Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  The past two centuries of European history can be viewed as a series of struggles to find a replacement for what Europe has lost. Until recently, nationalism in Europe has been a substitute for religious belief. In France, for example, the idea of France itself and its civilizing mission has lent meaning to the lives of Frenchmen, just as some mystical Aryan ideal has served as a substitute for religious belief in Germany.

  The second event, the complete catastrophe of the two World Wars, put an end to that, and to every other form of idealism in Europe besides. Europe is still experiencing postwar aftershocks that are at once deadening and deadly. All secular substitutes for faith, and particularly those based in a notion of the supremacy of European culture, have lost their hold. What Frenchman can stand before the graveyards of Ypres or Verdun and without choking on the words profess his allegiance to the mission civilatrice? The nation-state, the arts, music, science, fascism, communism, and even rationality—all of these were substitutes for Christianity, and all failed.

  My point in making these observations could easily be misunderstood: I am not an apologist for the Church, an enemy of secularism, or an advocate of religious revivalism; I am in fact a secular Jew who is delighted never to have faced the Inquisition. I am simply reporting what I see. Not much seems to be left here now beyond pleasure and personal relations, and these do not seem to be enough to keep hopelessness at bay. A poll conducted in 2002 found that while 61 percent of Americans had hope for the future, only 42 percent of the residents of the United Kingdom shared it. Only 29 percent of the French reported feeling hope, and only 15 percent of the Germans. 5 These statistics suggest—to me, anyway—that without some transcendental common belief, hopelessness is a universal condition. I do not believe it an accident that Americans are both more religious and more hopeful than Europeans, and more apt, as well, to believe that their country stands for something greater and more noble than themselves.

  The father of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, famously observed the prophylactic effects of religion on suicide, arguing that suicide rates may usefully be considered a measure of a society’s state of disillusionment. In many European countries, suicide is now the second most prevalent cause of death among the young and middle-aged, exceeded only by transport accidents. Despite the prevalence of firearms, suicide in the United States is only the eighth leading cause of death. The American suicide rate is about half that of France. Suicide rates in the Islamic world are dramatically lower.

  If the death of Christianity has left a void, what now is filling it? Bizarre pseudoreligious substitutes, of which anti-Americanism and antiglobalism are only the most obvious. The roots of European anti-Americanism are complex—they are in Europe’s failed domestic politics, in the universal human propensity to turn complaints outward in preference to subjecting oneself to scrutiny, in humiliation over the loss of the leadership role Europe played from the Age of Exploration to the Great War. But most interesting is the quasi-religious and messianic, even orgiastic, aspect of this anti-American ideology, especially in its coupling with undifferentiated antimodernism and anti-Semitism. Particularly revealing are the words and slogans of activists who conceive of their program as essentially spiritual or transcendental—French farmers, for example, who practice what is in effect a form of crop worship, or the extremely influential German neo-Protestant fruitcake Eugen Drewermann, who writes,

  . . . whether in the battle against racism amongst influential circles in the US south . . . whether against the absolutely unfair trade conditions on the world market in exchange relations of raw materials and manufactured goods to the permanently aggravating disadvantage of Third and Fourth World countries . . . every little “success” in the fight against injustice, inhumanity and violence, is undoubtedly a little more “nearness” to the kingdom of heaven which Jesus wanted to bring us.1

  George Orwell, observing the rise of fascism in Europe, described the worship of power as “the new religion of Europe.” Anti-Americanism, predicated in part on fascism’s mirror image, the revilement of power—especially when that power is somebody else’s—answers many of the fundamental needs once filled by the Church. There is a transcendent and common goal. There are crusades. There is a pleasing sense of moral superiority. There is community. There is zeal, a sense of belonging, even ecstasy in anti-American protest movements—yet there is rarely an explicit belief in God, for that is now widely viewed in Europe as the mark of primitivism.

