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

by Claire Berlinski

  A BLIND BALANCE OF POWER

  Directly following the terrorist attack on Madrid, one of al Qaeda’s key ideologists, the pseudonymous Lewis Atiyyatullah, published an article in the Global Islamic Media Internet forum. “The international system built-up by the West since the Treaty of Westphalia,” he prophesied, “will collapse; and a new international system will rise under the leadership of a mighty Islamic state.” Again, al Qaeda’s keen sense of history is in evidence: Who in the West is apt to give a moment’s thought to the Treaty of Westphalia?

  But he is right to think that treaty significant. Modern Europe’s political order can be traced directly to the conclusion of the Thirty Years War and the signing of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the terms of which afforded the various German principalities both religious autonomy and a measure of political independence. The secular state system that emerged replaced the medieval system of feudal loyalties. Subsequent European wars were fought not for reasons of religion but for reasons of state.

  The French Revolution ignited a blaze of nationalism throughout Europe, one that has not yet been extinguished. The French revolutionary armies, followed by Napoleon, his soldiers on fire with faith in France, provoked in their aggression an equal and opposite nationalist vitalization throughout Europe. The 1815 Congress of Vienna represented a compromise with this new nationalism, tempering—but not halting—its advancement.

  Europe is still organized along the lines of the Congress of Vienna: It remains a collection of independent nation-states governed by ever-shifting coalitions designed to prevent any one state from repeating the dominance achieved by Napoleonic France. This model has governed Europe for almost two hundred years, with two notable failures—the First and Second World Wars. The idea of the balance of power has never disappeared. (Indeed, the internal organizations of France and Germany are both governed by balance-of-power calculations. France is essentially a corporate state, with at least half a dozen powerful fiefdoms eternally trying to form coalitions and limit the power of other fiefdoms.)

  But a balance-of-power system is inherently blind when confronted with an ideologically driven, internationalist movement. Confronting Communism during the interwar years, Europe found itself in the same position it now finds itself with respect to radical Islam: under assault by an international movement that did not identify itself with a nation-state.47 Some—Britain’s intellectual elites, for example— underestimated the threat, finding much to admire in the Bolshevik Revolution; elsewhere in Europe, fascist parties rose to power by grossly exaggerating the threat. Then as now, Europe was incapable of marshaling an appropriate, effective, unified response. It reacts to radical Islamism now by default, as a large bureaucracy. Its leaders lack the imaginative power truly to appreciate the nature of their adversary. Europeans expect Islamic radicals to be, at heart, like Europeans: open to negotiation, amenable to reason, susceptible to bribery. They do not appreciate that their posture engenders not reciprocal conciliation but contempt.

  This tendency is reinforced by the nature of Europe’s governing class. Every modern European country is the legatee of feudalism’s system of social stratification. Based originally on birth, it is now based on competitive examinations. The EU countries now constitute a Mandarin system as complete as the Mandarin system of Imperial China. Historically, little has changed but the rules by which the aristocracy is defined. This idea is best traced in France: In large measure, the Revolution destroyed the old hereditary class; Napoleon created a new aristocratic class, however, through the system of the grandes écoles, schools designed to produce another kind of self-perpetuating class. The French system has now been adopted in all but name by the EU itself, since entry into EU employment is based on an endless series of competitive examinations. As a consequence, Europe’s leaders are bred of young Europeans who want nothing more than to pass those examinations. The kind of mind produced by elite schools and competitive examinations: bureaucratic, anti-entrepreneurial, and risk-averse.

  Of course, the conflict with the Islamic world is nothing new for Europe. Europe’s conflict with the Islamic world dates from the era of the first caliphs. Clearly it remains unresolved—at least, much of the Islamic world thinks so. But with the collapse of faith in Europe, the nature of this conflict has changed. In the era of the Crusades, Islam and the Christian West were equals in piety and passion. The eschatology of the Crusaders was uncannily similar, in tone and vocabulary, to that voiced in the ancient and contemporary mosques of the Middle East and broadcast daily now, via satellite dish, into the homes of Muslims in Europe. European eschatology has since changed completely. Islamic eschatology has not.

