Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too
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This appears to be what has happened. When American employers are asked to rank groups in terms of their desirability as employees, whites score highest. Immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent are seen as mid-rank, followed by blacks, Arabs, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. If Zia, then, found himself to be an “honorary white man” in the United States, it is perhaps because of the prevalence there of real black men. (I am observing, not celebrating, these circumstances.)
21. “We Can Take It,” Mirror, July 8, 2005.
22. “A Letter to the Terrorists, from London,” London News Review, July 7, 2005.
23. Harold Pinter, “The American Administration Is a Bloodthirsty Wild Animal,” Telegraph, December 11, 2002.
24. Margaret Drabble, “I Loathe America,” Telegraph, May 8, 2003.
25. Brian Reade, “God Help America,” Mirror, November 4, 2004. Of course, many on the American Left hold identical sentiments.
26. Salman Rushdie, “Anti-Americanism Has Taken the World by Storm,” Guardian, February 6, 2002.
27. http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=788
28. Fifth Volcker Report, p. 86. Galloway denies this, of course. (http://www.iic-offp.org/story27oct05.htm)
29. K. Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (London, 1988), p. 59.
CHAPTER 4 : THE HOPE OF MARSEILLE
1. The French philosopher and essayist Ernest Renan provided the definitive expression of this doctrine in his famous speech to the Sorbonne, “Qu’est-ce que la Nation?,” in 1882.
2. Cited in Patrick Parodi, “Citizenship and Integration: Marseille, a Model of Integration?” in History-Geography (Marseille, Académie Aix-Marseille, 2002). My translation.
CHAPTER 5 : WE SURRENDER!
1. Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World. Translated by Robin Dick (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003).
CHAPTER 6 : NO PAST, NO FUTURE, NO WORRIES
1. Antonio Golini, Possible Policy Responses to Population Aging and Population Decline: The Case of Italy (Expert Group Meeting on Policy Responses to Population Aging and Population Decline, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations Secretariat: UN/POP/PRA/2000/7, September 26, 2000).
2. “No Easy Answers Around the World to Population Decline,” The Scotsman, October 15, 2004.
3. Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride (New York: Rizzoli, 2001).
4. For an interesting depiction of the immaturity and fecklessness of the Italian male, see L’Ultimo Bacio (“The Last Kiss”), directed in 2002 by Gabriele Muccino, one of the most successful movies ever produced in Italy. At the center of the film are five young men, each striving to exceed the others’ irresponsibility toward their girlfriends and the children they have fathered.
5. Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence (Folio Ser.: No 1845). (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
6. Personal correspondence, December 7, 2004.
7. David Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 59.
8. “Germany’s Declining Population—Kinder, Gentler,” The Economist, June 12, 2003.
9. Icarus Fallen.
CHAPTER 7 : BLACK-MARKET RELIGION: THE NINE LIVES OF JOSÉ BOVÉ
1. I owe my description of the early Bovés, and my knowledge of medieval millenarianism—as does every contemporary scholar—to the great and eloquent historian of medieval heresy Norman Cohn. The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 41–42.
2. “A World Struggle Is Underway,” interview with José Bové by Lynn Jeffress, with Jean-Paul Mayanobe, www.zmag.org.
3. “Anti-Globalization Activist José Bové Is at It Again,” Agence France-Presse, January 30, 2001.
4. José Bové and François Dufour, The World Is Not for Sale: Farmers Against Junk Food (London: Verso, 2001), p. 18.
5. Phil Reeves, “José Bové Takes His Magic Potion to the West Bank,” The Independent, June 21, 2001.
6. “José Bové: A Farmer’s International?” New Left Review 12, November–December 2001.
7. The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 48.
8. The World Is Not for Sale, p. 146.
9. The Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. 59–60.
10. “A World Struggle Is Underway.”
11. The World Is Not for Sale, p. 34.
12. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), p. 41.
13. “Anti-Globalization Activist José Bové Is at It Again.”
14. The Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. 99–100.
15. “José Bové: A Farmer’s International?”
