The New Old World (2 page)

In due course, no doubt, the difficulty will be overcome. But for the moment, only makeshifts seem within reach. The solution attempted here is discontinuous. Composed of successive essays, the first part of this book looks at the past and present of the
Union, as it was conceived by its founders, and modified by their successors; how it came to acquire the forms it possesses today, and what kinds of public self-consciousness and patterns of scholarship—the two are quite distinct—have developed around them. European integration is taken throughout as a project whose economic purposes and practices—which form the overwhelming bulk of its activities—have always, in differing directions, been the pursuit of politics by other means. Despite many disclaimers, this remains as true today as at the time of the Schuman Plan.

The second part of the book moves to the national level. It looks at the three principal countries of the original six that signed the Treaty of Rome, comprising 75 per cent of the population of the European Economic Community it brought into being: France, Germany and Italy. Historically, these can be considered the core lands of the integration process. France and Germany were from the start, as they have continued to be, its two most powerful drivers and monitors. Italy played a less significant role than Belgium or the Netherlands in the creation of the Common Market, and its early years, but in due course was more critical for the direction taken by an expanded Community. Not only the largest economies and most populous states of continental Europe, France, Germany and Italy also enjoy, by common consent, the richest cultural and intellectual history. The structure of politics within each is inseparable from that history, and in considering its development I have tried to give a sense of the cultural setting in which events have unfolded in the past twenty years or more. Without some attempt at this, there is little hope of capturing in any country the textures of national life, that necessarily escape the bureaucratic integument of the Union. Each of the three surveyed in these pages has been the theatre of a major drama in recent years, each distinct, and all disjunct from the evolution of the EU. Germany has been transformed by unification. Italy has seen the collapse of one Republic and the rapid involution of another. France has suffered its first crisis of confidence since it was recast by De Gaulle. Such changes allow of no uniform treatment, and the approach of the chapters devoted to each varies accordingly.

Although Paris, Berlin and Rome loom largest in the conference-room—the only continental states in the G-7 of the time—they are far, of course, from representing, even by proxy, Western Europe since the end of the Cold War as a whole. I do not regret the omission of Britain, whose history since the fall of Thatcher has
been of little moment. But I would have liked to have written of Spain, whose modernization, though relatively placid, has been a significant feature of the period. The smaller countries of the region are another occasion for regret, since I have never believed that modesty of size means paucity of interest, and miss any treatment of Ireland, where I largely grew up. If space—to some extent, also time—has dictated these limitations, knowledge is naturally the larger barrier to moving in any way comprehensively below the level of the Union. Who could hope to write competently or evenly about its twenty-seven states? The intractability of this problem is posed even more sharply in Eastern Europe, whose languages are less widely read and affairs often less documented, and whose states are bunched closer together in magnitude, making selection between them potentially more arbitrary. This has not meant any general neglect of attention to them. Their release from Communism has, on the contrary, attracted a large literature, as has their—still ongoing—inclusion within the EU, justifiably regarded as one of the Union's major achievements.

This ground is now so well trodden that it seemed better to look further east, to the outermost limit of the existing Union, and its prospective further extension into Asia. Accordingly, the third part of this book looks at Cyprus, which joined the EU in 2004, and at Turkey, accepted as a candidate for entry two years earlier. Here extreme opposites of size have been closely entangled: one country of less than a million, another of over seventy million, that will soon overtake Germany to become larger than any current member of the Union. If the relationship between the two poses the most explosive immediate item on the agenda of EU enlargement, the candidature of Turkey confronts ‘Europe', understood as the Union, with far its biggest future challenge. The scale of that challenge is of another order from that involved in the absorption of the former Comecon region. But its exact nature is much less ventilated. The reason is not hard to see. Integration of the former Communist zone disturbed no reigning ideas in Western Europe; indeed, on the whole, truths could be told that comforted them. The fate of Cyprus and the pull of Turkey, by contrast, pose awkward questions for the good conscience of Europe, which polite—official and media—opinion have repressed. Just how awkward will be seen below. The light the new Eastern Question shines on the self-image of the Union can be compared, historically speaking, to that shed by the old on the Concert of Powers.

In considering it, I have adopted a longer time-span than in the second part of the book, and concentrated more strictly on the political history of the two societies concerned. The general background to the recent period in the trio of big West European states can largely be taken for granted, as so many familiar chapters in the record of the twentieth century. This is not the case in either Cyprus or Turkey, requiring a more extended reconstruction of the ways in which each has reached its present condition. That is no surprise, and calls for little comment. More questionable is the combination of a narrower time-span with a broader focus in treatments of France, Germany and Italy. All contemporary history is less than true history, given lack of records and foreshortened perspective. Any attempt to capture a modern society across a couple of decades, at point-blank range, is inevitably precarious. The dangers of what a French tradition condemns as a
coupe d'essence
are plain, and I am conscious of having run them. The simplifications or errors they imply, as well as those of more ordinary ignorance or misjudgement, will be corrected by others in due course. Although composed over a decade, the essays that make up successive chapters were written at different conjuctures within it, and bear their mark. I have reworked them relatively little, preferring to let them stand as testimonies of the time, as well as reflections on it. Each is dated at its head.

