The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  It is in this depoliticized setting that the issue of immigration has risen to a prominence out of all proportion with its objective place in society, becoming the punctum dolens of societies that rest on a social inequality and popular impotence which can never themselves be admitted to public consciousness. In the absence of any collective vision of the structures of power that hold all those without capital in their grip, let alone of how to replace them, beleaguered minorities on the margins of social existence become the focus of every kind of projection and resentment. Amid the fog-banks of a generalized insecurity, dim shapes, however wraith-like, easily acquire the lineaments of menace. Acting as incubators of xenophobia, the apparatuses of security can then provoke the kind of revolt that the intimidated majority has forgotten. Since the events of 1968, there has been no defiance of the established order to compare with them, save the riots in the banlieues of 2005.

  Even so, the depoliticization of European publics, still relatively recent, has not become as deep as the aphasia of their counterparts in America, as a glance at the respective mediaspheres of the EU and US—television, radio, magazines, such newspapers as survive—makes clear. Below Union level, not only are the national frameworks of political life in Europe more compact and comprehensible; memories of class conflict and ideological turmoil remain less residual. Yet these have largely ceased to find expression in the party system. There the plight of the Socialist International in the leading states of the EU speaks for itself. The near-uniformity of moral and political decline in its member parties suggests the possibility that a mutation might be underway, that could leave virtually nothing of their inheritance. The pit of contempt into which New Labour has fallen, in the closing stages of the tawdriest regime in post-war British history, is an extreme case. But even without stains of office, sister parties in the core of the Union have sunk to levels of popular esteem never previously witnessed—French Socialists, German Social-Democrats and Italian Democrats struggling to retain so much as a quarter of the electorate.

  Yet from the current emasculation of these parties it does not follow that all will consequently be quiet on the western front. In Britain or Spain, labour has not raised its head for nearly three decades. But in France, the strikes of 1995 brought down a government, and employers trying to close plants risk bossnapping even today. In Germany, the SPD has paid for its turn to the right with a scission in its industrial base and the emergence of a left entitled to the name. In Italy, as late as 2002 trade unions were able to mount the largest demonstration in the post-war history of the republic, in defense of pensions. In Greece, students can still hold the police at bay in pitched battles. However chloroformed legislatures or mediaspheres may be, turbulence has not yet been banished from the streets. The neo-liberal system generates reactions it cannot always control.

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  On the horizon, meanwhile, lies another kind of European order, at an angle to the semi-catallaxy within. The Union is preparing itself for the role of a deputy empire. The Treaty of Lisbon accords more substantial power to Germany within the EU, and greater formal rights to the Parliament in Strasbourg. But its principal function will be to furnish a preliminary framework for a global design, by the creation of a president of the European Council at the symbolic summit, and a vice-president of the Commission as effective foreign minister, of the Union as a whole. With these important figures in place, the EU will—so the theory goes—at last be able to punch its weight on the world stage.

  Behind them, of course, the leading states of Europe will continue to manoeuvre in their own interest, and seek to fashion its policies according to their respective visions of the appropriate profile of the Union. In the past, divergences between them were often quite pronounced. But today, though points of friction between the foreign policies of the various governments persist, there is little disagreement on the overall stance that the EU should adopt in the world at large. The reason for the convergence is, of course, the new-found Atlanticism of France. There was no need to convert British, German, or Italian elites to the wisdom of hewing to the United States wherever possible. But French traditions were more refractory. In breaking with them, to position Paris firmly at the side of Washington, Sarkozy has retained of Gaullism only a formal ambition to lead the continent, voided of its content. The result, ironically, has been to enable something like the directorate of powers envisaged in the Fouchet Plan advanced by Paris in the sixties, rejected at the time by the other five member-states of the Community as potentially anti-American. The constellation today, opposite in sign, is more favourable. On all major international questions, and especially in the central theatre of the Middle East, the stars––principally London, Paris and Berlin––are now in pro-American alignment.

