by Tony Judt
XXII
The Old Europe—and the New
‘You have to wonder why Europe does not seem capable of taking decisive
action in its own theatre’.
Richard Holbrooke
‘Si c’était à refaire, je commençerais par la culture’ (‘If I were starting over, I
would begin with culture’.)
Jean Monnet
‘It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in
love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the
manifestations of their aggressiveness’.
Sigmund Freud
‘What is the explanation of this curious combination of the permanent
unemployment of eleven percent of the population with a general sense of
comparative prosperity on the part of the bulk of the population?’
Beatrice Webb (1925)
The fissile political temper of the Nineties was not confined to the countries of the former Communist East. The same urge to escape the bonds of centralized rule—or else to relinquish responsibility for impoverished fellow citizens in distant provinces—was felt in the West. From Spain to the United Kingdom the established territorial units of Western Europe were subjected to extensive administrative decentralization, though they all managed more or less to retain at least the form of the conventional national state.
In some places this centrifugal propensity had already surfaced decades earlier, as we saw in Chapter 16. In Spain, where the longstanding demand for autonomy in Catalonia or the Basque region had been recognized by the new constitution, Catalonia especially had emerged within a generation as virtually a state-within-a-state, with its own language, institutions and governing councils. Thanks to a 1983 Law of Linguistic Normalization (sic), Catalan was to become the ‘dominant language of instruction’; ten years later the Generalitat (Catalan parliament) decreed the exclusive use of Catalan in kindergarten and infant schools. Not surprisingly, even though Castilian Spanish remained in use everywhere, many younger people were more comfortable speaking Catalan.
None of the other Spanish regions was to acquire quite this level of national distinctiveness; but then none of them carried the same weight within the country as a whole. In 1993 Catalonia, one of seventeen Spanish regions, accounted for a fifth of the country’s GNP. Over a quarter of all foreign investment in Spain came to Catalonia, much of it to the flourishing provincial capital, Barcelona; per capita income in the province as a whole was more than 20 percent above the national average. If Catalonia were an independent country it would count among the more prosperous states on the European continent.
One reason for the rise of a distinctive Catalan identity was an easily stoked resentment at the substantial contribution Catalans were expected to make to the national exchequer, thanks in part to the setting up in 1985 of an Inter-Territorial Compensation Fund to assist Spain’s poorest regions. But Catalonia—like the Basque country, Galicia, Navarre and other newly assertive autonomous provinces—also benefited from the hollowing out of ‘Spanishness’. Franco had exploited to exhaustion the traditional gamut of national claims—the glory of Empire, the honour of the military, the authority of the Spanish Church—and after his fall many Spaniards had scant interest in the rhetoric of heritage or tradition.
Indeed, rather like an earlier generation of post-authoritarian Germans, the Spanish were decidedly inhibited about ‘talking national’. Regional or provincial identification, on the other hand, was unpolluted by authoritarian association: on the contrary, it had been a favorite target of the old regime and could thus credibly be presented as an integral aspect of the transition to democracy itself. This association between autonomy, separatism and democracy was less clear in the Basque case, where ETA pursued its murderous path (even mounting assassination attempts in 1995 on both the king and the prime minister). Moreover, whereas the six million Catalans were prospering, the old industrial districts of the Basque country were in decline. Unemployment was endemic and income levels in the region were lower than in Catalonia, hovering close to the national average.
If Basque nationalists failed to capitalize on these problems it was in large measure because many of the region’s two million inhabitants were new to the area—by 1998 only one person in four could even speak Euskera, the Basque language. Not surprisingly, they showed little interest in separatist movements: just 18 percent of Basques expressed support for independence, preferring the regional autonomy they had already secured. Even a majority of the Basque National Party’s voters felt the same way. As for Herri Batasuna, the political wing of ETA, it was losing votes to moderate autonomists and even mainstream Spanish parties. By the end of the decade it had declined into an all-purpose outsiders’ party for disaffected Greens, feminists, Marxists and anti-globalizers.
In Spain, the splintering of the nation-state was driven by past memories. In Italy it was more often the product of present discontents. The traditionally dissident regions of Italy were in the far north: frontier zones where the local population had been assigned Italian identity within living memory—often as a result of war and usually against their will—and where most of them still spoke French or German or Slovene in preference to Italian. Much of the discontent in these areas had been mollified thanks to a series of agreements establishing newly autonomous regions: the Val d’Aosta in the Alpine north-west where Italy, France and Switzerland converge; the Trentino-Alto Adige, abutting Austria’s Tyrol; and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in the ethnically uncertain borderlands along the Yugoslav (later Slovene) frontier. Such regions also benefitted (as we have already seen in the case of the Alto Adige) from a range of regional subsidies and other encouragements from the European Union in Brussels. By the 1990s, with the further help of Alpine tourism and the passage of time, Italy’s northern frontier lands had faded from political view: regional pockets in a regionalized continent.
