by Tony Judt
Seen from across the Atlantic, where it became a staple in the speeches of Europhobic politicians and neo-conservative pundits, anti-Semitism in France or Belgium or Germany was immediately identified as a return to the continent’s dark past. Writing in the Washington Post in May 2002, the influential columnist George Will went so far as to describe the recrudescence of anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe as ‘the second—and final?—phase of the struggle for a “final solution to the Jewish question”.’ The American Ambassador to the EU, Rockwell Schnabel, told a special gathering in Brussels of the American Jewish Committee that anti-Semitism in Europe ‘is getting to a point where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’.
This was inflammatory rhetoric, and deeply misguided. Anti-Jewish feelings were largely unknown in contemporary Europe—except among Muslims and especially Europeans of Arab descent, where they were a direct outcome of the festering crisis in the Middle East. Arab television stations, now available via satellite throughout Europe, regularly broadcast reports from Gaza and the Occupied West Bank. Infuriated by what they saw and heard, and encouraged by Arab and Israeli authorities alike to identify Israel with their local Jewish neighbours, young men (mostly) in the suburbs of Paris or Lyon or Strasbourg turned on their Jewish neighbours: they scrawled graffiti on Jewish community buildings, desecrated cemeteries, bombed schools and synagogues and in a few instances attacked Jewish teenagers or families.
The attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions—concentrated in the first years of the new century—aroused concern not because of their scale, or even on account of their racist character, but because of their implicitly inter-communal nature. This was not the old European anti-Semitism: for those seeking scapegoats for their discontents, Jews were no longer the target of choice. Indeed, they ranked well down the pecking order. A French poll in January 2004 found that whereas 10 percent of those questioned admitted to disliking Jews, a far higher number—23 percent—disliked ‘North Africans’. Racially motivated attacks on Arabs—or, varying by country, on Turks, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Senegalese and other visible minorities—were far more numerous than assaults on Jews. In some cities they were endemic.
The troubling aspect of the new anti-Semitism was that while, once again, Jews were the victims, now it was Arabs (or Muslims) who were the perpetrators. The only exception to this rule appeared to be in Germany, where the renascent extreme Right did not trouble itself to distinguish between immigrants, Jews and other ‘non-Germans’. But Germany, for obvious reasons, was a special case. Elsewhere the public authorities worried more about the growing alienation of their Arab and other Muslim communities than they did about any putative revival of Fascism. They were probably right.
In contrast to the United States, which continued to treat ‘Islam’ and Muslims as a distant challenge, alien and hostile, best addressed by heightened security and ‘pre-emptive war’, Europe’s governments had good reason to see the matter very differently. In France especially, the crisis in the Middle East was no longer a matter of foreign policy: it had become a domestic problem. The transmigration of passions and frustrations from persecuted Arabs in Palestine to their angry, dispirited brethren in Paris should not have come as a surprise—it was, after all, another legacy of empire.
XXIV
Europe as a Way of Life
‘A free Health Service is a triumphant example of the superiority of
collective action and public initiative applied to a segment of society where
commercial principles are seen at their worst’.
Aneurin Bevan
‘We want the people at Nokia to feel we all are partners, not bosses and
employees. Perhaps that is a European way of working, but for us, it
works’.
Jorma Ollila (CEO, Nokia)390
‘Europeans want to be sure that there is no adventure in the future. They
have had too much of that’.
Alfons Verplaetse (Governor, Belgian National Bank) 1996
‘America is the place to come when you are young and single. But if it is
time to grow up, you should return to Europe’.
(Hungarian businessman in public opinion survey, 2004)
‘Modern society . . . is a democratic society to be observed without
transports of enthusiasm or indignation’.
Raymond Aron
The burgeoning multiplicity of Europe at the end of the twentieth century: the variable geometry of its regions, countries and Union; the contrasting prospects and moods of Christianity and Islam, the continent’s two major religions; the unprecedented speed of communications and exchange within Europe’s borders and beyond them; the multiplicity of fault lines that blur what had once been clear-cut national or social divisions; uncertainties about past and future alike; all these make it harder to discern a shape to the collective experience. The end of the twentieth century in Europe lacks the homogeneity implicit in confident descriptions of the previous fin-de-siècle.