  The outlines of a sub-imperial role to come are still emergent. But its ideologies and strategists are already in harness, and current priorities are clear. Military back-up for the United States in Afghanistan; economic sanctions and diplomatic menaces against Iran; privileged relations with Israel, and subsidies for a further Oslo; rapid deployment forces in the Horn, the Gulf and––if need be––the Balkans; more virtuous targets for reduction of carbon emissions, and regulation of financial flows, than America; comparable pressure for liberalization of services in the WTO. None of these elicits any discord, as the NATO alliance extends its ‘defensive’ reach to the ends of the earth.

  Potentially more divisive are the geo-politics of the EU’s own eastern front, with the categorical exclusion of Russia, and the prospective inclusion of Turkey, in the new Europe. Culturally and historically, this may make little sense, but politically it is perfectly consonant with the functions of a regional system within an overarching American imperium. Union dependence on Russian supplies of energy, and the need to nurture the country’s recently acquired capitalism, however unpalatable the forms it may have taken, preclude more than guarded hostility to Moscow. But formally correct relations still allow for Russia to feature as a potential adversary against which Europe must fortify itself, a task anyway high on the list of concerns of its new member-states in the east. No conflict with the United States is likely here.

  Turkey poses a more ticklish problem. Ever since the Clinton administration, its entry into the EU has been a top priority for Washington, as a means of anchoring a key American ally into the comity of Western nations, bolstering the military throw-weight of a loyal Europe––the Turkish army is near twice the size of that of any country now in the EU––and building a barrier against anti-imperialist dangers in the Arab world. Within the Union, the Commission in Brussels and establishment opinion in the media rallied with much further ado to Turkey’s candidature, and soon every effort was being made to accelerate Ankara’s passage into the EU. By 2003––the Bush administration in full cry, the Blair government in close support, Schröder and Chirac benevolent––success seemed virtually assured. But rapid closure came to grief on the rock of Cyprus, taken for granted too easily by the interested parties.

  Since then, a gap has opened up between official professions and actual calculations, present and future intentions, in the capitals concerned. New Labour, of course, remains a steadfast messenger for Washington. But in France and Germany, Sarkozy and Merkel––unlike Chirac or Schröder––had to face voters for whom Turkish entry was no longer an invisible issue, and in proposing doses of neo-liberalism neither could be certain the electorate would take to, each preferred not to incur the risk of another potentially unpopular commitment. Of the two, Sarkozy went further than Merkel in appearing to set his face against Ankara. Once in office, each ruler has naturally tacked. Across Europe, elite opinion––in France and Germany no less than in other countries––remains as generally favourable to Turkish entry as popular opinion is doubtful or opposed. But in any case, the American will is not lightly crossed. In early 2009, the new US president made its priorities clear with a visit to Ankara soon after his inauguration, extolling the close ties of the two countries, a
nd avoiding any inconvenient description of a remote past. Obama’s campaign pledges swiftly buried, recognition of the Armenian genocide now has less congressional traction than under Bush.

  On an issue as strategically critical as the inclusion of Turkey in the EU, Paris and Berlin, caught between masters and voters, can thus only temporize. Sarkozy, loudly repeating his opposition to Turkish entry with one side of his mouth, has made sure with the other that constitutional requirements for a referendum on it in France have been blocked, and negotiations on Turkey’s accession continue as if he had never made any principled objection to it. Merkel, with a large Turkish community to consider, some of it entitled to vote, has been happy to take cover in a less exposed position behind him. These are tactics of circumstance, unlikely to affect the ultimate outcome, if only because neither ruler has an indefinite political life in front of them––Sarkozy will be gone within at most eight, and not inconceivably three years, while Merkel’s hope of presiding over an unhampered Black–Yellow regime will be lucky to hold good for more than four. In the eyes of Brussels, and a fortiori of Washington, Turkey remains the ‘glittering prize’ of European expansion to come, and will not be casually relinquished. Around it, the discourse of diversity has for a good while been working overtime. What fairer trophy of multi-cultural tolerance could there be than the entry of this moderate Muslim land into the European Community? What newcomer could be better equipped, historically and actually, to share the responsibilities of a subaltern empire?

