by Tony Judt
Even Tony Blair’s own Third Way projects—for the semi-privatization of London’s Underground, for example, or the introduction of ‘competition’ into hospital services—were embarked upon as cost-efficiency calculations with side-benefits to the national budget. To the extent that they were tied to an argument of social principle, this was tacked on as an unconvincing afterthought. And Blair’s appeal was diminishing with time (as the sharply reduced scale of his third electoral victory, in May 2005, was to show). Despite cutting government expenditure, opting out of the European social charter, reducing company taxation and welcoming inward investment with all manner of sweeteners, the UK remained stubbornly unproductive. When measured by output-per-hour it consistently underperformed its ‘sclerotic’, regulation-bound EU partners.
Moreover, a New Labour plan to avoid the coming crisis of Europe’s under-funded public pension schemes—by passing the liability on to the private sector—was already doomed to failure within less than a decade of its proud inauguration. In the UK, like the US, companies that invested their pension funds in a skittish stock market had little hope of meeting long-term commitments to their employees, especially as those employees—no less than pensioners dependent upon public funding—would now be living much longer than before. Most of them, it was becoming clear, would never see a full company pension . . . unless the state was forced back into the pensions business to make up the shortfall. The Third Way was beginning to look an awful lot like a game of Three-Card Monte.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the dilemma facing Europeans was not Socialism or Capitalism, Left versus Right, or the Third Way. It was not even ‘Europe’ versus ‘America’, since that choice had now been effectively resolved in most people’s minds in favour of Europe. It was, rather, a question—the question—which history had placed upon the agenda in 1945 and which had quietly but insistently dislodged or outlived all other claims upon Europeans’ attention. What future was there for the separate European nation-states? Did they have a future?
There could be no going back to the world of the autonomous, free-standing nation-state, sharing nothing with its neighbour but a common border. Poles, Italians, Slovenes, Danes—even the British—were now Europeans. So, too, were millions of Sikhs, Bengalis, Turks, Arabs, Indians, Senegalese and others besides. In their economic lives, everyone whose country was in the European Union—or wanted to be—was now irrevocably European. The EU was the world’s largest internal single market, the world’s biggest trader in services, and its member-states’ unique source of authority in all matters of economic regulation and legal codes.
In a world where comparative advantage in fixed-factor endowments—energy, minerals, farmland, even location—counted for less than policies facilitating education, research and investment, it mattered hugely that the Union exercised increasing initiative in these areas. Just as states had always been vital in the constituting of markets—making rules governing exchange, employment and movement—so it was now the EU that made those rules; thanks to its own currency it also exercised a near monopoly on the markets in money itself. The only vital economic activity left to national rather than European initiative was taxation rates—and only because the UK insisted upon it.
But men live not in markets but in communities. For the past few hundred years those communities have been grouped, voluntarily or (more often) coercively, in states. After the experiences of 1914-45, Europeans everywhere felt an urgent need for the state: the politics and social agendas of the 1940s reflect this anxiety above anything else. With economic prosperity, social peace and international stability, however, that need slowly evaporated. In its place came suspicion of intrusive public authority and a desire for individual autonomy and the removal of constraints on private initiative. Moreover, in the era of the superpowers, the fate of Europe seemed largely to have been taken out of its hands. The European nation-states thus appeared increasingly supererogatory. However: since 1990—and a fortiori since 2001—those states appear, once again, to matter quite a lot.
The early modern state had two, intimately related functions: raising taxes and making war. Europe—the European Union—is not a state. It does not raise taxes and it has no capacity for making war. As we have seen, it took a very long time indeed for it to acquire even the rudiments of a military capacity, much less a foreign policy. For most of the first half century following the end of World War Two this was not a handicap: the prospect of undertaking another European war was abhorrent to almost all Europeans, and their defense against the only likely enemy had been sub-contracted across the Atlantic.
But in the aftermath of September 11th 2001 the limitations of a post-national prescription for a better European future became clear. The traditional European state, after all, not only made war abroad but enforced the peace at home. This, as Hobbes long ago realized, is what gives the state its distinctive and irreplaceable legitimacy. In countries where violent political warfare against unarmed civilians had been endemic in recent years (Spain, the UK, Italy and Germany) the importance of the state—its policemen, its army, its intelligence services and its judicial apparatus—was never forgotten. In an age of ‘terrorism’, the state’s monopoly of armed power is an attractive reassurance to most of its citizens.
Keeping citizens safe is what states do. And there was no sign that Brussels (the European Union) would or could take on this responsibility in the foreseeable future. In this vital respect the state remained the core legitimate representative of its citizens, in a way that the transnational union of Europeans, for all its passports and parliaments, could not hope to match. Europeans might enjoy the freedom to appeal over the heads of their own governments to European judges, and it remained a source of wonder to many that national courts in Germany or Britain complied so readily with judgments emanating from Strasbourg or Luxembourg. But when it came to keeping the gunman and the bomber away, responsibility and thus power remained firmly in Berlin or London. What, after all, should a citizen of Europe do if her house were fire-bombed? Call a bureaucrat?