16. “Report from French Farmers,” José Bové, Synthesis/Regeneration 16, Summer 1998.
17. The World Is Not for Sale, p. 208.
18. “Report from French Farmers.”
19. “A World Struggle Is Underway.”
20. The World Is Not for Sale, p. 168.
21. Ibid., p. 198.
22. Ibid., p. 185.
23. Ibid., p. 186.
24. Ibid., p. 186–87.
25. Ibid., p. vii.
26. Ibid., p. xii.
27. Ibid., p. 57.
28. Ibid., p. 138.
29. Michael Driessen, http://www.wisemonkeynews.com/article/politics/ 40/Jose+Bove+fights+the+Mc-Domination+of+the+world/
30. Hal Hamilton, “Reflections from France.” http://www.sare.org/ sanet-mg/archives/html-home/46-html/0025.html
31. The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 121.
32. The World Is Not for Sale, p. 185.
33. The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 83.
34. http://www.foodfirst.org/action/2003/josebove.html
35. The World Is Not for Sale.
36. Donella Meadows, The Global Citizen, July 13, 2000, http://www.pcdf.org/meadows/Jose_Bove.html
37. James W. Ceaser, “A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism,” Public Interest, Summer 2003.
38. The World Is Not for Sale, pp. 60–61, 78.
39. Ibid., p. 71.
40. The True Believer, p. 81.
41. I am indebted to the Brazilian poet Nelson Ascher for corresponding with me at length about these connections. I no longer recall which thoughts were originally his and which were mine, so to be on the safe side, let’s say that all the good ideas are his.
42. The World Is Not for Sale, p. 27.
43. “Le Peuple Palestinien est debout,” interview with José Bové by Fatiha Kaoues, April 24, 2002. My translation. http://oumma.com/ article.php3?id_article=378
44. The World Is Not for Sale, 11.
45. The True Believer, p. 11.
46. H. L. Mencken, Memorial Service, first printed in the Smart Set, March 1922. Cited in H. L. Mencken on Religion, S. T. Joshi (New York: Prometheus, 2002), p. 297.
CHAPTER 8 : BLACK-MARKET NATIONALISM: I HATE
1. John Felstiner, Paul Celan : Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 39. The translation is Felstiner’s.
2. Translated by Evan Goodwin, “Little Blue Light—Georg Trakl,” Littlebluelight (May 29, 2003). http://www.littlebluelight.com/ lblphp/quotes.php?ikey=27.
3. Gottfried Benn, Morgue and Other Expressionist Verse (1912–1913). Translated by Supervert32C Inc., 2002. http://supervert.com/elibrary/ gottfried_benn.
4. Der Kongress zur Nürnberg 1934 (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., Frz. Eher Nachf., 1934), pp. 130–41.
5. Wolfgang Spahr, Billboard, August 7, 1999.
6. Winston Cummings, “Teutonic Values,” Hit Parader, December 1998.
7. Colin Devinish, “Rammstein Raise Furor over Video with Nazi-Era Footage,” Sonicnet, August 1998, at www.vh1.com/artists/news/ 500908/08311998/rammstein.jhtml
8. Gabriella, New York Rock, November 1998, at www.nyrock.com/ interviews/rammstein_int.htm
9. Chris Gill, “Rammstein: Battering Ramm,” Guitar World, 6:9 at www.rammsteinsite.com/articles6.html
10. http://www.newsfilter.org/antimtv/ba
nds/rammstein.htm
11. Wojtek Goral, “Nazis? Heil No!,” London Records, 2001.
12. Examples of posters in this genre may be found at http://motlc. wiesenthal.com/gallery/pg01/pg9/pg01931.html and http://www. calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/posters/rad.jpg
13. “Teutonic Values.”
14. Hugo Ringler, “Heart or Reason?: What We Don’t Want from Our Speakers,” Unser Wille und Weg, 7 (1937), pp. 245–49. Translated by Robert D. Books, May 1972.