  Between Russia and Turkey there remains, it is true, awkward from every respectable standpoint within the Community, the sprawling no man’s land of the Ukraine. Hardly a model of constitutional stability, yet manifestly more democratic, by any standard, than Turkey; higher literacy and per capita income; less torture, no counter-insurgency, no ethnic cleansing, no genocide. Why should it be refused entry when its poorer and more repressive neighbour is ushered in? The answer is clear, but not easy to explain publicly, let alone square with the lofty professions of the Commission. The Ukrainian military is a shadow of the Turkish army; the stock market in Kiev is not a patch on that of Istanbul; the universe of Orthodoxy requires no coreligionary sepoys to check it. Last but not least, the regional hegemon is not America, in favour of a traditional client-state, but Russia, opposed to the alienation of a limb of its past. Empires can choose their terrain at will, when they are fully such. When they are no more than semi-sovereign, there are times when they must defer. So Brussels embraces Ankara and shrinks from Kiev. But Ukrainian pressure to enter the EU, which unites all parties in the country, will not go away. Somewhere in the future, a gap opening up in the eastern salient of the Union, a political Ardennes, may be in store for it.

  Whether any of this will impinge on the internal politics of the Union, or unfold largely insulated from it, remains to be seen. Current European visions of a deputy empire are a replica writ large of what Britain has always represented: a special relationship with the United States, in which the junior partner plays an honourable role as help-meet and counsel, taking the initiative in its own sphere, and following its senior in theatres beyond it. In any such arrangement, the EU will certainly command more power, if without coming close to parity, than the UK ever did. In Britain, there was never any popular enthusiasm for the relationship, a matter settled between elites, but nor was there any significant dissent from it. Would a magnification of the same to a European scale be met with comparable passivity or indifference? Or, for all the current consensus among the interested capitals, might such ambitions, still in many ways embryonic, founder in advance on the centrifugal resistance of smaller member-states, unwilling to be brigaded for imperial ends by any renovated Directorate?

  Neither the internal nor external direction of the Community is yet quite settled. Without clarity of means or ends, the Union seems to many adrift. Yet its apparent lack of any further coherent finality, deplored on all sides, might on one kind of reckoning be counted a saving grace, permitting the unintended consequences that have tracked integration from the start to yield further, possibly better, surprises. In principle, dynamic disequilibrium allows for that. In due course, a prolonged economic recession might reignite the engines of political conflict and ideological division that gave the continent its impetus in the past. So far, in today’s Europe, there is little sign of either. But it remains unlikely that time and contradiction have come to a halt.

  1. In an opinion written by the same judge, Udo Di Fabio, who in 2005 gratified the political establishment by tearing up the country’s ban on governments fixing the time of elections at their own convenience. Of immigrant descent, Di Fabio is the Clarence Thomas of the Federal Republic, nominated to the court by the CDU, and author of the neo-conservative tract Die Kultur der Freiheit, lauding vigorous market competition, attacking excessive welfare dependency, and calling for a return to the values of family, religion and nation—what, updating a prewar formula, might be called Kinder, Firma, Kirche, with a topping of Volk. The Germans had been tempted away from these and other expressions of their better nature by Hitler, who was no true German, lacking ‘any drop of the decency of the Prussian servant of the state, the attachment to home and zest for life of Bavarian Catholicism, any inclination to diligence and hard work, any sense of German ways of living, of bourgeois habits and Christian traditions’. After recovering these values in the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1950s, Germans were now in danger of letting them crumble to a myopic hedonism, deleterious residue of the sixties: Die Kultur der Freiheit, Munich 2005, pp. 207, 212, 217ff––a work itself national enough in genre, what might ungenerously be called philosophical airport literature.

  2. Alan Milward, ‘Envoi’, to the second edition of The European Rescue of the Nation-State, London 2000, pp. 425–36.

  3. ‘Envoi’, p. 428.

  4. ‘Envoi’, pp. 435–6.