Their place, however, had been taken by a decidedly more threatening form of regional separatism. Since 1970, in belated accordance with a provision of the post-war Constitution, Italy had been sub-divided into fifteen regions, in addition to five autonomous provinces (the three frontier districts together with Sardinia and Sicily). There were certainly sufficient precedents: Piedmont, or Umbria, or Emilia had at least as strong a claim to historical distinction as Catalonia or Galicia, and although the regional linguistic distinctions that had been so striking just a few decades before were now fading, they had not yet completely disappeared.
But the new regions of Italy—in contrast to those of Spain—were largely an administrative fiction. For all that they boasted their own elected councils and authorities—and employed large numbers of people—the regional units of Italy could neither overcome the ultra-local identification of Italians with their native village or town nor break the political and above all the financial reach of the capital. What the establishment of regions did achieve, however, was to remind Italians of the fundamental and continuing rift between the prosperous North and the dependent South—and to offer political expression to the resentments to which this gave rise.
The result was the emergence of something quite new, at least in the Italian setting: the separatism of the prosperous. The Italian north—especially the industrial and entrepreneurial towns and cities of Piedmont and Lombardy, and the thriving farms and small businesses of Bologna and its hinterland—had for decades been markedly richer than the rest of the country and the gap was getting larger. By the end of the 1980s gross regional product per capita in the Lombardy region around Milan was 132 percent of the national average; in Calabria, at the toe of the Italian boot, it was 56 percent. The poverty rate in the Mezzogiorno at the end of the Eighties was three times that of northern Italy. Whereas north and north-central Italy were comparable in wealth and services to France or Britain, the South had fallen ever further behind, opening a gap that was only made good in part by substantial cash transfers.
In the course of the 1980s a new political alliance, the Lombard League (later the Northern League, Lega Nord), arose to capitalize on a widespread belief that the ‘South’ had for too long been freeloading on northern wealth. The solution, according to the League’s charismatic founder and leader Umberto Bossi, was to gut Rome of its fiscal powers, separate the North from the rest, and ultimately secure independence for Lombardy and its neighbours, leaving the impoverished, ‘parasitic’ rump of the country to fend for itself. The resemblance to Catalonia (or Slovenia, or indeed the Czech Republic under Václav Klaus) will be clear.
In national elections of the 1990s the Northern League was able to command enough of the vote in Lombardy and the Veneto to ensure itself a foothold in conservative governing coalitions. Ironically, however, the League’s hold on office depended on its alliance with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia movement and the ex-Fascists of Gianfranco Fini’s National Alliance Party—both of which (the latter especially) depended for their support on precisely the poor, subsidized southern voters whom the League so despised. In spite of these mutual antipathies, then, and the illusions of Bossi’s more reckless supporters, there was never any serious question of Italy breaking apart or any of its provinces becoming independent.
Much the same was true of France, where the Mitterrand presidency undertook limited administrative decentralization and initiated some rather desultory efforts to disperse institutions and resources to the provinces. Of the country’s newly established regional units not even Alsace or the French Basque districts evinced much interest in cutting their ties to Paris, despite their distinctive historical identities. Only the island of Corsica saw the rise of a movement for national separation, based on a genuine sense of linguistic and historical uniqueness and the implausible assertion that the island would flourish with independence from the mainland. But, like ETA, the Corsican nationalists’ taste for violence (and inter-familial score-settling) confined their appeal to a minority.
What was distinctive about France was that whereas elsewhere in Europe politicians and commentators now paid formal homage to the virtues of autonomy and local self-government, even the faintest stirrings of regional separatism triggered in Paris an avalanche of neo-Jacobin disdain across the political spectrum. Moreover, the provinces of France with the strongest sense of difference—Brittany, for example, or the depopulated mountains of the upper Languedoc—had also for many decades been those most dependent upon government largesse. Everything from infrastructural spending on high-speed railway lines to tax benefits for inward investment came from Paris and there was never much support for the few remaining Breton or Occitan separatists, mostly ageing militants left stranded by the retreat from Sixties-era enthusiasms. Conversely, wealthy areas like the Rhône-Alpes region around Lyon and Grenoble might well have prospered on their own: but they had long since lost any memory of independence and evinced no political aspiration to recover it.
Across the English Channel in Britain, however, the Celtic fringes—despite their heavy economic dependence upon London—had undergone something of a national revival. In Wales this took mostly cultural form, with increased pressure for Welsh-language education and media. Only in the more mountainous and under-populated areas of north Wales did demands for full independence, as articulated by the nationalist party Plaid Cymru, actually find a sympathetic response. The urban south, with better transport links to England and well-established political connections to the national trade union movement and both the Liberal and Labour Parties, remained wary of the small-state nationalist ambitions of Walesfirsters.
As a result, although candidates from Plaid Cymru made an initial breakthrough in the national elections of 1974 and maintained a small but visible presence thereafter, they were never able to convince their compatriots of the nationalist case. Of the minority of Welsh voters who turned out in a March 1979 vote on devolution to regional assemblies, most were opposed. When devolution eventually came to Wales two decades later, it was not at the behest of local nationalists but as part of an administrative overhaul by the first New Labour government of Tony Blair—who calculated, shrewdly enough as it transpired, that the limited powers assigned to a new Welsh parliament in Cardiff would almost certainly fall into the hands of the same people who were now exercising it at Westminster.
