Posted on 06/08/2005 8:48:32 PM PDT by Pikamax
Decadent Europe The EU crisis can be read as evidence of a declining civilisation. Let's stop neocons gloating
Timothy Garton Ash Thursday June 9, 2005
Guardian
Contemplating the European Crisis (I think a capital C is called for) I find myself driven even to reading Toynbee. Not Polly Toynbee of the Guardian, whose work I always follow with the greatest pleasure, but her long-dead and largely forgotten ancestor, Arnold Toynbee, the philosophical historian of the rise and fall of civilisations. For one plausible long-term interpretation of the chaotic reaction in Europe since the French non of May 29 is that these are the symptoms of a civilisation in decline, if not in decadence. How ludicrous that the prime minister of Luxembourg should insist, like some east European communist leader of old, that black is white and everything can therefore continue just as before. The government will dissolve the people, and elect another. How absurd that, confronted with the greatest popular challenge to the European project since its inception, France and Britain can think of nothing better than to face up for a vicious cross-channel squabble over their respective contributions to an EU budget that costs the average British taxpayer less than £3 a week. Like the Bourbons, our leaders have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.
If I were Chinese I'd be laughing all the way to the bank. After the European centuries, from about 1500 to 1945, and the American century, from 1945 until some time in the first half of this one, the Asian century dawns on the horizon. As Tom Friedman of the New York Times acidly observes, while Europe is trying to achieve the 35-hour week, India is inventing the 35-hour day. Whatever our "knowledge-based" advantage, no economy can compete successfully on such terms. Things must change, if they are to remain the same.
Toynbee was led to ask why civilisations decline and fall through his experience of what has been called the European civil war from 1914 to 1945. His own grand, schematic answers have been largely discounted by professional historians, but the question remains a good one. As with all terribles simplificateurs, some of his ideas are, at least, suggestive. For example, among the characteristic features of disintegrating civilisations he finds the conjoined twins of archaism and futurism. Some people wallow in the memory of a golden age that never was while others glorify an imagined future. Does that sound familiar? Then there is what he calls the idolisation of an ephemeral institution. For some Europeans today that idolised ephemeral is the nation state, for others the EU. And there is his basic and perhaps rather obvious point that the decline of civilisations proceeds in a serious of routs and rallies. Coming close to self-parody, Toynbee suggests that the normal rhythm seems to be rout-rally-rout-rally-rout-rally-rout: three-and-a-half beats.
In the first half of the 20th century Europe inflicted upon itself the mother of all routs. In the second half of that century it produced a formidable rally. While the EU cannot (and generally does not want to) match the US in military power, it does in combined gross domestic product and social attractiveness. It is the world's largest single agglomeration of the rich and free. Moreover, it has just got much larger. This is an extraordinary success that, at the time of Toynbee's death, in the year of the first British referendum on our membership in "Europe", almost nobody foresaw.
The next year, in 1976, Raymond Aron wrote a book called Plaidoyer pour l'Europe Décadente, translated into English as In Defence of Decadent Europe. His great concern was that western Europe was losing its self-confidence, its will to win, what Machiavelli called virtù - "the capacity for collective action and historical vitality". The challenge he feared was not the far east, which, apart from Japan, hardly appeared as a competitor in those days, but the very near east: the Soviet-dominated, communist-ruled half of Europe. (Interestingly, given the negative significance attached to the word "liberal" in the recent French referendum debate, his alternative title was In Defence of Liberal Europe.)
His fears in respect of the communist east turned out to be unjustified, although a pessimist might say that, in a process of "competitive decadence", the east simply collapsed first. As a result, and due to the magnetic attraction and active policies of the European Union, eight post-communist democracies joined the EU on May 1 last year. Never before have so many European states been liberal democracies, joined in one and the same economic, political and security community. Yet the European Crisis has arrived just a year after this triumph, and partly caused by it. For, among many other things, the French and Dutch votes were also noes to the consequences of enlargement and to the prospect of further enlargements.
Thirty years ago Aron worried about a kind of hedonistic self-indulgence characteristic of decadent societies. At the risk of sounding like a cross between Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford, the thought does occasionally occur when flicking through British and European TV channels, from Celebrity Love Island, through Big Brother, to the endless onanistic German chatshows. Aron also worried about Europe's low birth rates, which in the meantime have become still lower. "The civilisation of self-centred enjoyment," he dared to write, "condemns itself to death when it loses interest in the future."
Of course, looked at from another viewpoint, liberal in a different sense, the very low birth rates in countries such as Spain, Italy and Germany are an expression of increased liberty: namely a woman's right to choose. But it's common sense that welfare states then need someone else to support so many pensioners. That someone is to hand: a young, vigorous, growing population just across the Mediterranean, eager to come and work here. But Europe is proving very bad at making Muslim immigrants feel at home. The Dutch nee vote was in significant part a vote against Muslim immigration, and the French non was in part against Turkey joining the EU.
It may not have escaped your attention that this analysis of European decadence bears a startling resemblance to that of American neoconservatives and anti-Europeans, against whose crude caricatures I have so often fought. To this I would say two things. First, American neocons would be idiots to gloat. Europe and America are two parts of one larger civilisation. If the old Europe on this side of the Atlantic goes down, it may help the new Europe on the other side of the Atlantic in short-term power relations, but it will be enormously damaging to US interests in the longer term.