  5. Renaud Dehousse, La fin de l’Europe, Paris 2005, p. 71.

  6. Jürgen Habermas,Ach, Europa. Kleine politische Schriften XI, Frankfurt 2008, p. 105.

  7. Ach, Europa, p. 85.

  8. Ach, Europa, pp. 121–2.

  9. Ach, Europa, p. 110. The relative weight of internal and external motives in Habermas’s ‘Plaidoyer für eine Politik der absgestuften Integration’ can be judged from the space accorded each: about twice as much for the latter as the former.

  10. Stefano Bartolini, Restructuring Europe. Centre formation, system building and political structuring between the nation-state and the European Union, Oxford 2005, pp. 157–8.

  11. Restructuring Europe, pp. 284, 233, 198.

  12. Restructuring Europe, p. 331. Even on the most significant votes taken by the Parliament, under the procedure of co-decision, a third of MEPs never show up.

  13. Restructuring Europe, pp. 410–12.

  14. For Pomian’s programmatic statement as director of the Museum, see ‘Pour une musée de l’Europe. Visite commentée d’une exposition en projet’, Le Débat, No. 129, March–April 2004, pp. 89–100.

  15. Krzysztof Pomian, L’Europe et ses nations, Paris 1990, pp. 53–61, 91–117, 219–33; Elie Barnavi and Krzysztof Pomian, La révolution européenne 1945–2007, Paris 2008, pp. 261–9.

  16. Andrea Boltho and Barry Eichengreen, ‘The Economic Impact of European Integration’, Discussion Paper No. 6820, Centre for Economic Policy Research, May 2008, p. 44. Based on a series of careful counterfactual controls, they conclude that the Common Market may have increased GDP by 3–4 per cent from the late fifties to the mid-seventies; that the impact of the EMS was negligible; that the Single European Act may have added around another 1 per cent; and that it is unlikely that Monetary Union has had ‘more than a very small effect on the area’s growth rate or even level of output’: pp. 27, 29, 34, 38. These are findings of authors who, as they point out, have always been, and remain, favourable to integration.

  17. See Peter Baldwin’s systematic exposition, The Narcissism of Minor Differences, New York 2009, passim.

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sp; 18. Populations: EU—470 million; US––330 million. Economies: EU––GDP $18 trillion; US––$14 trillion. See IMF, World Economic Outlook Database, April 2009.

  19. Zaki Laïdi, Norms over Force: The Enigma of European Power, New York 2008, pp. 5, 8, 42–50, 120, 33, 129. The English edition is an expanded version of the French original,La Norme sans la force. L’énigme de la puissance européenne, Paris 2005.

  20. Edgar Morin, Penser l’Europe, Paris 1987, pp. 27–28.

  21. Penser l’Europe, pp. 149, 191, 212, 199, 207, 216–17.

  22. Penser l’Europe, p. 212; Leopold von Ranke, Die grossen Mächte (1833) Leipzig 1916 (ed. Meinecke), p. 58.

  23. There is a subtle, yet significant, distinction between the connotations of ‘variety’ and ‘diversity’. Typically, the latter attaches to what is different but co-present, whereas the former more often implies alterations of experience over time, as in the lively imagery of folk wisdom. It was these that Fourier theorized in the figure of the Butterfly, in his taxonomy of the passions: Oeuvres, Vol. II, Paris 1845, pp. 145–6.

  24. Not that its arrival was simply continuous with previous constructions of the ‘melting-pot’, or failed to serve new functions. The most devastating attack on the new discourse as a cover for inequality has come from the United States, in Walter Benn Michaels’s blistering critique The Trouble with Diversity, New York 2006. No counterpart exists in Canada, where Multiculturalism Day is now officially celebrated alongside Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and other such solemnities.

  25. Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, pp. 3–4, 9–10, 29–30, 127–31, 19.

  26. Caldwell explains that his book is about the problems immigration poses local populations, not the problems of immigrants, real though these are. But since he speculates at some length about the subjective attitudes of Muslims in Europe, it is difficult to see how their objective situations can, by his own logic, be legitimately bracketed.