The outcome—a Welsh Assembly with considerable symbolic value but little real power—appeared nevertheless to satisfy whatever demand there was in the principality for a separate national identity. Wales, after all, had been absorbed into and under England in 1536 during the reign of Henry VIII—himself scion of a Welsh dynasty—and while the recent revival of interest in its language and history was real enough, it should not be mistaken for a full-scale recovery of national consciousness. If there was anger or resentment under the surface of Welsh public life it derived from economic woes, not thwarted national aspirations. Offered the choice between an independent Wales and the recovery under English rule of the mining valleys and villages and ports devastated by de-industrialization and unemployment, very few Welshmen would have hesitated.
Scotland was another matter. There too the decline of the old industries had taken a terrible toll; but the Scottish National Party (SNP) which emerged in the Seventies could count on a share of the local vote four times that of their Welsh colleagues. Within two decades of its breakthrough as a ‘single-issue’ party at the 1974 elections—where it returned eleven members to parliament—the SNP had overtaken the Conservatives and was placing serious pressure upon traditional Labour strongholds. Unlike the Welsh, the voters of Scotland did favour devolution of power; and although they had to wait for it until 1997, the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh indisputably speaks for a country which thinks of itself as a distinct and separate nation, if not quite a state.
Scottish nationalism benefited both from the fortuitous discovery of North Sea oil and gas—which brought prosperity to Aberdeen and the north-east—and from EC regional policies, which allowed Scottish administrators and businessmen to bypass London and forge direct links to Brussels. But Scotland, though joined to England by an Act of Union in 1707, had always been a land apart. Its sense of self rested less on linguistic or religious distinctions, which—though real enough—had grown tenuous for most of its residents, than on a curious admix of superiority and ressentiment.
Thus, in the same way that so many of the classics of modern English literature are in fact Irish, so some of the greatest achievements of English-language political and social thought since the Enlightenment, from David Hume to Adam Smith and on to John Stuart Mill and beyond, were actually Scottish. Not only was Edinburgh in some ways the intellectual capital of early industrial Britain and Glasgow the radical core of the British labour movement in the early years of the twentieth century; but Scottish businessmen, Scottish managers—and Scottish émigrés—were responsible for establishing, settling and administering much of England’s empire. Moreover Scotland had always claimed and maintained a distinctive and separate identity: even at the height of centralized rule from London it preserved its own system of education and its own legal system.
An independent Scotland, then, was a perfectly plausible proposition—particularly in a European Union in which it would have been by no means the smallest or the poorest nation-state. Whether the majority of the Scottish population, having secured much of the appearance and some of the substance of independence, would ever wish to go further is less certain. The limitations of geography, demography and resources which have kept Scotland dependent upon the UK are still there; and by the end of the Nineties there seemed reason to suppose that in Scotland as elsewhere the engine of nationalism was running out of steam.
Whether the same was true amongst the descendants of the Scottish emigrants who had crossed into Ireland was less clear. The channel separating Scotland from Northern Ireland is less than fifty miles wide, but the gulf between the sensibilities of the two communities remains immense. Whereas Scottish nationalism de
rived above all else from a desire to resist and repulse the English, the national patriotism of Protestant Ulstermen consisted of a consuming determination to remain at all costs within the ‘Union’. The tragedy of the Irish ‘troubles’ lay in the opposed but otherwise identical objectives of the ultras of both sides: the Provisional IRA seeking to expel the British authorities from Ulster and reunite the province with an independent, Catholic Ireland; the Protestant Unionists and their paramilitary volunteers fixated upon suppressing the ‘Papists’ and retaining sine die the three-hundred-year-old bond with London (see Chapter 14).
If by the last years of the century both the Unionists and the Provisionals were finally forced into compromise, this was not for lack of determination on the part of extremists on both sides. But for the same reasons that the massacres in Bosnia and Kosovo brought about the intervention of outsiders, so the seemingly endless cycle of atrocity and counter-atrocity in Ulster not only undermined local sympathy for armed militants in the communities they claimed to represent, but forced London, Dublin and even Washington to intervene with more energy than they had mustered hitherto and press at least an interim agreement on the warring parties.
Whether the Good Friday Agreement, signed in April 1998, could resolve the national question in Ireland remained unclear. The interim solution on which both sides reluctantly concurred left much unresolved. Indeed, the terms of the accord brokered by the Prime Ministers of Ireland and the UK, with assistance from President Clinton—local self-government by an Assembly based in Ulster, with guarantees of representation for the Catholic minority, an end to the Protestant monopoly of police and other powers, confidence-building measures across the two communities and a standing Inter-Governmental Conference to oversee implementation—contained much that could have been imagined, with good will on all sides, twenty years earlier. But as an armistice in Ireland’s Hundred Years War the agreement seemed likely to hold for a while. Not for the first time in such matters, the ageing radicals at the head of the insurgency appeared to have been won over by the prospect of office.