by Tony Judt
Although many countries still boasted distinctive national sports and sporting events—ice hockey in the Czech Republic, basketball in (curiously) Lithuania and Croatia, the Tour de France and the annual Wimbledon tennis tournament—in continental terms these were minority events, though capable on occasion of attracting millions of spectators (the Tour was the only sporting event whose live spectator turnout had actually increased over the decades). Bull-fighting in Spain held little appeal for young Spaniards, though it had been revived in the Nineties as a sort of revenue-chasing ‘heritage industry’. Even cricket, the iconic summer game of the English, had slipped to a niche position in entertainment terms, in spite of efforts to render it more colourful, more eventful—and to put an end to leisurely but commercially disastrous five-day games. What really united Europe was football.
This had not always been true. The game was played in every European country, but in the initial post-war decades players stayed close to home. Spectators watched domestic league football; the relatively infrequent international games were treated in some places as vicarious, emotionally charged re-runs of military history. No-one who attended football matches in those years between England and Germany, for example, or Germany and the Netherlands (much less Poland and Russia) would have been under any illusion about the Treaty of Rome and ‘ever-closer union’. The relevant historical reference was quite explicitly World War Two.
In the first post-war decades, players from different European countries were quite unfamiliar with one another and had typically never met off the field: when, in 1957, the Welsh forward John Charles made history by leaving Leeds United to join Juventus of Turin for the unheard-of sum of £67,000, it was headline news in both countries. Well into the late 1960s it would have been highly unusual for a club player to find a foreigner on his team, except in Italy where innovative managers were just starting to poach talented outsiders. The glorious Real Madrid team of the 1950s did indeed boast the peerless Hungarian Ferenc Puskás, but Puskás was hardly a representative case. The captain of Hungary’s national team, he had fled Budapest following the Soviet invasion and taken Spanish citizenship. Until then, like every other Hungarian footballer, he was virtually unknown outside his country—to the point that when Puskás led Hungary onto the pitch at London’s Wembley Stadium in November 1953, one of the opposing England players was heard to remark of him: ‘Look at that little fat chap. We’ll murder this lot’. (Hungary went on to win 6-3, the first time England had ever been beaten at home.)
A generation later, Juventus, Leeds, Real Madrid and just about every major European football club had a cosmopolitan roster of players drawn from many different countries. A talented youngster from Slovakia or Norway, once doomed to slog out his career in Košice or Trondheim with occasional appearances on his national team, could now hope to play in the big leagues: gaining visibility, experience and a very good salary in Newcastle, Amsterdam or Barcelona. The manager of the England team in 2005 was from Sweden. Arsenal, the leading British football team at the start of the twenty-first century, was managed by a Frenchman. The north London club’s first-team squad comprised players from France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, Ivory Coast and the USA—as well as a few from England. Football was a game without frontiers, for players, managers and spectators alike. Fashionable clubs like Manchester United parlayed their competitive success into an ‘image’ that could be (and was) marketed with equal success from Lancashire to Latvia.
A handful of individual football stars—not necessarily the most talented, but those boasting good looks, beautiful wives and an animated private life—assumed a role in European public life and popular newspapers hitherto reserved for movie starlets or minor royalty. When David Beckham (an English player of moderate technical gifts but an unsurpassed talent for self-promotion) moved from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2003, it made headline television news in every member-state of the European Union. Beckham’s embarrassing performance at the European Football Championships in Portugal the following year—the England captain missed two penalties, hastening his country’s ignominious early departure—did little to dampen the enthusiasm of his fans.
More revealingly, the England team’s departure from the competition had no discernible impact upon the UK television audience for the remaining games between teams from small countries (Portugal, the Netherlands, Greece and the Czech Republic) in which British fans had no stake. Despite the heightened fervor of international games, with colours flying, lions rampant and competitive anthem-singing, the common obsession with watching the game—any game—outweighed most partisan loyalties.394 At peak, the BBC broadcasts of the matches played in Portugal that summer attracted twenty five million viewers in the UK alone. The official ‘Euro.com’ website for the competition registered forty million visits and half a billion page views over the course of the games.
Football was well adapted to its new-found popularity. It was an unmistakably egalitarian pastime. Requiring no equipment beyond a ball of some sort, football could be played anywhere by anyone—unlike tennis or swimming or athletics, which required a certain level of income or else the sort of public facilities not widely available in many European countries. There was no advantage to being unusually tall or burly—quite the contrary—and the game was not especially dangerous. As a job, football had long been a low-paid alternative for working-class boys in industrial towns; now it was a path into the upper reaches of suburban prosperity and more besides.
Moreover, however talented and popular they might be, individual footballers were of necessity part of their team. They could not readily be transubstantiated, like the ever-unsuccessful French cyclist Raymond Poulidor, into symbols of unrequited national endeavour. Football was also far too straightforward to be turned to the metaphorical and quasi-metaphysical uses to which baseball in America was sometimes put. And the game was open to Everyman (and, increasingly, Everywoman) in a way that was no longer true of the professional team sports played in North America, for example. Football, in short, was a very European sort of game.