  The Crusaders had two chief goals: to rescue their coreligionists and to liberate Jerusalem. So do the jihadis who murdered 200 Spaniards in Madrid. But the fervor now runs only one way. No European is now prepared to die for Jerusalem or his fellow Christians. Few Europeans are even prepared to admit that there is, indeed, an unresolved conflict. But there is, and most Europeans cannot, or will not, confront it.

  THE LONG WITHDRAWING WHIMPER

  All these ancient conflicts and patterns are now shambling out of the mists of European history. This is why Europe has lately appeared so bewildering—and often so thoroughly obnoxious—to Americans. At the beginning of this book, I proposed that we must understand this to understand Europe, and must understand Europe to construct an intelligible relationship to it. Upon what principles, then, should this relationship be based?

  The first principle must be this: European anti-Americanism is a cultist system of faith, rather than a set of rational beliefs, and as such is impervious to revision upon confrontation with facts, logic, evidence, gestures of good will, public relations campaigns, or attempts on the part of the American secretary of state to be a better, more sensitive listener. I do not believe the United States to be beyond reproach. Like all societies, America has defects, often grave, and in some instances Europeans are correct to note them. But the vast bulk of this criticism is exuberantly irrational. Americans need not attempt to correct Europe’s antipathy toward the United States by means of pained introspection and efforts to improve themselves: it will not work. Nothing Americans might do, short of dying politely en masse, will change this. The American Left’s contention that it is the current administration’s foreign policy that has made the United States an object of hatred is a naïve delusion.

  Americans need not be much impressed by, or attempt to emulate, Europe’s controlled economies and social welfare policies. French newspapers chortled gleefully during the 2001 economic slowdown, when unemployment in the United States reached 5.5 percent. This occurred precisely as the French government was admiring itself for reducing levels of unemployment to 8.7 percent. Americans who are tempted to consider high levels of structural unemployment a reasonable price to pay for cradle-to-grave social welfare should consider more closely the social costs of that unemployment, particularly the barrier it constitutes to the economic integration and advancement of immigrants, and thus to the entire polity’s harmony and welfare.

  Precisely as the United States has succeeded dramatically in slashing its rates of violent crime over the past decade, European crime rates have soared. If former French minister of justice Marylise Lebranchu was quick to reassure her countrymen that in matters of police technique, “The government has no desire to copy the American model,” this is not because the French model has proved superior, as any quick trip to the suburbs of Paris will prove, if you survive it. Where police tactics have worked in Europe—as in Marseille—they have worked by emulating Americans ones. Where they have not emulated the Americans, they have failed.

  There is a popular myth, accepted by most Europeans and a surprising number of Americans, that Europeans enjoy a superior quality of life, that their societies are less plagued by inequality, that European societies are less violent, more civilized, more rational, even that Europe’s popular culture is more tasteful. This simply is not s
o. When films by Michael Moore receive rapturous ovations at Cannes, the audience stopping just short of ululating and firing AK-47s into the air, it is not because Michael Moore makes a great many excellent points. It is because Michael Moore, like Europe, is lost in what is evidently a pleasurable miasma of perverse fantasy, internal contradiction, and hysteria.

  Our policy and posture toward Europe must be informed by the belief that this popular myth is just that, a myth, and by a deeper appreciation of European history. Politicians with no appreciation of that history should not determine our policies toward Europe. Ted Kennedy, lamenting the failures of the Bush administration, proposed that “we should have strengthened, not scorned, the alliances that won two World Wars and the Cold War.” But it is logically impossible to strengthen the alliances that won the two World Wars and the Cold War. The two World Wars were fought against Germany, but the Cold War was fought in alliance with West Germany; Russia was our ally in the First World War and the Soviet Union was our ally in the Second World War, but the Soviet Union was our enemy in the Cold War; Japan was our ally in the First World War and our enemy in the Second World War and our ally again in the Cold War, as was Italy; Turkey was our enemy in the First World War, neutral in the second, and our ally in the Cold War; Vichy France was our enemy for a time, too. So really, Britain is the only major power to which this statement might logically apply, and no one could fairly argue that this is an alliance we scorned. Am I quibbling here? No, not really. Anyone who has spent time thinking about Europe and its history would be incapable of making such a comment in a well-rehearsed and widely broadcast speech. And no one so unfamiliar with the history of our European alliances should be giving us advice about those alliances now.

