The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  In the wider Middle East, the scene is the same. Europe is joined at the hip with the US, wherever the legacies of imperial control or settler zeal are at stake. Britain and France, original suppliers of heavy water and uranium for the large Israeli nuclear arsenal, which they pretend does not exist, demand along with America that Iran abandon programmes it is allowed even by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, under menace of sanctions and war. In Lebanon, the EU and the US prop up a cabinet that would not last a day if a census were called, while German, French and Italian troops provide border guards for Israel within the country. As for Palestine, the EU showed no more hesitation than the US in plunging the population into misery, cutting off all aid when voters elected the wrong government, on the pretext that it must first recognize the Israeli state, as if Israel had ever recognized a Palestinian state, and renounce terrorism—read: any armed resistance to a military occupation that has lasted forty years without Europe lifting a finger against it. Funds now flow again, to protect a remnant valet in the West Bank.

  Questionable some of this record may be, lovers of Europe might reply. But these are external issues, that can scarcely be said to affect the example Europe sets the world of respect for human rights and the rule of law within its own borders. The performance of the EU or its member-states may not be irreproachable in the Middle East, but isn’t the moral leadership represented by its standards at home what really counts, internationally? So good a conscience comes too easily, for the War on Terror knows no frontiers. The crimes committed in its name have stalked freely across the continent, in the full cognizance of its rulers. Originally, the sub-contracting of torture—‘rendition’, or the handing over of a victim to the attentions of the secret police in client states—was, like so much else, an invention of the Clinton administration, which introduced the practice in the mid-nineties. Asked about it a decade later, the CIA official in charge of the programme, Michael Scheuer, simply said: ‘I check my moral qualms at the door’.16 As one would expect, it was Britain that collaborated with the first renditions, in the company of Croatia and Albania.

  Under the Bush administration, the programme expanded. Three weeks after 9/11, NATO declared that Article V of its charter, mandating collective defence in the event of an attack on one of its members, was activated. By then American plans for the descent on Afghanistan were well advanced, but they did not include European participation in Operation Enduring Freedom—the US high command had found the need for consultations in a joint campaign cumbersome in the Balkan War, and did not want to repeat the experience. Instead, at a meeting in Brussels on 4 October 2001, the allies were called upon for other services. The specification of these remains secret, but—as the second report to the Council of Europe by the courageous Swiss investigator Dick Marty, released in June 2007, has shown—high on the list agreed on this occasion must have been a stepped-up programme of renditions. Once Afghanistan was taken, the Bagram air base outside Kabul became both interrogation centre for the CIA and loading-bay for prisoners to Guantánamo. The traffic was soon two-way, and its pivot was Europe. In one direction, captives were transported from Afghan or Pakistani dungeons to Europe, either to be held there in secret CIA jails, or shipped onwards to Cuba. In the other direction, captives were flown from secret locations in Europe for requisite treatment in Afghanistan.

  Though NATO initiated this system, the abductions it involved were not confined to members of the North Atlantic Council. Europe was eager to help America, whether or not fine print obliged it to do so. North, South, East and West: no part of the continent failed to join in. New Labour’s contribution occasions no surprise: with up to 650,000 civilians dead from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, it would have been unreasonable for the Straws, Becketts, Milibands to lose any sleep over the torture of the living. More striking is the role of the neutrals. Under Ahern, Ireland furnished Shannon to the CIA for so many westbound flights that locals dubbed it Guantánamo Express. Social-Democratic Sweden, under its portly boss Göran Persson, now a corporate lobbyist, handed over two Egyptians seeking asylum to the CIA, who took them straight to torturers in Cairo. Under Berlusconi, Italy helped a large CIA team to kidnap another Egyptian in Milan, who was flown from the US airbase in Aviano, via Ramstein in Germany, for the same treatment in Cairo. Under Prodi, a government of Catholics and ex-Communists has sought to frustrate the judicial investigation of the kidnapping, while presiding over the expansion of Aviano. Switzerland proffered the overflight that took the victim to Ramstein, and protected the head of the CIA gang that seized him from arrest by the Italian judicial authorities. He now basks in Florida.

  Further east, Poland did not transmit captives to their fate in the Middle East. It incarcerated them for treatment on the spot, in torture-chambers constructed for ‘high value detainees’ by the CIA at the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence base, Europe’s own Bagram—facilities unknown in the time of Jaruzselski’s martial law. In Romania, a military base north of Constanza performed the same services, under the superintendence of the country’s current president, the staunchly pro-Western Traian Băsescu. Over in Bosnia, six Algerians were illegally seized at American behest, and flown from Tuzla—beatings in the aircraft en route—to the US base at Incirlik in Turkey, and thence to Guantánamo, where they still crouch in their cages. Down in Macedonia, scene of Blair’s moving encounters with refugees from Kosovo, there was a combination of the two procedures. A German of Lebanese descent was kidnapped at the border; held, interrogated and beaten by the CIA in the country; then drugged and shipped to Kabul for more extended treatment. When it eventually became clear, after he went on hunger-strike, that his identity had been mistaken, he was flown blindfolded to a NATO-upgraded air-base in Albania, and deposited back in Germany.