The unity of the period under question, which sets the parameters of the book, is that of the neo-liberal ascendancy. Historically, this was defined by two great changes of regime. The first came at the turn of the eighties, with the arrival of the Thatcher and Reagan governments, the international deregulation of financial markets and the privatization of industries and services that followed it in the West. The second, at the turn of the nineties, saw the collapse of Communism in the Soviet bloc, followed by the extension eastwards of the first in its wake. In this double vortex, the shape of the European Union altered and every country within it was bent in new directions. How these pressures worked themselves out, at supranational and at national level, and what external as well as internal policies were driven by them, is one of the book's recurrent themes. Today the neo-liberal system is in crisis. The general view, even of many of its one-time champions, is that its time has passed, as the world sinks into the recession that began in the last quarter of 2008. How far that system will have been modified, if and when the current crisis recedes, or what will replace it, remains to be
seen. All these pages, save the second part of the chapter on France, were written before the collapse of financial markets in the United States. Other than noting the onset of the crisis, I have not altered them to cover its effects so far or to come, but consider these in the reflections that conclude the book, which review more generally ideas of Europe, past and present.

England has, from the beginning, produced more Eurosceptics than any other country that has joined the EU. Although critical of the Union, this is not an outlook I share. In 1972
New Left Review
, of which I was then editor, published a book-length essay by Tom Nairn, ‘The Left against Europe?', as a special issue.
¹
At the time, not only the Labour Party in Britain, but the overwhelming majority of socialists to the left of it, were opposed to the UK's entry into the EEC, which had just been voted through Parliament by a Conservative government. Nairn's essay not only broke with this massed consensus, but remains even today, a quarter of a century later, the most powerful single argument ever made for support to European integration from the left—nothing comparable has ever emerged from the ranks of its official parties, Social-Democratic, Post-Communist, or Green, that now wrap themselves in the blue banner with gold stars. The Union of the early twenty-first century is not the Community of the fifties or sixties, but my admiration for its original architects remains undiminished. Their enterprise had no historical precedent, and its grandeur continues to haunt what it has since become.

The European ideology that has grown up, around a changed reality, is another matter. The self-satisfaction of Europe's elites, and their publicists, has become such that the Union is now widely presented as a paragon for the rest of the world, even as it becomes steadily less capable of winning the confidence of its citizens, and more and more openly flouts the popular will. How far this drift is irreversible no one can tell. For it to be checked, a number of illusions will have to be abandoned. Among them is the belief, on which much of the current ideology is founded, that within the Atlantic ecumene Europe embodies a higher set of values than the United States, and plays a more inspiring role in the world. This doctrine can be rejected, to the advantage of America, by dwelling on how much that is admirable they share,
or to the detriment of Europe, how much that is objectionable. For Europeans, the second criticism is the more needed.
²
Not only their difference, but their autonomy, from America is less than they imagine. Nowhere are current relations between them illustrated so vividly as in the field of EU studies itself, to which the third essay here on the Union is devoted.

By and large, this field forms a closed universe of often highly technical literature, with few outlets to any wider public sphere. In Europe, it has generated a vast industry of professional articles, research papers and consultancies, much of it financed by Brussels, which if it does not command the heights of the terrain, occupies an ever extending plain below them. The density of pan-European exchanges across it is without precedent, and these exchanges along with innumerable others—conferences, workshops, colloquia, lectures in adjacent disciplines, from history and economics to law and sociology—have created what should comprise the bases of an intellectual community capable of lively debate across national borders. Yet in practice, there is still remarkably little of that. In part, this has to do with the characteristic tares of the academy, when scholarship turns inwards only to a profession rather than also outwards to a broader culture. In larger measure, however, it is a reflection of the lack of any animating political divisions in this—in principle—eminently political field, occupied chiefly by political scientists. To speak of a
pensée unique
would be unfair: it is more like a
pensée ouate
, which hangs like a pall over too much of it. The media offer little, if any, counterbalance, columns and editorials hewing in general to a Euro-conformism more pronounced than that of chairs or think-tanks.

One effect of such unanimism is to undermine the emergence of any real public sphere in Europe. Once all agree in advance on what is desirable and what is not—
vide
successive referenda—no impulse to curiosity about the life and thought of other
nations is left. Why take any interest in what is said or written elsewhere, if it merely repeats, in all essentials, what is already available here? In this sense, it might well be thought that the echo-chambers of today's Union are less genuinely European than much of the cultural life of the inter-war, or even pre–First World War period. There are not many equivalents today of the correspondence between Sorel and Croce, the collaboration between Larbaud and Joyce, the debate among Eliot, Curtius and Mannheim, the arguments of Ortega with Husserl; not to speak of the polemics within the Second and early Third Internationals. Intellectuals formed a much smaller, less institutionalized group in those days, with deeper roots in a common humanist culture. Democratization has dispersed this, while releasing a vastly larger number of talents into the arena. However, whatever its fruits elsewhere—they obviously are many—it has not so far led to much of a republic of letters in the European Union. The hope of this book is to contribute towards one.

1
.
New Left Review
I/75, September–October 1972, pp. 5–120, which subsequently appeared as a book under the same title (Harmondsworth 1973).

2
. For the former, see the statistical fireworks of Peter Baldwin,
The Narcissism of Minor Differences: Why America and Europe are Alike
, New York 2009, which sets out to confound anti-American prejudice across the Atlantic, by showing—with brio—that if West European societies are taken as a set, by most indicators American society falls at various points within the same range, and not infrequently outperforms its smugger counterparts. Such comparisons, of course, bypass the enormous difference between the American state and its European opposites—the US dwarfing any European country in military, political and ideological power, not to speak of an EU that lacks the attributes of a nation-state, let alone one the size of a continent.