  As someone who has spent time thinking about Europe and its history, I do not prophesy the imminent demise of European democratic institutions, nor do I predict imminent catastrophe on European soil. But I don’t rule out these possibilities either. Europe’s entitlement economy will collapse. Its demography will change. The European Union may unravel. Islamic terrorists may succeed in taking out a European city. We have no idea what these events would herald, but it is possible and reasonable to imagine a very ugly outcome.

  And once again, the only people to whom this will come as a surprise are those who have not been paying attention.

  AFTERWORD FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION

  I TOLD YOU SO

  THIS BOOK BEGAN with a prediction that the next major terrorist attack on America would come from Europe. So when recently it emerged that British counterterrorism officials had foiled a plot to blow up as many as a dozen transatlantic airliners with liquid explosives, the news did not come as a surprise to me. In fact, shortly after September 11, 2001, I spoke to American counterterror officials who told me they were concerned about precisely this scenario. Nor was I surprised to learn that the arrested men and women were British citizens, some of a “wholly ethnic British” background, as the newspapers delicately put it. (In plain speech: They were white).48 Authorities suspected that a British charity ostensibly dedicated to earthquake relief in Pakistan had helped to fund the plot. Again, no surprise there.

  From the moment the word terrorist passed over the news feed, it was assumed by the public that the suspects were Islamic radicals, as indeed they were. But no mention of this was made for an entire news cycle—as if quite possibly they were extremist members of the Order of the Elks or radical Rotarians, and only time would tell. Bloody Elks, it’s always them, innit, mate? The media’s delicacy was also unsurpising, for mentioning Islam in the same breath as terrorism is now considered in Europe to be a breech not only of good manners but the law. According to European Union guidelines drafted in April 2006, officials are to avoid the phrase “Islamic terrorism” to avoid causing “frustration among Muslims.”1 The words fundamentalist and jihad are also to be eschewed. Quite right, too; we wouldn’t want some frustrated Islamic fundamentalist going on a jihad now, would we?

  The suspects were who I said they would be in this book’s introduction: deranged homegrown ideologues who sought to take advantage of the freedom of movement afforded them by their European passports to attack the United States. It was this prediction, among others, that caused certain critics to argue that my view of Europe was unduly pessimistic. In light of the events of the past six months, I would suggest that the views offered in this book were, on the contrary, unduly bright.

  I wrote in this book, for example, that the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali represented an important light of moral courage in the Netherlands. That light has now been extinguished. In April, Hirsi Ali was evicted from her apartment in The Hague. Her neighbors had filed a lawsuit charging that Hirsi Ali was likely to be murdered by terrorists; her neighbors could be caught in the cross fire, and therefore Hirsi Ali’s very presence violated their right, enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, to feel safe in their homes. The court, agreeing—and inadvertently illustrating the consequences of relinquishing sovereignty to the Council of Europe—effectively ruled that Hirsi Ali had no right to live near anyone. No Hirsi Ali, no problem. Perhaps Hirsi Ali’s neighbors’ right to security had been infringed, but the court’s decision to penalize Hirsi Ali for this, rather than those who wished to kill Hirsi Ali, reflects a species of moral reasoning so dismal that one might think it parody.