15. Interview with Flake Lorenz, Deutscher Video Ring Magazin, May 2001.
16. Dante Bonutto, online interview with Rammstein in Blistering, http://www.blistering.com/fastpage/fpengine.php/templateid/7967/ menuid/3/tempidx/5/catid/4/editstatus//restemp/N%3B/fPpagesel/2
17. I thank my editor at Azure, Daniel Doneson, for pointing this out to me and for directing me to a number of interesting sources for the study of the relationship between music and politics.
18. Schwärmerei means excessive or unwholesome sentimentality. Richard Wagner, Über deutsches Musikwesen, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen: vol. I, translated by William Ashton Ellis, The Wagner Library, Edition 1.0, http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/ prose/wagongm.htm
19. Andrea Nieradzik, “Beautiful Sons,” Musik Express, March 2001.
20. See the final lines of Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism,” Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975).
21. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Das Türkenproblem,” Die Zeit, September 12, 2002.
CHAPTER 9 : TO HELL WITH EUROPE
1. Pascal Ceaux, Franck Colombani, and Alexandre Garcia, “L’agresseur de M. Delanoë n’aimait ni les élus ni les homosexuels,” Le Monde, October 8, 2002. My translation.
2. No one can discuss the rise of modern nationalism without revealing the influence of the seminal theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991).
AFTERWORD FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION : I TOLD YOU SO
1. “Islamic Terrorism Is Too Emotive a Phrase, Says EU,” Telegraph, April 12, 2006.
2. “Germany in the Crosshairs,” Spiegel Online, August 22, 2006.
3. “Train Bombers Funded by British Businessmen,” Times of London, July 17, 2006.
4. Aftenposten, August 5, 2006.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My agent, Daniel Greenberg, is what every writer dreams of in an agent. He’s aggressive on my behalf, ever-tactful and encouraging with me, and his advice, generously offered, is always good advice. Best of all, he always answers my phone calls and e-mails right away. (Other writers will appreciate how rare and wonderful this is in an agent.) Thank you, Daniel, for seeing the potential in this book and for finding it a good home.
That good home was with Crown Forum, and specifically with my editor, Jed Donahue. An editor who publishes books about politics needs to be able to see not what is in the headlines that day, but what will be in the headlines in two years’ time. When Jed first saw the proposal for this book, Theo van Gogh was alive, London had not been attacked, and no one was giving a moment’s thought to the suburbs of France. Jed had the foresight to anticipate Europe’s crisis at a time when many people did not. He has also forced me to return again and again to this question: Why should anyone care what happens to Europe? If more writers were asked by more editors why anyone should give a damn about their books, I suspect a lot of books would be a lot better.
My thanks to Crown Forum’s art director, Whitney Cookman, for this book’s eerily menacing cover; to production editor Susan Westendorf; to indexer Leoni McVey; and to copy editor Toni Rachiele, who scrubbed this manuscript with a Kärcher. If Toni sees a reference to the world’s forty-nine least developed countries, she is the kind of copy editor who goes to the footnote, counts each country by hand, then reports that there are in fact fifty on the list I cite. She applied the same meticulous care to every word in the book. It is customary at this point for authors to avow complete responsibility for any errors remaining in the text, but frankly, I don’t think it’s necessary; I can’t imagine anything escaped her. (If something did, it’s still my fault.)
I am also particularly thankful for the excellent editorial advice I received from David Hazony and Daniel Doneson, editors of the journal Azure. Azure published two chapters of this book in abridged form. I thank them, as well, for inviting me to the Shalem Center and permitting me to air my ideas among their colleagues. I also thank Policy Review and the Washington Post for publishing some of the material in this book and giving me the chance to think out loud, in print, about the significance of the decline of faith in Europe and the limits to Europe’s integration project.
Many people were kind enough to read this manuscript, in part or in whole. I thank in particular Damian Counsell, William Hill, Steven Lenzner, and Ulrich Schollwöck. Norah Vincent offered not just intellectual but emotional support on those days when the phrase “To hell with Europe” seemed like more than just a good title for a chapter. To Bill Walsh, who again saved me from committing to print errors too embarrassing to contemplate, I extend my limitless gratitude. I also thank Mustafa Akyol, Nelson Ascher, Cristina Iampieri, Bruce Gatenby, Jeffrey Gedmin, Judith Wrubel Levy, Phiroze Neemuchwala, Rubel Quadar, and of course Zia Rahman, who were all notably generous with their time and thoughts about Europe, both in correspondence and conversation.