Legitimacy is a function of capacity: it is in part because the disarticulated, ultra-federal state of Belgium, e.g. has sometimes appeared unable to keep its citizens safe that its legitimacy has been called into question. And although the capacity of the state begins with arms it does not end there, even today. So long as it is the state—rather than a trans-state entity—which pays pensions, insures the unemployed and educates children, then that state’s monopoly of a certain sort of political legitimacy will continue unchallenged. Over the course of the twentieth century the European nation-state took on considerable responsibilities for its citizens’ welfare, security and well-being. In recent years it has shed its intrusive oversight of private morality and some—but not all—of its economic initiative. The rest remains intact.
Legitimacy is also a function of territory. The European Union, as many observers have noted, is an utterly original animal: it is territorially defined without being a consistent territorial entity. Its laws and its regulations are territory-wide, but its citizens cannot vote in each other’s national elections (while being free to cast their vote in local and European ballots). The geographical reach of the Union is quite belied by its relative unimportance in Europeans’ daily affairs when compared to the country of their birth or residence. To be sure, the Union is a major provider of economic and other services. But this defines its citizens as consumers rather than participants—‘a community of passive citizens . . . governed by strangers’—and thus risks provoking unflattering comparisons with pre-democratic Spain or Poland, or the quiescent political culture of Adenauer’s West Germany: unpromising precedents for such an ambitious undertaking.
Citizenship, democracy, rights and duty are intimately bound up with the state—particularly in countries with a living tradition of active citizen participation in public affairs. Physical proximity matters: to participate in the state you need to feel part of it. Even in an age o
f super-fast trains and real-time electronic communication it is not clear how someone in Poimbra, say, or Rzeszow, can be an active citizen of Europe. For the concept to retain any meaning—and for Europeans to remain political in any useful sense—their reference for the foreseeable future will remain Lisbon, or Warsaw: not Brussels. It is not by chance that in the modern age giant states—China, Russia, the US—have either been governed by authoritarian rule or else have remained resolutely centrifugal, their citizens more than a little suspicious of the federal capital and all its works.
Appearances, then, were misleading. The European Union in 2005 had not superceded conventional territorial units and would not be doing so for the foreseeable future. Six decades after Hitler’s defeat, the multiple identities, sovereignties and territories that together defined Europe and its history certainly overlapped and inter-communicated more than at any time in the past. What was new, and thus rather harder for outside observers to catch, was the possibility of being French and European, or Catalan and European—or Arab and European.
Distinctive nations and states had not vanished. Just as the world was not converging on a single ‘American’ norm—the developed capitalist societies exhibited a wide range of social forms and very different attitudes toward both the market and the state—so Europe too contained a distinctive palate of peoples and traditions. The illusion that we live in a post-national or post-state world comes from paying altogether too much attention to ‘globalized’ economic processes . . . and assuming that similarly transnational developments must be at work in every other sphere of human life. Seen uniquely through the lens of production and exchange, Europe had indeed become a seamless flow chart of transnational waves. But viewed as a site of power or political legitimacy or cultural affinities Europe remained what it had long been: a familiar accumulation of discrete state-particles. Nationalism had largely come and gone401; but nations and states remained.
Considering what Europeans had done to one another in the first half of the twentieth century, this was rather remarkable. It certainly could not have been predicted from the rubble of 1945. Indeed, the re-emergence of Europe’s battered peoples and their distinctive national cultures and institutions from the wreckage of the continent’s thirty years’ war might well be thought an even greater achievement than their collective success in forging a transnational Union. The latter, after all, had been on various European agendas well before the Second World War and was if anything facilitated by the devastation wrought by that conflict. But the resurrection of Germany, or Poland, or France, not to speak of Hungary or Lithuania, had seemed altogether less likely.
Even less predictable—indeed quite unthinkable just a few short decades before—was Europe’s emergence in the dawn of the twenty-first century as a paragon of the international virtues: a community of values and a system of inter-state relations held up by Europeans and non-Europeans alike as an exemplar for all to emulate. In part this was the backwash of growing disillusion with the American alternative; but the reputation was well earned. And it presented an unprecedented opportunity. Whether Europe’s burnished new image, scrubbed clean of past sins and vicissitudes, would survive the challenges of the coming century, however, would depend a lot on how Europeans responded to the non-Europeans in their midst and at their borders. In the troubled early years of the twenty-first century that remained an open question.