All the same, there was emerging a distinctively European identity, discernible in many walks of life. In high culture—the performing arts in particular—the state had retained its subventionary role, at least in Western Europe. Museums, art galleries, opera companies, orchestras and ballet troupes all depended heavily, in many countries exclusively, on generous annual grants from public funds. The egregious exception of post-Thatcherite Great Britain, where the national lottery had relieved the Treasury of some of the burden of cultural support, was misleading. Lotteries are merely another device for raising public revenue: they are just more socially regressive than the conventional collection agencies.391
The high cost of such public funding had raised doubts about the possibility of sustaining lavish grants indefinitely, particularly in Germany, where during the Nineties some of the Länder governments began to question the generous scale of their outlays. Public subsidies in Germany typically defrayed over 80 percent of the cost of running a theatre or opera house. But culture at this level was closely bound up with status and with regional identity. The City of Berlin, despite growing deficits and stagnant receipts, supported three full-time houses: the Deutsche Oper (the former West Berlin opera); the Staatsoper (the former East Berlin opera); and the Komische Oper, to which should be added the Berlin Chamber Orchestra and the Philharmonic. All drew on considerable public assistance. Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Freiburg, Würzburg and many other German cities continued to support first-rate international ballet or opera companies, paying annual salaries with full benefits and state pensions to performers, musicians and stage hands. By 2003 there were 615,000 people in Germany officially classified as full-time ‘artistic workers’.
In France, too, the arts (theatre especially) flourished in far-flung provincial towns—thanks in the French case to direct aid distributed from central funds by a single Culture Ministry. In addition to building his eponymous library and other monuments, President Mitterrand spent sums unprecedented since the reign of Louis XIV not just on the Louvre, the Opéra de Paris and the Comédie Française but also on regional museums, regional arts centres, provincial theatre companies, as well as a nationwide network of cinématheques to store and show classic and modern films.
Whereas in Germany the high arts were proudly cosmopolitan (Vladimir Derevianko, the Russian director of Dresden’s Opera-Ballet, commissioned works from William Forsythe, an American choreographer, for enthusiastic German audiences), much of the point of artistic subsidies in France was to preserve and display the riches of the nation’s own heritage—France’s exception culturelle. High culture in France retained a broadly acknowledged pedagogical function, and the canon of French theatre in particular was still rigorously inculcated in the national curriculum. Jane Brown, the London headmistress who in 1993 forbade a school visit to a performance of Romeo and Juliet—on the grounds that the play was politically incorrect (‘blatantly heterosexual’ in her words)—would not
have made a career across the Channel.
The scale of public funding was perhaps most striking in France and Germany, but the state was the main—and in most cases the only—source of funding for the arts all across Europe. Indeed ‘culture’ was the last important area of public life in which the national state, rather than the European Union or else private enterprise, could play a distinctive role as a near-monopoly provider. Even in Eastern Europe, where the older generation had good reason to recall with trepidation the implications of allowing government a controlling say in cultural life, the impoverished public treasury was the only alternative to the baleful impact of market forces.
Under Communism the performing arts had been worthy rather than exciting: usually technically competent, almost always cautious and conservative—anyone who saw Die Zauberflöte performed in, say, Vienna and Budapest could hardly fail to note the contrast. But after Communism, while there was considerable low-budget experimentation—Sofia in particular became a hotbed of recherché post-modern experiments in choreography and staging—there were almost no resources and many of the best musicians, dancers and even actors headed west. Joining Europe could also mean becoming provincial.
Another reason for this was that the audience for Europe’s high arts was now itself European: national companies in major cities performed in front of increasingly international audiences. The new caste of transnational clercs who communicated readily across frontiers and languages had the means and the time to travel freely in pursuit of entertainment and edification no less than clothing or careers. Reviews of an exhibition, a play or an opera would appear in the press of many different countries. A successful show in one city—London, say, or Amsterdam—could hope to attract audiences and visitors from as far afield as Paris, or Zurich or Milan.
Whether the newly cosmopolitan audiences were genuinely sophisticated—as distinct from merely well-heeled—was a point of some contention. Long-established events such as the annual Salzburg Festival or the periodic Ring cycle performances at Bayreuth still attracted an older audience, familiar with not just the material being performed but also the attendant social rituals. But the trend was towards energetic efforts to popularize traditional material for younger audiences, whose acquaintance with the classics (and the original language) could not be taken for granted—or else to commission novel, accessible works for a new generation.
For those who looked with favour upon them, the updated opera productions, ‘cutting-edge’ dance troupes and ‘post-modern’ art shows illustrated the transformation of the European cultural scene: youthful, innovative, disrespectful and above all popular—as befitted an industry that depended so much on public largesse and thus had an obligation to seek out and please a broad constituency. To their critics, however, the new art scene in London (‘Brit Art’), like William Forsythe’s controversial ballets in Frankfurt or the quirky operatic ‘adaptations’ occasionally mounted in Paris, confirmed their dyspeptic prediction that more would only mean worse.
Seen thus, European ‘high’ culture—which had once played to its patrons’ inherited familiarity with a common canon—was now exploiting the cultural insecurities of a neophyte audience who could not confidently distinguish between good and bad (but who could be counted upon to respond enthusiastically to the dictates of fashion). This was not as unprecedented a situation as cultural pessimists were wont to assert—the exploitable anxieties of under-cultivated nouveaux riches had been a theme of literary and theatrical mockery at least since Molière. What was new, however, was the continental scale of the cultural shift. The composition of audiences from Barcelona to Budapest was now strikingly uniform, and so, too, was the material on offer. To critics this merely confirmed the obvious, that the arts and their clientele were caught in a reciprocally detrimental embrace: EuroCult for Eurotrash.