  There the Red-Green government had been well aware of what happened to him, one of its agents interrogating him in his oubliette in Kabul—Otto Schily, the Green minister of interior, was in the Afghan capital at the time—and accompanying his flight back to Albania. But it was no more concerned with his fate than with that of another of its residents, a Turk born in Germany, seized by the CIA in Pakistan and dispatched to the gulag in Guantánamo, where he too was interrogated by German agents. Both operations were under the control of today’s Social-Democratic foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then in charge of the secret services, who not only covered for the torturing of the victim in Cuba, but even declined an American offer to release him. In a letter to the captive’s mother, Joschka Fischer, Green foreign minister at the time, explained that the government could do nothing for him. In ‘such a good land’, as a leading admirer has recently described it,17 Fischer and Steinmeier remain the most popular of politicians. The new interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, is more robust, publicly calling for assassination rather than rendition in dealing with deadly enemies of the state, in the Israeli manner.

  Such is the record set out in Marty’s two detailed reports to the Council of Europe (nothing to do with the EU), each an exemplary document of meticulous detective work and moral passion. If this Swiss prosecutor from Ticino were representative of the continent, rather than a voice crying in the wilderness, there would be reason to be proud of it. He ends his second report by expressing the hope that his work will bring home ‘the legal and moral quagmire into which we have collectively sunk as a result of the US-led “war on terror”. Almost six years in, we seem no closer to pulling ourselves out of this quagmire’.18 Indeed. Not a single European government has conceded any guilt, while all continue imperturbably holding forth on human rights. We are in the world of Ibsen—Consul Bernick, Judge Brack and their like—updated for postmoderns: pillars of society, pimping for torture.

  What has been delivered in these practices are not just the hooded or chained bodies, but the deliverers themselves: Europe surrendered to the United States. This rendition is the most taboo of all to mention. A rough approximation to it can be found in what remains in many ways the best account of the rela
tionship between the two, Robert Kagan’s Paradise and Power, whose benignly contemptuous imagery of Mars and Venus—the Old World, relieved of military duties by the New, cultivating the arts and pleasures of a borrowed peace—has predictably riled Europeans. But even Kagan grants them too much, as if they really lived according to the precepts of Kant, while Americans were obliged to act on the truths of Hobbes. If a philosophical reference were wanted, more appropriate would have been La Boétie, whose Discours de la servitude volontaire could furnish a motto for the Union. But these are arcana. The one contemporary text to have captured the full flavour of the transatlantic relationship is, perhaps inevitably, a satire, Régis Debray’s plea for a United States of the West that would absorb Europe completely into the American imperium.19

  Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of De Gaulle, but of figures like Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the seventies, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the eighties, and the arrival in power in the nineties of a post-war generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.

  By this time, on the other hand, the Community had doubled in size, acquired an international currency, and boasted a GDP exceeding that of the United States itself. Statistically, the conditions for an independent Europe existed as never before. But politically, they had been reversed. With the decay of federalism and the deflation of inter-governmentalism, the Union had weakened national, without creating a supranational, sovereignty, leaving rulers adrift in an ill-defined limbo between the two. With the eclipse of significant distinctions between Left and Right, other motives of an earlier independence have also waned. In the syrup of la pensée unique, little separates the market-friendly wisdom of one side of the Atlantic from the other, though as befits the derivative, the recipe is blander still in Europe than America, where political differences are less extinct. In such conditions, an enthusiast can find no higher praise for the Union than to compare it to ‘one of the most successful companies in global history’. Which firm confers this honour on Brussels? Why, the one in your wallet. ‘The EU is already closer to Visa than it is to a state’,20 declares New Labour’s infant prodigy. Europe exalted to the rank of a credit-card.

  Transcendence of the nation-state, Marx believed, would be a task not for capital but for labour. A century later, as the Cold War set in, Kojève held that whichever camp accomplished it would emerge the victor from the conflict. The foundation of the European Community settled the issue for him. The West would win, and its triumph would bring history, understood as the realization of human freedom, to an end. Kojève’s prediction was accurate. His extrapolation, and its irony, remain in the balance. They have certainly not been disproved: he would have smiled at the image of a chit of plastic. The emergence of the Union can be regarded as the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie, proof that its creative powers were not exhausted by the fratricide of two world wars; and what has happened to it as a strange declension from what was hoped from it. Yet the long-run outcome of integration remains unforeseeable to all parties. Even without shocks, many a zig-zag has marked its path. With them, who knows what further mutations might occur.

