In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  Furthermore, there is no guarantee that this cautious, formal democracy will assume sufficient critical mass within Europe. The democratic tradition has been limited largely to the continent's north-western corner: Scandinavia, Belgium and the Netherlands, England and France. Right after the collapse of the great monarchies in 1917 and 1918, the rest of Europe also embraced the loveliest democratic constitutions with the most liberal basic rights, but that honeymoon did not last long. Political conflicts had a way of degenerating into civil wars, and the elite in many countries chose anti-communism first, and only afterwards democracy and the rule of law. In Hungary, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Greece and Rumania, power was quickly seized by generals and populist dictators, and this finally happened in powerful Germany as well. After the war, the communist parties imposed their authoritarian policies all over Central and Eastern Europe, while Southern Europe, with the exception of Italy, was run until the 1970s by ultra-right-wing dictatorships.

  In large parts of Europe, unlike in the United States, democracy is therefore a fairly recent phenomenon and hardly to be taken for granted. There is also the bureaucracy. In the United States, most of the obvious federal tasks – defence, foreign policy – rest immediately and clearly with the federal government, while the states have far-reaching autonomy on all other matters. California's environmental policy is very different from that in Texas, and there is no reason why the bread in Vermont should taste the same as that in Arkansas.

  In Europe, the exact opposite is the case. Here, in recent decades, a dangerously skewed development has taken place: a plethora of regulations has arisen regarding precisely such matters of detail, while cooperation on obviously communal issues – common defence policies, a unified foreign policy – is still, after all these years, in a pristine state at best. It is precisely the groundwork of a federal government – budgetary legislation, foreign policy and military organisation – that is still in the hands of the national states within the EU. Although the Union has access to a reasonably large budget, it pales by comparison with the combined budgets of the national states. There is work in progress on a quickly deployable European army corps, the old plan for a European Defence Community is being revived under the auspices of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), but the forging of national armies into a single military force with global aspirations is still, for the time being, unthinkable. This imbalance as well, clear for all to see, permanently chips away at the authority of the Union.

  The European project is a unique one in history. It is not an empire, it is not a federation, it is something all its own, just as new and unprecedented as the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands was in the seventeenth century. And it will require a great deal of time: such integration processes are not to be thought of in terms of years, but of generations. History, however, also shows us that such projects are not doomed.

  In the nineteenth century, a large part of the French population spoke no French at all, and the fact that they were Frenchmen and Frenchwomen did not interest them one whit. The only identity they recognised was that of their village, their city and sometimes their region. On occasion, that identity was defended by force of arms, as in the Pyrenees, the Ariège and, even today, in Corsica. Yet France still entered the First World War as a nation. Not due to speeches and clever PR techniques, but above all thanks to the building of countless railways and roads, the construction of thousands of schools and, last but not least, thanks to its system of military conscription.

  When the Dutch students Jacob van Lennep and Dirk van Hogendorp went walking through their newly formed fatherland in 1823, different currencies were still circulating everywhere. In the midst of what is today Zeeland Province they encountered passport problems, the country's political life usually came no further than the local men's club, and the two were often unable to make themselves understood amid all the strange local dialects. By that time the Netherlands had already been a constitutional federation for some 250 years, but it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that something like a ‘conceptual community’ arose at the national level.

  In 1831–2, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville travelled through the United States. Upon his return, he published a collection of journal entries and notes on this new nation under the title De la démocratie en Amérique. It was to become a seminal historical document about rights, democracy, nation-building and, above all, about the common mentality of the Americans. But, even today, it also shows the enormous differences between that nascent United States and today's European project.

  Everything de Tocqueville took note of almost 200 years ago in that young America – the single language, the public's great interest in the new forms of government, a clear consensus on the roles of the various parts of government, a strong sense of democratic legitimacy, a system of simple but solid rules of play between the various powers – everything that unified the United States then can hardly be found in the Europe currently under construction. If only for that reason, the use of the word ‘constitution’ during the 2005 referendums was misleading: the complicated system of treaties with which the old European states bind themselves together in no way resembles the clear lines which the Founding Fathers were able to impose on their new world in the Philadelphia of 1787.

  It has been noted often enough before: the view Europeans have of Europe is a – usually unconscious – projection of the idea they have of their own society. For the Germans, Europe will become one big Germany, for the Poles one great Poland, and the Dutch bravely continue to see Europe as being just as orderly and compromise-oriented as themselves. The problem is that all this leads to an endless flow of conflicts and misunderstandings.

  For there is no European people. There is no single, all-embracing community of culture and tradition that binds together Jorwerd, Vásárosbéc and Kefallonia; there are at least four of them: the Northern-Protestant, the Latin-Catholic, the Greek-Orthodox and Muslim-Ottoman. There is not a single language, but dozens of them. The Italians feel very differently about the word ‘state’ than do the Swedes. There are still no truly European political parties, and pan-European newspapers and television stations still lead a marginal existence. And, above all: in Europe there is very little in the way of a shared historical experience.