Whether the ever-closer Union of Europeans rendered its beneficiaries more cosmopolitan or simply blended their separate parochialisms was not just a question for the high-arts pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) or the Financial Times. The FAZ, the FT, Le Monde and to a lesser extent Italy’s La Repubblica were now genuinely European papers, universally available and read all across the continent. The mass-circulation tabloid press, however, remained firmly circumscribed by national languages and frontiers. But their readership was down everywhere—highest in Great Britain, lowest in Spain—so distinctive national traditions in popular journalism mattered less than they used to: except, once again, in England, where the popular press fanned and exploited Europhobic prejudice. In eastern Europe and Iberia, the long absence of a free press meant that many people, especially outside of the large cities, had missed out altogether on the newspaper era—transiting directly from pre-literacy to the electronic media.
The latter—television above all—were now the main source of information, ideas and culture (high and low) for most Europeans. As with newspapers, so with television: it was the British who were most attached to the medium, regularly topping European viewing figures, followed closely by Portugal, Spain, Italy and—though still with some lag—eastern Europeans. The traditional state-owned television stations faced competition from both terrestrial commercial companies and satellite channels; but they had retained a surprisingly large audience share. They had also for the most part followed the lead of the daily press and sharply reduced their foreign news coverage.
As a consequence, European television at the close of the twentieth century presented a curious paradox. The entertainment on offer varied little from one country to the next: imported films and sit-coms, ‘reality shows’, game shows and other staples could be seen from one end of the continent to the other, the only difference being whether imported programmes were dubbed (as in Italy), sub-titled or left in their original language (increasingly the case in small or multi-lingual states). The presentational style—in news broadcasts, for example—was remarkably similar, borrowing in many cases from the model of American local news.392
On the other hand, television remained a distinctly national and even insular medium. Thus Italian television was unmistakably Italian—from its curiously dated variety shows and stilted interviews to the celebrated good looks of its presenters and the distinctive camera angles deployed when filming scantily clad younger women. In neighbouring Austria an earnest moral seriousness informed locally produced talk shows, contrasting with Germany’s near-monopoly of the rest of the programming. In Switzerland (as in Belgium) each region of the country had its own television channels, employing different languages, reporting different events and operating in sharply contrasting styles.
The BBC, as its critics bitterly observed, had abandoned the aesthetics and ideals of its earlier days as the nation’s moral arbiter and benevolent pedagogue in the drive to compete with its commercial rivals. But in spite of being dumbed-down (or perhaps for that reason) it was even more unmistakably British than ever. Anyone in doubt had only to compare a report, a debate or a performance on the BBC with similar programmes on France’s Antenne 2, or TF1: what had changed, on both sides of the water, was far less striking than how much had remained the same. The intellectual or political concerns, the contrasting attitudes to authority and power, were as distinctive and different as they had been half a century before. In an age when most other collective activities and communal organizations were in decline, television was what the mass of the population of every country had in common. And it served very effectively to reinforce national distinctions and a high level of mutual ignorance.
For except during major crises, television channels showed remarkably little interest in events in neighbouring countries—rather less, if anything, than in television’s early years, when fascination with technology and curiosity about the near-abroad led to numerous documentaries and ‘outside broadcasts’ from exotic towns and seascapes. But because Europe was now taken for granted, and—with the exception of its troubled and impoverished south-east—was decidedly un-exotic for most viewe
rs, travel and other programmes on European television had long since ‘globalized’ themselves, turning their attention to farther horizons while leaving the rest of Europe to languish: presumptively familiar territory but in practice largely unknown.
Major public spectacles—imperial-style public funerals in France; royal marriages and deaths in Britain, Belgium, Spain or Norway; reburials, commemorations and presidential apologies in various post-Communist lands—were strictly local affairs, copiously broadcast to a domestic audience but watched only by unrepresentative minorities in other lands.393 Election results elsewhere in Europe were reported by national mass media only if they had shock value or trans-continental implications. For the most part, Europeans had very little idea what was going on in neighbouring countries. Their singular lack of interest in European elections did not derive just from suspicion or boredom in the face of the elucubrations emanating from Brussels; it was a natural by-product of the largely un-European mental universe of most Europeans.
There was, however, one ubiquitous exception: sport. A satellite television channel—‘Eurosport’—was devoted to broadcasting a wide-range of sports events in various European languages. Every national television station from Estonia to Portugal devoted considerable blocks of airtime to sporting competitions, many of them inter-European and frequently not even involving the local or national team. The appetite for spectator sports had grown dramatically in the last decades of the century even as the number of people attending them in person had mostly fallen, and in three Mediterranean countries there was sufficient demand to support a highly regarded, mass-market daily paper entirely devoted to sport (L’Equipe in France, Marca in Spain, Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy).