Dear Old Europe
by Lancelot Finn (Spring 2002)
Americans see Europe like a retired grandmother. It’s fun to visit her; her hospitality is excellent. We’re happy to look through her old photo albums, and feel a twinge of nostalgia. We like to listen to stories of her youth. But when it comes to important business, or our dirty little secrets, we don’t consult with her—her ideas are a little too conservative and out of touch.
I majored in history as an undergraduate, and my fascination was Europe. European history was a suspense thriller. Some highlights: Venice, the tiny islet that swayed the commerce of nations; Spain, completing the Reconquista, then gaining an empire in the New World and, via the Hapsburg succession, another one in Italy, the Netherlands and Austria; Peter the Great, a titan body and soul whose exploits forged the Russian empire; and England, masterminding the resistance to Louis XIV and Napoleon. Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon sought hegemony, yet European history had a strange and wonderful way of favoring the underdog. Meanwhile, there was Renaissance and Reformation, Baroque and Enlightenment, revolution and Romanticism—an endless ecstasy of the intellect meandering across a continent which never ceased to reap a harvest of genius.
But 1945 was the cut-off. After that came a dull “and they lived happily ever after.” I had no urge to study it.
I think this is typical of Americans. Looking through Harvard’s history course catalog just now, I found scores of European history courses, hardly any of which covered post-1945 Europe at all; nary a one focused on Europe in the last sixty years (though maybe some other departments do). Every summer American tourists flood through France, England, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and Greece—to visit castles, cathedrals, palaces, battlefields, art museums, statues, and other relics of History, which is assumed to be over now. A friend of mine who studied in Florence once saw a graffito near the city center: “Welcome to Disney Florence”—a fine summary of the tourist mentality. We like to visit Europe because it offers in real life what we usually only see in Disney cartoons.
Plato, Julius Caesar, Dante, Queens Elizabeth and Victoria, Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler—these are names most Americans would recognize. De Gasperi, Adenauer, Harold McMillan, Gunter Gross, Mitterand—a rare American would be able to identify them.
Naturally, Europeans are frustrated with this attitude. We can’t really blame the French, for example, for being rude to tourists; after all, visiting only their castles, cathedrals and old art galleries is rather an insult to the modern French, who might like to think that they too have achieved something worth admiring.
And they have. Arabs, Turks and Africans come to Europe, and eastern Europe wants to join the EU, because they are impressed by Europe’s freedom and (comparative) prosperity.
This may underlie Europe’s perennial annoyance with America. Europeans are jealous of American power and want—in Wilhelm II’s words—a place in the sun. That is part of what motivates the drive of Europeans for “ever closer union.” Collectively, they have more manpower and almost as large an economy as the US. Doesn’t it stand to reason, then, that the EU should enjoy power comparable to the US on the world stage? For some reason, it is not happening at all. In the wake of September 11th, Europe is more impotent than ever relative to the US. Without really trying to, the US has dissolved any façade of unity the Europeans might have put up, securing varying degrees of cooperation in Afghanistan, and driving a wedge between Blair and the Continent on Iraq. Meanwhile, US-China friction has been quietly forgotten; the US-Russia alliance is suddenly very close; the US has, somehow, become closer to both Pakistan and India; and even the Arab world, where US support for Israel makes it widely hated, is not particularly interested in European support, for it accepts that only the US, if anyone, can influence Israel. The EU is comprehensively sidelined.
Europeans like to make up for military inferiority by claiming the moral high ground against the US. Values of “human rights,” (for example, no death penalty), rules of war, development assistance, the “social market” and “international law” are used in arguments against the US. It is easy for Europeans to win these debates, at least in their own eyes, because the American pundits who could refute their arguments have better things to do (run the world.) In its own eyes, Europe is an example to the world, America is a rogue state. Such claims have a certain sway among the international left, which has long been characterized by credulity and a prejudice in favor of the underdog—it adored the Soviet Union in the 1930s-50s, then Maoist China in the 1960s and 70s. But to the hundreds of millions who study English, listen to American pop music, watch American movies, and dream of someday coming to America, America remains the symbol of wealth of freedom.
The US underrates Europe—but not without reason. Slow growth rates, tenacious unemployment resulting from restrictive labor laws, falling populations, unsustainable pensions systems, costly welfare states and resistance to immigration, liberalization and globalization make Europe’s future bleak and uncertain. The EU shows no signs of closing the gap with the US; on the contrary, this gap continues to widen. Europe has been following America’s lead in the last decade, as America’s superior economic performance has continuously strengthened the case liberalization—but far too tentatively.
What would it take to change Europe? Europe should loosen labor laws and trim welfare benefits to stimulate job creation. It should cut external tariffs, refrain from protectionism, and scale down (or eliminate) the CAP. It should be more receptive to immigration, and enlarge to include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and perhaps one or more of the Baltic states. The ECB should be less inflation-phobic and stimulate growth. Strategies like these have helped Poland, the US, the UK, China and India to escape economic sclerosis. But the change was revolutionary even in the US. In Europe, which has come to take pride in the “social market,” such a transformation is not politically feasible. The mainstream political parties—due to Europe’s campaign laws, largely funded by the state—and the prejudices of the electorate lock in place an economic system which is a formula for stagnation.
Can Europe overcome problems rooted in the entrenched views of its politicians and electorates? Perhaps. Enlargement provides hope, both because the collision of Polish farmers with the CAP may yet force reform, and because the post-communist countries are more market-friendly than their western neighbors. But it seems more likely that Europe’s establishment will stay in control for a while yet, and liberalization a la Thatcher is still far off. In that case, the weakness of the euro may not be a temporary fluctuation. It may reflect a prolonged condition of the euro, a penalty for the flawed policy framework in which it operates. Europe may be a dwindling old postcard continent for the foreseeable future.