  Almost every country I travelled through myself, for example, had come up with its own account of the unimaginable explosion of violence between 1939–45, its own myth to explain all that unbelievable madness, to justify wrongdoings, to bury humiliations and create new heroes. The British compensated for the loss of empire with the myth of the Blitz. From the shame of Vichy, the French constructed the glorious story of General de Gaulle and the Resistance. The Soviets came to terms with Stalin's unnameable waste of human lives through the story of the Great Patriotic War. The Germans explained their dearth of morale during the Nazi era – the Nazis were always ‘the other people’ – with the legend of Hitler as ‘the evil demon’.

  All these mollifying, explanatory, comforting myths cannot exist without a national context. People need stories in order to grasp the inexplicable, to cope with their fate. The individual nation, with its common language and shared imagery, can always forge those personal experiences into one, great, cohesive history. But Europe cannot do that. Unlike the United States, it still has no common story.

  The Amsterdam sociologist Abram de Swaan speaks in this regard of Europe's ‘pedagogical deficit’: the lack of political fire at the European level, of that spirit so indispensable to a vital democracy. The absence of a common European language almost certainly has something to do with that, although it is estimated that eighty per cent of the conversations held within the EU bureaucracy are now in English. Much more serious, however, is the total lack of so much as a forum for mutual discussion: there is still no European coffee house, no place where Europeans can together mould their opinions, where ideas can be born, viewpoints examined. Without such an agora all further politi
cal processes remain hanging in thin air, without such a permanent debate Europe remains a cascade of phrases, a democracy for the sake of appearances, and nothing more.

  The British chronicler of Europe Timothy Garton Ash speaks in this regard of the grand ennui, the risk that the entire European project will collapse under its own inertia. ‘If I wish to reach the broadest intellectual European audience,’ he writes, ‘then I can best write an essay for the New York Review of Books, or a shorter editorial in the International Herald Tribune or the Financial Times.’ That is funny and absurd, but it illustrates above all how deep the problem lies: what seems to be missing here is a common attitude to life, an attitude like the one that existed, for example, within the chaotic Danube monarchy. The coffee houses of Vienna, the barracks, the theatres and clubs in all those far-flung provinces, that entire monarchy on the Danube was dominated by a carefully cultivated mixture of lightness and great earnest, a musical German full of Italian drama and Slavic melancholy, a common culture that, more than all the rest, bound together the national elites. For years, it was this culture which propped up that strange, dégagé empire.

  Have you ever heard Europeans shouting ‘We the People’? Yes, perhaps at the mass demonstrations against the American intervention in Iraq, in spring 2003. And certainly one year later, during the mass demonstrations in almost every capital on the continent against the bombings in Madrid. But those were the very first times.

  In 1924, Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy was published, a novel about a hotel full of disenfranchised guests stranded on the edge of Europe. Hotel Savoy was crawling with the victims of war, refugee families, whores, speculators, lottery-ticket touts and the unforgettable Croatian veteran Zwonimir Pansin. Zwonimir is always dreaming of a better world, and he loves America so much that he underscores all things commendable with the cry:‘America!’.‘If the food in the mess hall was good, he said: “America!” If a scaffolding was built well, he said: “America!” Concerning an “outstanding” first lieutenant he said: “America”. And because I was a good shot, he called my bullseyes: “America.”’

  The main character in Hotel Savoy is a black hole, an eternally missing person, someone for whom everyone else waits and waits. His name is Bloomfield, a Pole who has garnered a massive fortune in America and is now coming back to visit his father's grave. Everyone in the hotel has put their hopes in Bloomfield. ‘All over town, people were waiting for Bloomfield. In the Jewish quarter, people were waiting for him, everyone was holding onto their money, trade was slow … At the soup kitchen, everyone was talking about Bloomfield as well. Whenever he showed up, he met their every wish and the earth took on a new appearance.’ The people go down to the railway station every day to wait for Bloomfield, until one day he actually shows up, fleeting and ephemeral as always.

  Bloomfield has passed through Europe twice: in 1917, and again in 1941 (not counting the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift and the American intervention in the Yugoslav wars, when Europe proved unable to deal with that problem as well). On two occasions, America – not without interests of its own – has pulled Europe out of the mire. America set the tone of post-war European history. It was the pacesetter behind the European Community, it provided the atomic umbrella beneath which Western Europe could grow and blossom in the 1950s and 1960s and, by the same token, it forced the national politics of the European countries into a tight anti-communist straitjacket: if you're not for us, you're against us.