  Europe’s anti-Americanism significantly antedates the presidency of George W. Bush. It has been a theme of European politics for some two hundred years, suppressed only during the Cold War, and then just barely. It is through ignorance of this tradition that American observers attribute Europe’s recent satisfied spasm of anti-Americanism to our presumptively incompetent diplomacy or our military presence in Iraq. It is more helpful to place this emotion in the context of Eric Hoffer’s still-relevant observations about mass movements. These, he asserted, have distinct characteristics in common, no matter how disparate the subjects. They are convenient ways of avoiding personal responsibility. They can exist without a God, but will fail without something to hate. They are attractive to people whose lives are meaningless. They give hope to existence. And they are interchangeable: No matter the goals of the movement, the people involved are the same.

  IT’S OUR PROBLEM

  It’s their problem, not ours. That’s what many Americans believe. For the most part, Europe is regarded by American policymakers as an irrelevant museum at best, a squawking nuisance at worst. The silent premise animating American policy is that we have more important things to worry about—terrorism, Iraq, nuclear proliferation, hurricanes. These are problems that should cause us all to lose sleep. But recall where the lives of American soldiers have in fact been squandered in the past century: in Europe, 344,955. In all other conflicts combined—including Vietnam, Korea, and the Persian Gulf— less than half this number of Americans have perished.

  Why should this concern us now? We are, after all, in the process of removing troops from Europe. Can’t we just leave them to their own devices and forget about them at last? No, we can’t. Would that we could. A united Europe, even to the limited extent that it is united, is a major power—one bigger than the United States in territory and population. A morally unmoored Europe, imploding under the weight of social and economic pressures few politicians in Europe will even forthrightly describe, no less address, poses a threat to American interests and objectives everywhere on the planet. It threatens our trade policy and our economy. It threatens our policies in Iraq. It threatens our attempts to mediate the Arab-Israeli conflict, particularly given the alarming recrudescence of anti-Semitism on European soil. It threatens our posture toward North Korea. Toward China. Toward Iran. Toward Afghanistan. Toward Sudan. It impedes our efforts to prevent terrorism and halt the advance of Islamic radicalism.

  This is not a hypothetical: There are radical Islamic terrorist cells in every major European city. The September 11 attacks were plotted in Hamburg. The assassins of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance leader, Ahmad Shah Masood, carried Belgian passports. Zacarias Moussaoui, who trained to be the twentieth hijacker on September 11, was born in France and educated in Britain. I could extend this list for pages. If Europe is unable to assimilate its immigrants, if Europe is a breeding ground for anti-Americanism and Islamic radicalism—and it is—this is our problem, and we need to understand why this is so.

  Islamic radicals are far from the only problem in Europe. We have already been drawn back into armed conflict on European soil, where “Never again” has proved an empty slogan. Confronted with genocide—yet again—in the former Yugoslavia, European diplomats bickered helplessly until the United States intervened. Jacques Poos, the foreign representative of the European Community, surveyed the scene in 1991 and declared, “The hour of Europe has come!” Distinctly under-awed Bosnian Serb forces responded by capturing European peacekeepers and tying them to trees. T
he hostages offered no resistance, and their governments did nothing to retaliate. When Bosnian Serbs entered Srebrenica, the Dutch forces charged with the protection of the refugees failed to fire a single shot. The Serbs separated some 7,000 men and boys from the women, hauled them away, and slaughtered them. This kind of Europe—passive, paralyzed, and fundamentally in disaccord with American idealism—is very much our problem. Our history is too deeply intertwined with Europe’s to imagine it could be otherwise.