As an object of European public attention, football, it was sometimes suggested, now substituted not just for war but also for politics. It certainly occupied far more space in newspapers; and politicians everywhere were careful to pay their respects to sporting heroes and demonstrate due familiarity with their accomplishments. But then politics in Europe had lost its own competitive edge: the disappearance of the old master narratives (Socialism vs Capitalism; proletarians vs owners; imperialists vs revolutionaries) did not mean that particular issues of public policy no longer mobilized or divided public opinion. But it did make it harder to describe political choices and allegiance in traditional party terms.
The old political extremes—far Left, far Right—were now frequently united: typically in their opposition to foreigners and their shared fear of European integration. Anti-capitalism—recast somewhat implausibly as anti-globalization, as though strictly domestic capitalism were somehow a different and less offensive breed—was attractive to nativist reactionaries and internationalist radicals alike. As for the political mainstream, the old differences between parties of center-Right and center-Left had largely evaporated. On a broad range of contemporary issues, Swedish Social Democrats and French neo-Gaullists, for example, might well have more in common with each other than with their respective ideological forebears. The political topography of Europe had altered dramatically over the previous two decades. Although it remained conventional to think in terms of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, what they distinguished was unclear.
The old-style political party was one victim of these changes, with declining membership and falling turnout at the polls, as we have seen. Another casualty was an almost equally venerable European institution, the public intellectual. The previous fin-de-siècle had seen the first flowering of politically engaged intellectuals—in Vienna, in Berlin, in Budapest, but above all in Paris
: men like Theodor Herzl, Karl Kraus or Léon Blum. On the European scene a century later their would-be successors were, if not entirely absent, then increasingly marginal.
There were various reasons for the demise of the continental intellectual (the species had always been uncommon in Britain, its isolated occurrence usually the by-product of exile, as in the case of Arthur Koestler or Isaiah Berlin). In central and eastern Europe, the issues which had once mobilized the political intelligentsia—Marxism, totalitarianism, human rights or the economics of transition—now elicited a bored and indifferent response from younger generations. Ageing moralists like Havel—or one-time political heroes like Michnik—were irrevocably associated with a past which few cared to revisit. What Czesław Miłosz had once described as the ‘irritation of East European intellectuals’ at the American obsession with purely material products was now increasingly directed at their fellow citizens.
In western Europe, the exhortatory function of the intellectual had not altogether disappeared—readers of the German or French quality press were still periodically subjected to incandescent political sermons from Günter Grass or Régis Debray—but it had lost its object. There were many particular sins against which public moralists might rail, but no general goal or ideal in whose name to mobilize their followers. Fascism, Communism and war had been expunged from the continent, together with censorship and the death penalty. Abortion and contraception were almost universally available, homosexuality freely permitted and openly practiced. The depredations of the unrestricted capitalist market, whether global or local, continued to attract intellectual fire everywhere; but in the absence of a self-confident anti-capitalist counter-project, this was a debate better suited to think tanks than philosophers.
The only remaining arena in which European intellectuals could still combine moral earnestness with universal policy prescriptions was in foreign affairs, free of the messy compromises of domestic policy-making and where issues of right and wrong, life and death were still very much in play. During the Yugoslav wars intellectuals from west and east Europe strenuously took up the cudgels. Some, like Alain Finkielkraut in Paris, identified body and soul with the Croat cause. A few— notably in France and Austria—condemned Western intervention as an American-led affront to Serbian autonomy, based (as they asserted) on exaggerated or even falsified reports of non-existent crimes. Most pressed the case for intervention in Bosnia or Kosovo on general principles, extending the rights-based arguments first espoused twenty years before and emphasizing the genocidal practices of the Serbian forces.
But even Yugoslavia, for all its urgency, could not return intellectuals to the centre of public life. Bernard-Henri Lévy in Paris could get invited to the Elysée Palace for consultations with the President, much as Tony Blair would occasionally host retreats with favoured British journalists and other literary courtiers. But these carefully staged exercises in political image-building had no impact on policy: neither France nor Britain nor any of their allies was moved by intellectual pressure to alter their calculations in any way. Nor could publicly engaged intellectuals play their once-crucial role in mobilizing opinion at large, as became clear in the course of the Atlantic rift of 2003.
The European public (as distinct from certain European statesmen) was overwhelmingly opposed both to the American invasion of Iraq in that year and to the broader lines of US foreign policy under President George W. Bush. But the outpouring of anxiety and anger to which this opposition gave rise, though it was shared and expressed by many European intellectuals, did not depend upon them for its articulation or organization. Some French writers—Lévy, again, or Pascal Bruckner—refused to condemn Washington, partly for fear of appearing unreflectively anti-American and partly out of sympathy for its stance against ‘radical Islam’. They passed virtually unheard.