  During the first post-war decades, the United States and Europe travelled almost identical paths. Around the mid-1980s, however, both partners began going their own ways. While the phenomenon of immigration was regarded with increasing fearfulness within the EU, the United States continued to keep its own borders slightly ajar: between 1980–2000, that country took in about twenty million immigrants. In the short term, America's policy in this regard resulted in the problems regularly associated with integration. In the longer term, however, it will – as demographic projections from the University of Michigan show – ensure that America remains young, ambitious and energetic for some time to come. Unless policies change, the average age in the United States in the year 2050 will be thirty-five. In Europe that will be somewhere around fifty-two.

  A prognosis from the Institut Français de Relations Internationales points in the same direction: Europe will gradually exhibit less vitality, and participate less and less in the global economy. Around 1950, a quarter of the world's population was European; around the year 2000 it was twelve per cent. By 2050, it will be seven per cent. Unless policy changes, the active population of Europe will decrease in the next half-century from 331 million to 243 million. (Meanwhile, the active population in Canada and the United States will grow from 269 million to 355 million.)

  Yet the position of the United States is not unassailable either. In economic terms, the situation in which America finds itself is actually reminiscent of Great Britain after 1918: still the most important empire in the world, still in possession of the mightiest army and the greatest fleet, but at the same time locked in a fundamental struggle with growing economic, financial and social problems. Many longer-term prognosticators expect that China, where a quarter of the world's economy will be concentrated halfway through this present century, will ultimately surpass the United States as a superpower. China, after all, not only possesses a staggeringly huge reservoir of diligent workers, but its economy is also open to an unprecedented extent to trade and innovation. China is therefore generally considered the new driving force in the world economy, a motor which will also exercise a great influence on economies in other parts of the world. (It remains entirely possible, of course, that factors such as climate change or major epidemics will once again overturn all these economic prognoses.)

  The proud American national self-image is still very much alive. But it does not necessarily imply that the old family ties with Europe will remain a part of that image. Around the year 2055, the majority of American voters will be former immigrants from Africa, Asia and Central and South America or their descendants, people who no longer have any affinity with Europe, with European problems or the Europeans themselves. In the coming decades, the descendants of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Friesland and Holland will enter the minority once and for all.

  Europe, in other words, must set a course of its own: politically, economically and militarily. Within a ninety-minute flight from Berlin, the Kremlin reigns over the unstable remnants of the former Soviet Empire – including a doomsday struggle in and around Chechnya. Two hours from Rome begins one of the world's major hotbeds of unrest, the Arab world. Five hours from London lies the centre of power of the old Atlantic alliance, now fallen into deep crisis, whose leader, the United States, is increasingly less interested in the international order to which it once gave shape.

  We shall not catch Bloomfield coming to the rescue of Hotel Savoy for a third time.

  I have often had the feeling that, despite our common heritage and our present-day contacts, Europe as it was in spring 1914 exhibited a greater cultural unity than it does today, more than ninety years later. Then, a worker in Warsaw led more or less the same life as a worker in Brussels, and the same went for a teacher in Berlin or in Prague, a shopkeeper in Budapest or in Amsterdam.

  Our common disaster can be summarised briefly. Around 1900 there was a tree and an apple, and everyone ate of it. At the heart of Europe lay a young, unstable nation that did not recognise its own destructive potential. Two hellish wars followed, and we all experienced them in our own way. After that, for the East, began four deadly decades, while for Western Europe the gates opened onto a paradise of mopeds, electric mixers, cars and televisions. Close to the end of the century, the Wall fell, but for millions of Eastern Europeans hard times arrived again, the years of humiliated men, frightened women and broken families. At the same time, the West was celebrating the boom of the 1990s, without realising what their Central and Eastern European kin were suffering. Immigrants from
other cultures came and went, closed societies were broken open, there arose a new set of dynamics with new tensions. In short, we still have a great deal to tell each other and a great deal to explain, and all that has yet to begin.

  This winter I was back in Vásárosbéc. In the café, people were whispering that the owner planned to close the place in May: EU regulations demanded the installation of strictly divided men's and women's toilets, and there was no way she could afford that. Lajos and Red Jósef had passed away: sixty is a respectable age for men here. They lay in the churchyard beside the veteran, who had been found dead one summer morning, flat on his face in the road.

  The post office had closed down and the school was about to close. There were houses for sale everywhere. ‘People want to leave,’ our friend had written. ‘Others are dying or already dead.’ The German grocery chain Lidl – long live the EU! – had invaded Hungary with dozens of supermarkets, all of them brand-spanking new, all of them opening at once. By selling vegetables and other products at barely cost price, they were now grinding the small shopkeepers to a pulp. The greengrocer and the little shops in neighbouring Szigetvár were going under. But there was good news as well. The mayor had found a source of European funding: a new cultural centre was rising up in the middle of the village, a big building with shiny roof tiles. Almost all the men had work now, the wages were going up, even the toothless man had a steady job. Everyone had become a little more prosperous, except for the postman's wife. Her cow had died. One of the Dutch people had already offered to buy her house, just to have a little extra space.