As always, I thank my father and brother. Every chapter in this book began as a conversation with one or the other of them. I also thank my father and grandmother for their translations of Rammstein’s lyrics—the reader may imagine what my grandmother thought of that task—and my mother for her thoughts about the German musical tradition.
David Gross traveled with me through Europe while I looked for answers to my questions. He took many photographs of what we saw together. Some of these can be seen at www.mimetic.com. I could not ask for a more patient and curious companion on the long journey— or a better friend.
And one final word in memory of my grandfather. No one knew this continent better than he, and no one taught me more about it. I’m sure he knows how grateful I am.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Claire Berlinski, born and raised in the United States, has lived and worked in Britain, France, Switzerland, Thailand, Laos, and Turkey as a journalist, academic, and consultant. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and Policy Review, among other publications. She holds a first-class degree in modern history and a doctorate in international relations from Oxford University, as well as a diploma in French literature from the Sorbonne and a degree in philosophy from the University of Washington. Berlinski is also the author of Loose Lips, a novel. Menace in Europe is her first nonfiction work. She now divides her time between Paris and Istanbul.
1 These remarks are particularly rich inasmuch as Drewermann is best known for complaining bitterly in an interview with Der Spiegel that Americans “live in the delusion that they, as a magnificent nation, were specially appointed by God to direct the course of world events.” Interview with Eugen Drewermann, “Psychoanalysis: Why Bush Must Conduct This War,” Der Spiegel, February 11, 2003.
2 Courage in conjunction with lamentable military strategy is, of course, not much to celebrate.
3 The message is obviously of Koranic inspiration. “22/1 Mankind, have fear of your Lord! The quaking of the Hour is a terrible thing. 22/2 On the day they see it, every nursing woman will be oblivious of the baby at her breast, and every pregnant woman will abort the contents of her womb, and you will think people drunk when they are not drunk; it is just that the punishment of Allah is so severe.” (Sura al-Haj, ‘The Pilgrimage’)
4 The fruits of this peculiar conception of tolerance may also be seen in the Netherlands’ policy on euthanasia, one that may briefly be summarized as Don’t get sick in a Dutch hospital. A policy widely applauded for its
tolerance in fact permits Dutch doctors to kill deformed newborns, the retarded, and a great many elderly people who have specifically indicated that they have no desire to die. According to the Dutch government’s own investigation, an average of sixteen people in the Netherlands are killed each day by their doctors without their consent. See the Remmelink Report by the Committee to Investigate the Medical Practice Concerning Euthanasia, Medische Beslissingen Rond Het Levenseinde, Sdu Uitgeverij Plantijnstraat (The Hague: 1991). On the so-called Groningen Protocols concerning the killing of infants by doctors, see, e.g., Toby Sterling, “Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies,” Associated Press, November 30, 2004. See also Richard Miniter, who reports that more than 10 percent of Dutch senior citizens surveyed feared being killed, against their will, by their doctors: “The Dutch Way of Death: Socialized Medicine Helped Turn Doctors into Killers,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2001.
5 He wasn’t paying attention, then. Only seven weeks before, Marco Biagi, a senior adviser to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, had been gunned down by the Red Brigades. The fact that Verhofstadt was either unaware of this or indifferent to it suggests something about the degree to which Europe has truly been integrated: not so much as some claim, evidently. It is true that Fortuyn’s murder was the first political assassination in the Netherlands since 1584, when William the Silent was shot to death in the city of Delft. Perhaps the Belgian prime minister was inadvertently expressing a common, if rarely articulated, European sentiment: Italians can be expected to shoot their politicians (that’s Sopranoland down there, after all), but when the placid Dutch begin shooting one another, it is time to worry.