Once-influential figures like Michnik and Glucksmann urged their readers to support Washington’s Iraq policy, arguing by extension from their own earlier writings on Communism that a policy of ‘liberal interventionism’ in defense of human rights everywhere was justified on general principles and that America was now, as before, in the vanguard of the struggle against political evil and moral relativism. Having thus convinced themselves that the American President was conducting his foreign policy for their reasons, they were then genuinely surprised to find themselves isolated and ignored by their traditional audiences.
But the irrelevance of Michnik or Glucksmann had nothing to do with the particular cast of their opinions. The same fate awaited those intellectuals who took the opposite tack. On May 31st 2003, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida—two of Europe’s best-known writers/philosophers/intellectuals—published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung an article entitled ‘Unsere Erneuerung. Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas’ (‘Our Renewal. After the War: The Rebirth of Europe’) in which they argued that America’s new and dangerous path was an urgent wake-up call for Europe: an occasion for Europeans to rethink their common identity, draw upon their shared Enlightenment values and forge a distinctive European stance in world affairs.
Their essay was timed to coincide with the appearance all over Western Europe of similar essays by equally renowned public figures: Umberto Eco in La Repubblica ; his Italian colleague the philosopher Gianni Vattimo in La Stampa; the Swiss President of the German Academy of Arts, Adolf Muschg, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung; the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater in El País; and a lone American, the philosopher Richard Rorty, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. At almost any point in the previous century an intellectual initiative on this scale, in such prominent newspapers and by figures of comparable standing, would have been a major public event: a manifesto and call to arms that would have rippled through the political and cultural community.
But the Derrida-Habermas initiative, even though it articulated sentiments shared by many Europeans, passed virtually unnoticed. It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathizers. No-one implored its authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward. The governments of a significant number of European states, including France, Germany, Belgium and later Spain, undoubtedly sympathized in general terms with the views expressed in these essays; but it did not occur to any of them to invite Professors Derrida or Eco in for consultation. The whole project sputtered out. One hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, fifty years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe’s leading intellectuals had thrown a petition—and no-one came.
Six decades after the end of the Second World War, the Atlantic Alliance between Europe and the United States was in disarray. In part this was the predictable outcome of the end of the Cold War—while few wished to see NATO dismantled or abandoned, it made little sense in its existing form and its future goals were obscure. The Alliance suffered further in the course of the Yugoslav wars, when US generals resented sharing decision-making with European counterparts who were reluctant to take the initiative and could offer little practical support in the field.
Above all, NATO was placed under unprecedented strain by Washington’s reaction to the assaults of September 11th 2001. President Bush’s uncompromising and tactless unilateralism (‘with us or against us’), the snubbing of his NATO allies’ offer of help, and the US march to war in Iraq despite overwhelming international opposition and the absence of any UN mandate, ensured that America—no less than the ‘terror’ on which it had declared indefinite war—would now be regarded as a leading threat to world peace and security.
The ‘Old Europe-New Europe’ distinction that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed to have identified in the spring of 2003, in order to drive a wedge between Washington’s European allies, explained little about intra-European divisions and badly misread its object. Only in Poland could America count on solid popular respect and support. Elsewhere in Europe, old and new alike, American policy on Iraq and much else was heartily disliked.395 But the fact that a senior US official could seek to divide the Europeans in this way, just a
few years after they had so painfully begun to sew themselves together, led many to conclude that the US itself was now the most serious problem facing Europe.
NATO had come into existence to compensate for Western Europe’s inability to defend itself without American help. The continuing failure of European governments to forge an effective military force of their own was what kept it in business. Beginning with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993, the European Union had at least acknowledged the need for a Common Foreign and Security Policy, though what that was and how it would be determined and implemented remained obscure. But ten years on the EU was close to establishing a 60,000-strong Rapid Response Force for intervention and peace-keeping tasks. Urged on by France and to Washington’s evident annoyance, European governments were also nearing agreement on an autonomous defense establishment capable of acting out of area and independent of NATO.
But the Atlantic gap was not just a disagreement about armies. It was not even about economic conflict, though the European Union was now large enough to bring effective pressure on the US Congress and on individual American manufacturers to conform to its norms and regulations or else risk being squeezed out of its markets: a development that caught many US Congressmen and businesses by surprise. Not only was Europe no longer in America’s shadow, but the relation was if anything reversed. European direct investment in the US in the year 2000 had reached $900 billion (against less than $650 billion of American direct investment in Europe); nearly 70 percent of all foreign investment in the US was from Europe; and European multi-nationals now owned a large number of iconic American products, including Brooks Brothers, Random House, Kent cigarettes, Pennzoil, Bird’s Eye and the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.