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

by Claire Berlinski

  The Revolutionary was a passionate German nationalist. He envisioned the restoration of Germany to what he imagined was its utopian past, from which it had fallen as a consequence of capitalism and a conspiracy among the inferior, non-Germanic people. He prescribed a complete program for the purification of the German race, to be followed by German conquest of the globe. It has been remarked that his vision did not die with him.

  He is a dark Bové, to be sure. But he is a Bové nonetheless.

  BRINGING MEANING TO AN INDIFFERENT UNIVERSE

  And what, exactly, does the current Bové’s objection to “globalization” signify? It is hard to say just what he means by globalization, or what anyone means by the term, which has come to comprise more or less every complaint one might have about modernity, and certainly has nothing to do with that which is global per se, since the movement itself is both quick and proud to describe itself as global. As Bové has said, though, his is a fight against free trade and global capitalism, and that, probably, is as precise a definition of globalization as we’ll get from him.

  Here, too, some of the specifics of Bové’s lament are not thoroughly unreasonable, or at least, earnest people of good will might debate them. For example, he opposes the United States’ unfettered agricultural dumping—the practice of exporting commodities produced under high levels of government subsidization, which in turn drives farmers in developing countries out of the global market and destroys local agricultural traditions. And indeed, dumping is a real problem, and it does jeopardize food security in developing countries. That is precisely why Article VI of the GATT allows countries to take action against dumping, and why the WTO’s Anti-Dumping Agreement clarifies and expands Article VI.

  So why does Bové view the World Trade Organization as the problem, rather than the solution? It is not as if these international agreements were toothless: Most recently, the WTO ruled with Brazil in its dispute with the United States over the dumping of American cotton. Moreover, the WTO is the only formal, coherent forum in the world that exists for the resolution of these disagreements. How does Bové propose that these disputes be resolved instead? He doesn’t, but the strong suggestion—from his example—is that he would prefer them to be resolved on the street, with victory awarded to the loudest and most threatening mob. I urge his followers to think this through with care. A world thus governed may not be one in which you wish to live.

  It is puzzling, too, that Bové does not seem to grasp a key theoretical point: Dumping is a violation of the principles of free-market economics, not their logical outgrowth. Dumping occurs because government subsidies distort the mechanism of the market. The practice is fundamentally anticapitalist. French farmers are among the most highly subsidized in the world—and Bové likes it just that way—so there is a certain inconsistency in his views.

  The peasant uprising, Dufour adds, has come to pass because people are beginning to understand the sinister forces “lurking behind the opacity of these international institutions.”32 These institutions are actually extremely transparent: the deliberations and judgments of the WTO may be consulted by anyone, in paralyzing, minute detail, at www.wto.org. Dufour’s comment to the contrary is puzzling, until we see it for what it is—a vestigial anticlerical reflex.

  There is, again, a long historic tradition evident in Bové’s wholesale denunciation of the WTO. Bovés throughout history have always been intolerant of imperfect, earthly organizations. By the standards of medieval Christianity, for example, the record of the Church was far from deplorable; despite corruption and abuses, most of the clergy led relatively austere lives; they, far more than any other category of medievals, were the caretakers of the poor and the sick. But the revolutionary millenarians, certain of the imminent Second Coming and terrified by it, held the world to higher standards. Norman Cohn writes,

  It was because of their inordinate expectations that eschatological movements could not—as the Church itself could and did—simply condemn certain specific abuses and criticize certain individual clerics, but had to see the whole clergy in all its doings as the militia of the Antichrist, bound by its very nature to strive for the spiritual and material ruin of Christendom and striving all the more ferociously now that the End was at hand.33

  Substitute global capitalism for the Church (or in the case of the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine, substitute global capitalism for global capitalism), and think of the clerics, perhaps, as the modern government officials who are presumptively in the pockets of the multinationals. You’ll see that the result sounds very similar.

  I do not wish to resolve an argument about agricultural dumping here. I mean only to suggest that the degree of emotion that accompanies this debate reveals an underlying agenda that goes well beyond the ostensible message. For all his concern about food security, after all, Bové gives nary a thought to what is overwhelmingly the single greatest cause of hunger today: the use of famine as a military weapon. The Sudanese government has been attempting systematically to annihilate the inhabitants of the Darfur region not by flooding them with underpriced food but by intentionally starving them to death. This is a deliberately conceived, carefully planned, explicitly genocidal, man-made famine. Crises like these are the globe’s greatest threat to food security, but where is Bové, and where are the antiglobalization protesters? Their eerie silence suggests, again, that feeding the world may not, in fact, be their chief concern, and is certainly not the source of their passion.

  Considered in this context, certain comments made by Bové’s admirers seem particularly unhelpful. Following Bové’s arrest, one antiglobalist organization called Food First declared in a manifesto that Bové’s “only ‘crime’” was fighting “for the rights of consumers to have access to food that is adequate, culturally appropriate, and produced in a sustainable way.”34 If recent history is anything to go by, the “culturally appropriate” food of Sudan is no food at all. Perhaps a graduate student in the school of Edward Said would like to have a look at the grotesquely patronizing idea of “culturally appropriate” food. I leave it as an exercise.