Second, it's up to us to prove them wrong. Nothing I have darkly hinted at here is inevitable. Jeremiads are meant to be self-denying prophecies. The European project has many times moved forward precisely through and out of crisis. My formula, from Romain Rolland via Antonio Gramsci, is "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will". At a time when most columns in British and European newspapers are engaged in the familiar, admonitory rhetoric of "we should do this, we must do that", it can help to stand back and, with the pessimism of the intellect, calmly contemplate the abyss. But then, after a period of reflection, we should act. Give yourself a treat: prove a neocon wrong.
everyone! gloat gloat gloat.
Not anymore we aren't. We're tired of being betrayed by the French. We're looking to India to accept the torch of modern civ, much like we accepted it from the British.
"Ain't gonna happen". The only road in Europe right now leads south. Socialism always fails. Always.
Bad Europe. Bad bad Europe.
It's pretty difficult to think with pessimism and act with optimism, at the same time.
"The European project has many times moved forward precisely through and out of crisis."
Yes, everytime the people say 'no,' they don't listen and continue to dig the hole deeper.
Europes road leads to Mecca.
The Europeans will have to try harder: turn their cathedrals into mosques, put their women into bondage, and cut out sexual exhibitionism. Then, perhaps, the Muslims will start to feel at home.
Shut up and make babies.
This guy makes a true statement to start "Europe is in decline", then starts dithering about "futurism".
He still doesn't get it. The downfall of Europe is happening through Muslim immigration, not as a reaction to it. Also, that "right to choose" is the reason they need this trojan horse. He totally glosses over that.
I don't know what a 'neocon' is (who does?) but I'm sure gloating..... and chortling, and cheering, and laughing....
Not that I think enough people in Europe are coming to their senses, but it sure is fun to watch socialist Eurocrats fumble and mumble as "the masses" don't fall properly in line. Of course, in France a big part of the vote 'Non' seems to be from people who want to secure their ossified socialism, not from those who are coming to grips with reality.... but it's always fun to see anything that will make Jacques 'Iraq' Chirac pucker like Dominique de Vichy just put something up his backside.....
The same disease is at the bottom of our social security crisis. When in 1972 Nixon and the Congress attacked old age poverty by makes social security a
full-scale pension program, they assumed that the Baby-boomers' children would pick up the tab. But at least half of those children were never born. Thank goodness that our immigrants--those who have picked up SOME of the slack--are not Arabs and Turks. Still the decadence spreads.
This analysis of European decadence bears a startling resemblance to that of American neoconservatives and anti-Europeans, against whose crude caricatures I have so often fought.
Remember when, not longer after the fall of the USSR, the leftists advised America not to gloat?
Then there was the remarkably successful Iraq election, following which neocons were advised by leftists not to gloat?
To continue excerpting the Guardian article:
American neocons would be idiots to gloat. ... Give yourself a treat: prove a neocon wrong.
One can only conclude that Americans should have been proven wrong, and the left been pleasantly surprised, by resurrected communism; neocons proven wrong by Iraq descending into civil war, validating the left's blindness; and finally, neocons being proven wrong by Europe finally and irretrievably fitting herself into the straitjacket of capitalism-hating socialism, spiralling down into a bankrupt, union-corrupted, bureaucratic poverty on a par with sub-Saharan Africa.
Enough is enough. These leftist wishes are no more seemly than the keen desire that corrupted Christians have for a link between breast cancer and abortion. Love of good must never be subsumed for hatred of political opposites.
Being free and prosperous is ample recompense for having been wrong. Shut up and enjoy the roses.
Europe has not fallen from this election. What has fallen is the hope of an intellectual class of whom Garton Ash is representative to form a centrally-directed government made up of a supposedly enlightened elite that will lead its bovine population to some sort of cradle-to-grave utopia. Garton Ash states that it cannot and does not desire to form a military similar to that of the United States, and this seems to be true of that elite and of a couple of states who have come under its sway. However, I see nothing wrong with the British military or the Polish or the Czech or the Danish or the others who did manage to make the Iraq show. I see everything wrong with an elite that not only has become so at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer and soldier, but whose members now style themselves above such crudity. For them a rude awakening is very much in order, and if it wouldn't take much of the planet with it as it did in the 1940's I'd be all for it.
We "neocons" cannot afford that luxury, however satisfying it may be to see the Chiracs and the Schroeders get their comeuppance. The price of power is responsibility. Those who forget the latter tend to lose the former.
But one thing is moribund if not actually shattered, and it is the model of an international class of professional administrators with wisdom sufficient to command prosperity and peace. That is not an Actonian power that tends toward corruption, it is a corruption in search of power.
***Second, it's up to us to prove them wrong. Nothing I have darkly hinted at here is inevitable. Jeremiads are meant to be self-denying prophecies.***
Any understanding of a society that ignores the religious dynamic, as this article clearly does, is half-blind.
Europe is falling apart because it has left it's faith.
Also from Antonio Gramsci:
"Optimism and pessimism. It should be noted that very often optimism is nothing more than a defense of one's laziness, one's irresponsibility, the will to do nothing. It is also a form of fatalism and mechanicism. One relies on factors extraneous to one's will and activity, exalts them, and appears to burn with sacred enthusiasm. And enthusiasm is nothing more than the external adoration of fetishes. A reaction [is] necessary which must have the intelligence for its point of depature. The only justifiable enthusiasm is that which accompanies the intelligent will, intelligent activity, the inventive richness of concrete intitiatives which change existing reality."
[Source: Remark 130 in Notebook #9, quoted in the Introduction to the first volume of the Columbia critical edition of the Prison Notebooks, ed., Joseph A. Buttigieg and trans. Joseph A, Buttigieg and Antonio Callari, New York, 1992, p.12.]
I don't know why it's SOOO delicious to read articles such as this. Mmmmmh!
European socialists are in utter panick mode and lashing out at the big, bad, "neocon!" Ha!!!
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