in order to enjoy American guarantees of European security. Yet even during the Cold War, American economic power caused discomfort for many in Europe. In 1964, French political scientist Maurice Duverger wrote that “there is only one immediate danger for Europe, and that is American civilization,” a fear seconded in J-J Servan-Schreiber’s 1967 essay “The American Challenge.” Once the Soviet Union imploded and that threat disappeared, Europe began to find more concrete ways to assert its global prestige and independence from an America that had become what French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, in 1999, called a “hyperpower.” That America was as much or more a rival as an ally of the French was made clear in 1996––also during the Clinton administration, before the advent of the “cowboy” Bush––when French President François Mitterand said, “France does not know it, but we are at war with America. Yes, a permanent war; a vital war; an economic war; a war without death.”
Nations, obviously, pursue their own political and economic interests, and for many European nations, these interests will conflict with those of the United States no matter which party holds the presidency. Yet the “postmodern” EUtopian ideal is supposed to transcend such parochial national interests and realist power politics and move, in Robert Kagan’s words, “beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation.” This disconnect between the professed ideal and the actual behavior of European nations calls into question the viability of the EUtopian “postnational” vision, a theme to which we will return.