  “Cooking is culture,” Bové says. “All over the world. Every nation, every region, has its own food cultures. Food and farming define people. We cannot let it all go, to be replaced with hamburgers.” 35 I’d readily agree that the global caliphate of the hamburger would be a terrible thing, fiercely to be resisted, but I have to say it is not a particularly realistic fear. I have lived in New York—the city that defines globalization, if anything does—and I have lived in Paris. As anyone who has lived in both cities will tell you, the cuisine available in New York is vastly more diverse. It is also generally much better and much cheaper. There are only a handful of restaurants in Paris with first-rate Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Indian, or Ethiopian food, and these restaurants are prohibitively expensive. Most of what purports to be Thai or Indian food has been homogenized into something quite bland and recognizably French. There are not even very many good Vietnamese restaurants in Paris. There is—literally—not one single good Mexican restaurant in Paris, and trust me, I have looked. In New York, you can find excellent examples of each of these cuisines more or less on every block.

  So what do they really want? Again, look at their own rhetoric. Donella Meadows, who was an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College and author of a column, “The Global Citizen,” admiringly interpreted Bové as an enemy of the “narrow, heartless economics that would have us fill our lives with things produced wherever they can be made most ‘efficiently.’”36 This woman could not seriously have objected to efficiency; I am sure she did not go out of her way, when driving her Volvo to her Dartmouth office in the morning, to take the route with the most traffic. So her words make no sense. But she did not really mean what she seems to be saying. This is a case, ironically enough, of false consciousness. No, the key words are these: narrow and heartless. Cold. Unfeeling. Indifferent. Bové, on the other hand, cares. Bové has a heart. He has a soul. He bri
ngs meaning into a meaningless and indifferent universe. That is why they love him.

  THE SEVENTH LIFE OF JOSÉ BOVÉ

  Until the advent of Catharism, heresy had been a sporadic affair, and if the charismatic messiahs who cropped up here and there were a nuisance to the Church, they were never a serious threat to its existence. The efflorescence of Catharism, however, posed for the first time the prospect that the garden of the Church would be overrun by a particularly hardy heretical weed. The dreamy, gentle, and lunatic Cathars flourished—where else?—in Languedoc, now southwestern France, in the late twelfth century. Pacifists, vegetarians, celibates, believers in the equality of women, the Cathars rather resembled the weird but harmless New Age spiritualists who are often found at the fringes of the antiglobalization movement.

  Like the Manicheans, the Cathars were dualists who believed in two gods, a sublime god of the spiritual world and a malign god of the material one. All worldly creation could be ascribed to the malign God and was therefore to be disdained. Worldly authority—the Church, particularly—was a fraud; the sacraments, a farce. Jesus was not a gross material being but an apparition; he had come to Earth as a prophet of dualism; his death was incidental, not the central salvific event of history. The cross was an instrument of torture, its glorification perverse. Men and women were one. Reincarnation was a fact. The Crusades were shameful, as was all violence.

  The seductive Cathar heresy swiftly overtook the towns of Albi, Toulouse, and Carcassonne. By the reports that remain (most evidence was destroyed by the Inquisitors), the Cathars lived peaceably among the Jews and Catholics. But ideas like these were for obvious reasons unbearable to the papacy. Innocent III resolved to eradicate the Cathar stain and recruited in his cause the military powers of France, eager to annex the independent Languedoc. Thus began the so-called Albigensian Crusade, named for the town of Albi, from which the heresy had sprung.29

  Between 1209 and 1229, papal henchmen and French armies systematically exterminated the Cathars and many others besides, for they were unconcerned to distinguish Catholic from heretic. In Béziers, the pope’s legate, Arnoud Amaury, issued the orders that have now passed into infamy: “Kill them all. God will know his own.” Some 20,000 men, women, and children—loyal and subversive— were slaughtered and the town was burned to the ground. This was the first but not the last massacre; the crusade continued with undiminished cruelty for years. When subsequently the Inquisition was convened, it was with the purpose of eradicating all remaining traces of the heresy. In the end, as many as a million perished.

  The extermination of the peaceable, dopey, endearing Cathars is one of the sorriest and most shameful events in European history, and this is a history in no way short of sorry and shameful events. If the people of southwest France still feel a suspicion of authority and orthodoxy, who can blame them?

  The mention of the Cathar genocide—the word sounds queerly anachronistic, but it is exactly the right one—still prompts the residents of the region to defensiveness. Recently I found myself in the great Romanesque cathedral of Toulouse. I asked a guide at the door whether it might be possible for me to inspect the church’s archival records about the Albigensians. Absolutely not, she said, her face instantly souring. There were none. The Church had nothing to do with it.

  It is not possible to say who among the Cathars was the seventh Bové, precisely, but he was surely there, and his spirit lives on.

  THE EIGHTH LIFE OF JOSÉ BOVÉ

  And now another Bové is born, this one quite unlike the others, for by this time Christianity itself was dying. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Bové was born in Geneva in 1712. His early life was undistinguished. Moving from Savoy to Turin to Chambéry, he was by turns a notary, a footman, a coppersmith, a dilettante, a composer of music, and a student of the arts and sciences. Biographers have noted that like most Bovés, Rousseau was narcissistic and self-seeking; also like most Bovés, he was unusually attractive to women.