  As if this were not sufficiently craven, in May 2006 Dutch immigration minister Rita Verdonk revoked Hirsi Ali’s citizenship outright on the grounds that she had lied on her citizenship application, in 1992. This had been public knowledge for years, and the lies were trivial. She had used her grandfather’s last name on her application rather than her father’s, and she had neglected to mention that she had arrived after transiting through Kenya and Germany. According to Hirsi Ali, she lied to avoid retribution from her family. If that is the case, she in no way violated the spirit of the asylum laws, if indeed those laws had anything to do with providing real asylum. She admitted the falsehoods in 2002; her party at the time accepted her explanation, and, until recently, so did Dutch immigration authorities. Yet suddenly—at precisely the moment the courts were concluding that Hirsi Ali’s very existence was a violation of her neighbors’ human rights—Verdonk decided that Hirsi Ali must lose her citizenship. It is impossible to imagine that this was a coincidence or that the reasoning behind the decision was not the same: No Hirsi Ali, no problem.

  In response to widespread criticism, the Dutch government reinstated Hirsi Ali’s citizenship in June 2006, but she had by then resigned from parliament. She plans to leave the Netherlands and come to the United States to work with the American Enterprise Institute. Who can blame her?

  One year after the London Tube bombings, and one month before the exposure of the plot to blow up U.S.-bound aircraft, the Times of London conducted a poll among British Muslims. It found that 13 percent of them considered the Tube bombers “martyrs.” That is, slightly more than 200,000 British Muslims thought the murderers not only admirable, but sanctified. This constitutes a minority of Muslims, true, but obviously not a trivial minority. In the same month, a previously unknown group of Islamic terrorists narrowly failed to blow up German passenger trains in Dortmund and Koblenz. Only a design flaw prevented the bombs, concealed in suitcases, from exploding and killing civilians in numbers similar to those in the attacks in Madrid and London. “But why is Germany in the crosshairs of international jihadism?” asked a bewildered columnist in Germany’s Spiegel. “After all, al Qaeda’s two major attacks in Europe to date were attributed to the fact that the governments of Spain and Britain were involved in the Iraq war, which Germany is not. And Germany itself was not the direct target of the previously thwarted attacks. In one case it was an Iraqi politician and in the second it was German Jews, whom Islamists planned to attack because of their religious affiliation, not their citizenship.” 2 Imagine that! Despite all that earnest German pacifism and all that stern denunciation of Israel, the terroris
ts are refusing to confine their attacks to Jews. How inexplicable and unsporting! (Note the columnist’s assumption that an attack on German Jews is not an attack on Germany.)

  But no matter how often the bombs go off or narrowly fail to go off, it seems impossible to persuade a large segment of the European public—and the American one—that the threat is real. Within minutes of the announcement that a plot to blow up aircraft had been foiled, rumors began circulating on the Internet suggesting that there had been no plot, only a hoax perpetrated by the Bush and Blair administrations to shore up support for their foreign policy and strip their subjects of their remaining civil liberties. “More propaganda than plot,” sneered British broadcaster and former ambassador Craig Murray. “Be skeptical. Be very, very skeptical.”

  I’m all for skepticism, as a rule. But it would take the very opposite quality—extraordinary credulity—to endorse Murray’s view. You would have to believe that an enormous number of people with no obvious interest in perpetrating such a hoax had been convinced to go along with it—including hundreds of members of MI5, Scotland Yard, and the SAS; local British and American law enforcement authorities of mixed party affiliation; the government of Pakistan; and significant numbers of the Pakistani intelligence service (which is said to have provided key information leading to the arrests). You would have to imagine that Bush and Blair seriously expected everyone in the loop to keep their mouths shut about the hoax forever. All the evidence to be presented at the trial would have to be manufactured—the detonators and the bombmaking chemicals and the thousands of hours of surveillance tapes, photographs, and videos—and the silence of the technicians who manufactured the evidence would have to be guaranteed forever. (I can think of only one way of ensuring that.) British authorities claim to have several of the suicide bombers’ farewell videos in their possession. Did they convince actors to play the terrorists? What actor would play that role, knowing it would be used as evidence to send him to prison? It could all theoretically be done, I suppose— though, for my money, I’d hazard that if our leaders had the organizational talent, cunning, discipline, and diplomatic skill to pull the whole scam off without a hitch, we wouldn’t be losing in Iraq.