  Throughout Europe, crude anti-Americanism now substitutes for serious attempts to construct farsighted foreign policy. European bookstores are full of titles such as American Totalitarianism; No Thanks, Uncle Sam; A Strange Dictatorship; and Who Is Killing France? (The answer to the last question is, of course, the United States. Given the hectic imperial schedule we have apparently adopted, it is odd that the author believes killing the French would be high on our priority list.) The French journalist Thierry Meyssan has argued that no airplane crashed into the Pentagon on September 11; instead, he proposes, the American secret services and America’s military-industrial complex invented the story to prime their sheeplike countrymen for a war of imperial conquest against Afghanistan and Iraq. The level of anti-American hysteria in France is such that his book, The Horrifying Fraud, was a galloping best-seller. Shortly before the beginning of the Iraq War, a poll showed that 30 percent of Frenchmen hoped the United States would be defeated by Saddam Hussein. It is one thing to oppose the war in Iraq on strategic grounds or out of heartfelt dopey pacifism; it is another to hope for the triumph of a genocidal maniac who transformed his own country—and its neighbors—into an abattoir. Who in his right mind hopes for the victory of a dictator who fed his opponents into industrial shredders and shoveled uncountable numbers of his compatriots into mass graves?

  The popular Belgian musician Raymond van het Groenewoud recently wrote a hit song titled “Down with America.” The lyrics are easily remembered: “Down with America! Down with the jerks from America. Down with America!” In Britain, newspaper headlines have proclaimed the United States to be the “world’s leading rogue state” and “an unrepentant outlaw.” In a comparison widely echoed by German entertainers, writers, playwrights, and talk show hosts, Germany’s former justice minister, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, suggested an equivalence between President Bush and Hitler—this from a cabinet-level official, not some adolescent protester, an educated woman who should be fully conversant with the history of Nazism, the rape of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Holland, France, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Greece. She has heard of the Holocaust, I’m sure. She must be aware that some 52 million people perished in the Second World War. But these same critics, whose well-developed organs of indignation are so exceptionally sensitive to the infamies visited upon the globe by the United States, have had little to say about the outrageous human rights records of Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or China. When these countries are mentioned, the critics may be found coughing discreetly into their napkins and decorously picking lint from their neckties.

  France and Germany, having long luxuriated under the American defense umbrella, appear now at long last to have converged upon a foreign policy principle: systematically undermining diplomatic and military initiatives emerging from the United States. European leaders who reviled the United States for deposing Saddam Hussein by force were consistently unable to propose, or even formulate in outline, any thoughtful or viable policy alternative beyond the one that had already been tried without success for twelve years. France and Germany were not content merely to voice their own objection to our diplomatic and military policies in Iraq; they obstructed both, aggressively lobbying African nations to vote against us in the United Nations and, it is credibly rumored, blackmailing Turkey with the threat of exclusion from the European Union should it permit the United States to stage operations from its bases.6 France was the principal investor in Saddam Hussein’s regime and remains the chief lender to Iran, Cuba, Somalia, Sudan, and nearly every other kleptocratic state the United States seeks economically to isolate. Wherever French lending institutions hesitate, German ones pick up the slack; their banks are the biggest lenders to North Korea, Syria, and Libya.7

  In October 2005, a commission led by former U.S. central bank chief Paul Volcker concluded its lengthy investigation of the United Nations’ oil-for-food program. The commission reported that in exchange for French diplomatic support, Iraq adopted an “explicit policy of favoring companies and individuals based in France.” Beneficiaries of Iraqi kickbacks received oil barrel allocations based on their level of opposition to the sanctions regime. (Now mind you, countless European politicians piously insisted that this very same sanctions regime had not been given enough time to work.) The Volcker Report alleges that Jean-Bernard Mérimée, France’s former special adviser to the secretary-general of the UN, received oil allocations for 6 million barrels from Iraq; French businessman Claude Kaspereit received allocations for more than 9.5 million barrels; former French diplomat Serge Boidevoix received 32 million barrels; Gilles Munier, the secretary-general of the French-Iraqi Friendship Association, received 11.8 million barrels. Munier, by the way, has been a particularly loud critic of American policy in Iraq. Former French interior minister Charles Pasqua was given allocations for 11 million barrels. Upon receiving this news, he is said gleefully to have exclaimed, “I will be the king of petrol!”8 (The line is almost too camp to be believed. It’s something Dr. Evil would say while dangling Austin Powers above a tank of hungry sharks.)