  In 1750, having returned to Paris, he achieved celebrity with his prizewinning essay, “A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” in which he declared the superiority of the primitive life of savage man in the so-called State of Nature and deplored the pernicious effect on the human soul of technology, science, and urbanization. The advancement of the arts and sciences, he held, far from being beneficial to mankind, had in fact served only to crush and alienate the individual spirit.

  In this he was both the inheritor and the progenitor of a European tradition of revolutionaries, men who idealized a utopian, irenic past— a pastoral arcadia—and despaired of soulless modernism. German Romantic thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were particularly enamored of these ideas; the poet and essayist Gottfried von Herder, for example, condemned the cold sterility of European modernity and found much to admire in the simple, child-like primitives of the tropical zones. The incompatibility of technology and soulfulness has since Rousseau been a standard trope of Continental philosophy.30 Not incidentally, that machine-driven soulless-ness is typically associated with America. Heidegger bore a fierce enmity toward industrial, soul-sapping Amerikanismus; Arthur Moeller van den Bruck—father of the phrase “Third Reich”—denounced Amerikanismus as something to be “not geographically but spiritually understood,” for this was “the decisive step by which we make our way from dependence on the earth to the use of the earth, the step that mechanizes and electrifies inanimate material.”37

  The current Bové espouses precisely these views. We have become embroiled, he says, in “excessive industrialization,” turning our backs on the natural rhythms of the land in favor of “the engineer, the technician and the builder.” “Technology,” he adds, is “stripping meaning from all of life’s activities.” 38 In a chapter of his manifesto titled “Subversion in a State of Nature,” we learn how Bové cherished the years he spent in the Larzac as a squatter in a primitive shack without a telephone, water, or electricity. Bové is nostalgic for the imaginary epoch of “birds, nature, people on the farm.” By contrast, he imagines, cardiac problems and hypertension plague contemporary farmers because they are “no longer in touch with their roots.” Although farmers’ material living conditions, he concedes, have improved, he believes their family lives have deteriorated. 39 (His own family life has certainly deteriorated. Just ask his ex-wife.)

  From Rousseau through the Romantics to the present Bové, we see another current of important thought, the disdain for rationality itself. Bové disparages the “rationalization and segmentation of work” and the “scientific organization of work.” As Eric Hoffer has noted, the devout are always asked to seek the truth with their hearts and not their minds: “When a movement begins to rationalize its doctrines and make them intelligible,” he reflects, it is a sign that its dynamic span is over.”40 Bové’s day, it would seem, is not over yet.

  No Bové can refrain from outraging the French authorities. Rousseau’s views on Christianity should by now be familiar to us: He admired the Gospel for its egalitarianism while vigorously condemning the Church, which, he held, promoted slavery and tyranny. In this regard, it is odd that Rousseau is so often labeled an original thinker. In 1762, the patience of the French parliament was exhausted. Condemning Rousseau’s works as antistate and anti-Church, its members called for his arrest and burned his books. He fled to Neuchâtel, in Prussia, where he wrote his Letters Written from the Mountain, advocating freedom of religion. He died of apoplexy in 1778. In 1789 came the French Revolution and the frenzied, bloody orgies of the Commune. The revolutionaries clutched Rousseau’s works in hand.

  I do realize it is a stretch to describe the unquestionably brilliant and subtle Rousseau, one of the great thinkers of modern Europe, as a Bové. To those who would quibble, fine, I cede the point. He was not just another Bové. But his influence on the current Bové is clear. And besides, I needed nine.

  THE ENDURING LEGACY OF MEDIEVAL MILLENARIANISM

  It is odd, it is spooky, even, how much of the current Bov�
�’s rhetoric descends from medieval millenarianism. Bové’s species of crop worship is in essence a neoteric Christian heresy. It is no accident that he was born in Cathar country. His elevation of nature to the status of a surrogate religion recalls the Romantic movement, which itself descends from the same medieval millenarianism. These movements, like Bové’s, strived to enact some kind of earthly utopia by restoring some kind of idealized past. Bové’s project, like theirs, is essentially spiritual and transcendental. Like all of the leaders of these movements, Bové is intensely hostile toward and suspicious of authority, and also like them, he counters that authority on the street. These movements, it should be stressed, have historically always ended in blood.

  Both Nazism and Communism have their origins in the same movements. The frenzy of Europe’s incessant manifs derives directly from the tradition of the revolutionary millenarians; there are Blut und Boden roots below Bové’s ecological agenda.41 Bové’s crop worship draws, unconsciously perhaps, on the mysticism of the Vichy Fascists and their call for the “return to earth, to roots.” Among Bové’s followers, the connection between the literal roots of crops and the metaphorical roots of community are repeatedly stressed: François Dufour, for example, remarks that “you don’t have to be a farmer or live in the country to feel rooted in the land. Such roots connect all parts of the country in a unifying whole. . . . People don’t want to be uprooted.”42