One hundred and seventy years earlier, at the dawn of the nationalist era, the German poet Heinrich Heine drew a revealing distinction between two sorts of collective sentiment: ‘We [Germans]’, he wrote,
were ordered to be patriots and we became patriots, for we do everything our rulers order us to do. One must not think of this patriotism, however, as the same emotion which bears this name here in France. A Frenchman’s patriotism means that his heart is warmed, and with this warmth it stretches and expands so that his love no longer embraces merely his closest relative, but all of France, the whole of the civilized world. A German’s patriotism means that his heart contracts and shrinks like leather in the cold, and a German then hates everything foreign, no longer wants to become a citizen of the world, a European, but only a provincial German.
France and Germany, of course, were no longer the critical references. But the choice posed by Heine’s two kinds of patriotism speaks quite directly to the contemporary European condition. If the emerging Europe were to take a ‘Germanic’ turn, contracting ‘like leather in the cold’ to a defensive provincialism—an eventuality suggested by the referendums in France and the Netherlands in the spring of 2005, when clear majorities rejected the proposed European ‘Constitution’—then the opportunity would be missed and the European Union would never transcend its functional origins. It would remain no more than the sum and highest common factor of its members’ separate self-interests.
But if patriotism for Europe could find a way to reach beyond itself, to capture the spirit of Heine’s idealized France, ‘stretching and expanding to embrace the whole of the civilized world’, then something more was now possible. The twentieth century—America’s Century—had seen Europe plunge into the abyss. The old continent’s recovery had been a slow and uncertain process. In some ways it would never be complete: America would have the biggest army and China would make more, and cheaper, goods. But neither America nor China had a serviceable model to propose for universal emulation. In spite of the horrors of their recent past—and in large measure because of them—it was Europeans who were now uniquely placed to offer the world some modest advice on how to avoid repeating their own mistakes. Few would have predicted it sixty years before, but the twenty-first century might yet belong to Europe.
Epilogue
From the House of the Dead
AN ESSAY ON MODERN EUROPEAN MEMORY
‘The problem of evil will be the fundamental problem of postwar
intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental problem
after the last war’.
Hannah Arendt (1945)
‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial
factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is
often a danger for national identity . . . The essence of a nation is that all
individuals have many things in common, and also that they have
forgotten many things’.
Ernest Renan
‘All historical work on the events of this period will have to be pursued or
considered in relation to the events of Auschwitz . . . Here, all
historicization reaches its limits’.
Saul Friedlander
For Jews, concluded Heinrich Heine, baptism is their ‘European entry ticket’. But that was in 1825, when the price for admission to the modern world was the relinquishing of an oppressive heritage of Jewish difference and isolation. Today, the price of admission to Europe has changed. In an ironic twist that Heine—with his prophetic intimations of ‘wild, dark times rumbling towards us’—would have appreciated better than anyone, those who would become full Europeans in the dawn of the twenty-first century must first assume a new and far more oppressive heritage. Today the pertinent European reference is not baptism. It is extermination.
Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket. In 2004 President Kwasniewski of Poland—seeking to close a painful chapter in his nation’s past and bring Poland into line with its EU partners—officially acknowledged the wartime sufferings of Polish Jews, including their victimization at the hands of Poles themselves. Even Romania’s outgoing President Iliescu, in a concession to his country’s ambition to join the European Union, was constrained the following year to concede what he and his colleagues had long and strenuously denied: that Romania, too, played its part in the destruction of the Jews of Europe . . .
To be sure, there are other criteria for full participation in the family of Europe. Turkey’s continuing refusal to acknowledge the
‘genocide’ of its Armenian population in 1915 will be an impediment to its application for EU membership, just as Serbia will continue to languish on the European doorstep until its political class takes responsibility for the mass murders and other crimes of the Yugoslav wars. But the reason crimes like these now carry such a political charge—and the reason ‘Europe’ has invested itself with the responsibility to make sure that attention is paid to them and to define ‘Europeans’ as people who do pay attention to them—is because they are partial instances (in this case before and after the fact respectively) of the crime: the attempt by one group of Europeans to exterminate every member of another group of Europeans, here on European soil, within still living memory.
Hitler’s ‘final solution to the Jewish problem’ in Europe is not only the source of crucial areas of post-war international jurisprudence—‘genocide’ or ‘crimes against humanity’. It also adjudicates the moral (and in certain European countries the legal) standing of those who pronounce upon it. To deny or belittle the Shoah—the Holocaust—is to place yourself beyond the pale of civilized public discourse. That is why mainstream politicians shun, so far as they can, the company of demagogues like Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Holocaust today is much more than just another undeniable fact about a past that Europeans can no longer choose to ignore. As Europe prepares to leave World War Two behind—as the last memorials are inaugurated, the last surviving combatants and victims honoured—the recovered memory of Europe’s dead Jews has become the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity. It wasn’t always so.