  This is our problem, not that we ever asked for it. It is infuriating, of course. I am hardly the first person to observe that were it not for American soldiers and taxpayers, Russian tanks would long ago have rolled straight to the Atlantic, the troops pausing only to perform a traditional Cossack dance on the rubble of the Elysée Palace and then urinate on the remains of the flower beds. Indeed, one rarely hears discussed in Europe the threat now posed by Russia’s descent into neo-imperial authoritarianism, but this is not because no such threat exists: it is because we may be counted on to nullify it. The United States still stations 26,000 combat personnel and 34,000 military support and administrative personnel on 294 military installations in Europe. It has cost us many billions of dollars to maintain these bases since the end of the Second World War. This is money that we have not spent on social welfare programs in America—nor has it been returned to those who earned it—and it is money that Europe has spent on its own social welfare programs.

  But Europe should interest us for another reason: We share its problems. America is Europe’s cultural, political, intellectual, and social progeny. Many of the problems now confronting Europe are also present, in lesser but growing form, in America. Hysterical anti-Americanism, for example, is widespread in America itself. It is not only Europeans who have compared the American president to Hitler. Europe is a test case, a laboratory, that shows us exactly where some of these ideas lead. It is significant that the French sheep farmer and antiglobalization activist José Bové has such a large American following. Before joining his herd, Americans might wish to know exactly who he is, where he comes from, and what people like him have already wrought in Europe.

  Many Americans are besotted with Europe. They look to contemporary European political culture and its social institutions for inspiration; they admire Europe’s welfare states and believe American social welfare programs should be modeled on them. Paul Krugman, for example, has urged us in the pages of the New York Times to “learn from” the French and their admirable family values, which he believes to be nurtured by the shorter French workweek.9 France’s government regulations, he writes, “actually allow people to make a desirable trade-off—to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family—the kind of deal an individual would find hard to negotiate.”

  Has Paul Krugman ever set foot on French soil? One wonders. The argument is, first of all, laughable on the face of it. For one thing, the
most important family value is to have a family in the first place, and it is a notorious source of concern to French economists that French rates of marriage and reproduction have for years been drastically lower than those in America. Second, there’s no evidence at all that the French are spending that leisure time with their families, even when they have them: During the great European heat wave of 2003, the corpses of the elderly were stacked up by the thousands in makeshift warehouses outside Paris because the French took their abundant vacation time and went to the Riviera, leaving their parents behind to perish. Their families? Where does he get these crazy ideas? Krugman may vaguely recall the French expression cinq à sept, which means “five to seven” and refers to the hours of the afternoon during which the French commit adultery, the traditional French pastime. That’s what they do with that leisure time. There is, of course, no comparable expression in America—from five to seven in the evening, Americans are too busy working.

  More seriously, Krugman does not for a moment consider the other consequences of those regulations—consequences that one encounters every day living in Paris. Among them is France’s intractable structural unemployment, which bears a direct relationship to its inability to assimilate its Islamic immigrants, and thus the growing, murderous radicalism of its slums.

  The riots that erupted in the suburban ghettos of Paris in November 2005—where unemployment among the young on average exceeds 30 percent and is, in some areas, as high as 50 percent—are in large part attributable to the very policies Krugman would have us emulate. The worst violence France has seen since 1968 quickly spread to more than 200 cities and towns, as well as neighboring countries. Curfews were imposed throughout France. The president declared a state of emergency. In some parts of France, commerce and transportation were brought to a halt. Lyon shut down its entire public transportation system following the bombing of a train station. In Bordeaux, a bus exploded when hit with a Molotov cocktail. Thousands of vehicles and several public buildings were completely destroyed. There were many serious injuries and one death. By the time this book is in print there may be more. It would seem that a great many French families—or their children, at least—enjoy spending their leisure time torching cars, throwing firebombs, and choking on tear gas. Surely it would be no very cynical asperity to suggest that these kids would be better off working.