  1. Postwar, London 2005, p. 799.

  2. Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, London 2005, pp. 7, 85.

  3. Why Europe Will Run the Twenty-First Century, p. 4.

  4. Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, Cambridge 2004, p. 382.

  5. The European Dream, p. 385.

  6. Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West, Cambridge 2006, p. 43.

  7. ‘Ulrich Beck, Understanding the Real Europe’, Dissent, Summer 2003.

  8. ‘Le problème européen’, Le Débat, No. 129, March–April 2004, p. 66.

  9. Eneko Landabaru, ‘The Need for Enlargement and the Differences from Previous Accessions’, in George Vassiliou (ed.), The Accession Story: The EU from Fifteen to Twenty-Five Countries, Oxford 2007, p. 15.

  10. See Le Monde, 20 May 2005.

  11. Andrew Moravcsik, ‘In Defence of the “Democratic Deficit”: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4, November 2002, p. 618; Financial Times, 14 June 2005; ‘Conservative Idealism and International Institutions’, Chicago Journal of International Law, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 2000, p. 310.

  12. The Divided West, p. 40.

  13. ‘Deconstructing Europe’, p. 287.

  14. ‘The Next Empire’, Prospect, October 2001.

  15. Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union, Oxford 2006, pp. 54–7.

  16. See Dick Marty’s first report to the Council of Europe of 7 June 2006, Alleged Secret Detentions and Unlawful Inter-state Transfers Involving Council of Europe Member States, Strasbourg, footnote to paragraph 30.

  17. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The Stasi on our Minds’, New York Review of Books, 31 May 2007.

  18. Dick Marty, Secret Detentions and Illegal Transfers of Detainees Involving Council of Europe Member States: Second Report, 8 June 2007, paragraph 367.

  19. L’Édit de Caracalla ou plaidoyer pour les États-Unis d’Occident, Paris 2002; extracted in Régis Debray, ‘Letter from America’, New Left Review II/19, January–February 2003.

  20. Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, p. 23.

  THEORIES

  2007

  Larger now than the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago, more opaque than the Byzantine, the European Union continues to baffle observers and participants alike. Concepts have failed even its most prominent actors and analysts. For De Gaulle it was simply, and somewhat contemptuously, ce machin. For Jacques Delors, whose sympathies were the complete opposite, it still remained a kind of flying saucer—an ‘unidentified political object’, as he called it. For the leading constitutional authority on the EU, it is a golem. Such perplexities are not just quirks of terminology. They correspond to a painful reality, the enormous structural gap between the institutions of Europe and its citizens, attested by every opinion poll, steadily sinking rates of participation in Union elections, not to speak of popular understanding of its decision-making processes. This distance is in turn reproduced in the literature about the EU. Here writing falls into two widely differing categories, with only occasional crossovers between them. There is a popular literature aimed at a general audience, produced by publicists—or, less frequently, politicians—that enters into the mediasphere, becoming an element in the intellectual ether. Shifts of register within it need to be attended to in their own right.

  On a far vaster scale is the professional literature about the EU, by now a veritable industry, with a perpetually expanding assembly line of journals, monographs, papers, conferences, research projects, collections, commentaries and more. No less than three hundred Jean Monnet chairs of European studies now adorn universities and institutes across the Union. Little of the huge output of this world penetrates any wider public consciousness, the bulk of it remaining as technical as the regulations and directives of Brussels themselves, sometimes more so. But if this is partly due to its subject matter,
it is also a function of the discipline that dominates academic discussion of the EU, political science. Alfred Cobban’s definition of this branch of learning—a device ‘for avoiding that dangerous subject politics, without achieving science’—has not lost its sting fifty years later.

  A more or less concurrent French and American invention—today’s Sciences-Po was founded in 1872, in the wake of France’s defeat in war with Prussia; the Civil War was the comparable watershed in the US—political science crystallized in the twentieth century as a distinctively American enterprise. This may have something to do with what is the most striking single feature of the scholarly literature on the EU today. Few of the leading contributions to it are written by Europeans. Virtually all the most original recent work on the Union comes, in one way or another, from America. Indeed, there is a sense in which the field was largely an American creation. Historically, few would contest that the first serious theorization of European integration was the work of an American scholar, Ernst Haas, whose study of the European Coal and Steel Community, The Uniting of Europe, appeared in 1958, a year after the Treaty of Rome was ratified, setting a paradigm for analysis of the Common Market that remained dominant for a quarter of a century. Haas’s standpoint was, famously, neo-functionalist: that is, focussed on the ways in which the ECSC, sprung from a convergence of interest groups—businesses, parties, unions—in the original Six, had unleashed a dynamic process of integration. In that process, he argued, the interdependence of economic sectors would lead, in a slow cascade of spillovers, to a steadily more extensive pooling of sovereignty in supranational institutions.