The New Old World (26 page)

69
. Majone,
Dilemmas of European Integration
, p. 37.

70
. Montesquieu,
De l'esprit des lois
, Book IX, 1–3.

71
.
Chapter 2
, pp. 68–69.

72
. Jan Zielonka,
Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union
, Oxford 2006, p. 117.

73
. Majone,
Dilemmas of European Integration
, p. v.

74
. ‘Despotism in Brussels? Misreading the European Union',
Foreign Affairs
, May–June 2001, p. 117.

75
. Larry Siedentop,
Democracy in Europe
, London 2000, p. 1.

76
.
Democracy in Europe
, p. 101.

77
. Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America,
Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (eds), Chicago 2000, pp. 157, 160.

78
.
Democracy in America
, p. 149.

79
. Joseph Weiler,
The Constitution of Europe
, Cambridge 1999, p. 269.

80
.
The Constitution of Europe
, p. xi.

81
.
The Constitution of Europe
, p. 258.

82
.
The Constitution of Europe
, p. 89.

83
.
The Constitution of Europe
, p. 264.

84
.
The Constitution of Europe
, p. 256.

85
. Philippe Schmitter,
How to Democratize the European Union
. . .
and Why Bother?
, Lanham 2000, p. 75.

86
. See Philippe Schmitter and Alexander Trechsel,
The Future of Democracy in Europe: Trends, Analyses and Reforms
, Council of Europe 2004.

87
. Schmitter,
How to Democratize the European Union
, pp. 128–9.

88
. Whose ‘class bias is so severe that one wonders whether EC doesn't really stand for “Executive Committee for managing the general affairs of the Bourgeoisie!” This is hardly surprising (and not even scandalous) in this epoch of renewed faith in markets and entrepreneurial virtue': see ‘The European Community as an Emergent and Novel Form of Political Domination', Working Paper 1991/26, Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales, Madrid 1991, p. 26.

89
. See, respectively, Alan Cafruny and Magnus Ryder (eds),
A Ruined Fortress? Neo-Liberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe
, Lanham 2003, in which Stephen Gill's keynote essay ‘A Neo-Gramscian Approach to European Integration' is particularly striking; and Bernard Moss (ed.),
Monetary Union in Crisis: The European Union as a Neo-Liberal Construction
, Basingstoke 2005, whose leading essay, alongside Moss's own contributions, is by another American scholar, Gerald Friedman of Amherst, whose ‘Has European Economic Integration Failed?', shows how limited the efficiency gains from trade across member-state borders have been, given the similarity of national factor endowments in the Union.

 

France is, of all European countries, the most difficult for any foreigner to write about. Its intractability is a function, in the first instance, of the immense output on their society produced by the French themselves, on a scale undreamt of elsewhere. Seventy titles just on the electoral campaign of spring 2002. Two hundred books on Mitterrand. Three thousand on De Gaulle. Such numbers, of course, include a huge amount of dross. But they are not mere logomachy. High standards of statistical rigour, analytic intelligence, literary elegance continue to distinguish the best of French writing about France, in quantities no neighbouring land can rival.

Confronted with this mass of self-description, what can the alien gaze hope to add? The advantages of estrangement, would be the anthropological reply—Lévi-Strauss's
regard éloigné.
But in England we lack the discipline of real distance. France is all too misleadingly familiar: the repetitively stylized Other of insular history and popular imagination; the culture whose words are still most commonly taught, movies screened, classics translated; the shortest trip for the tourist, the most fashionable spot for a secondary residence. London is now closer to Paris than Edinburgh by train; there are some fifteen million visits by Britons to France every year, more than from any other country. The vicinity is lulling. Its effect is a countrywide equivalent of the snare against which every schoolchild struggling with French is warned. France itself becomes a kind of
faux ami.

Local connoisseurs are seldom of much help in correcting the error. It is striking that the two best-known recent English historians of France, Richard Cobb and Theodore Zeldin, have
taken the national penchant for the whimsical and eccentric to extremes, as if so defeated by their subject they had to fall back, in compensation, on a parodic exhibition of French images of Anglicity, as so many historiographic Major Thompsons. Less strenuous contributions—political science, cultural studies, the higher journalism—offer little antidote. Reportage itself often seems mortified: few dispatches are so regularly flat as those filed from Paris, as if it were somehow the death-bed of the correspondent's imagination. A bright obscurity covers the country, screening its pitfalls for cross-Channel commentary. What follows is unlikely to escape a share of them.

The current scene is as good a place to start as any, since it offers a pregnant example of the illusions of familiarity. Newspapers, journals and bookshops brim with debate over French decline. Gradually trickling to the surface in the past few years,
le déclinisme
burst into full flow with the publication last winter of
La France qui tombe
, a spirited denunciation of national default—‘the sinister continuity between the fourteen years of François Mitterrand and the twelve of Jacques Chirac, united by their talent for winning elections and ruining France'—by Nicolas Baverez, an economist and historian of the Centre-Right.
¹
Rebuttals, vindications, rejoinders, alternatives have proliferated. Baverez looks at first glance like a French version of a Thatcherite, a neo-liberal of more or less strict persuasion, and the whole controversy like a re-run of long-standing debates on decline in Britain. But the appearances are deceptive. The problem is not the same.

Britain's diminution since the war has been a long-drawn-out process. But its starting-point is clear: the illusions bred by victory in 1945, under a leader of 1914 vintage, followed virtually without intermission by the realities of financial dependency on Washington, austerity at home, and imperial retreat abroad. By the time consumer prosperity arrived, a decade later, the country was already lagging behind the growth of continental economies, and within a few more years found itself locked out of a European Community whose construction it had rejected. In due course
the welfare state itself—a landmark when first created—was overtaken elsewhere. There was no dramatic reckoning with the past, just a gradual slide within a framework of complete political stability.

Abroad de-colonization was conducted steadily, at little cost to the home country, but owed much to luck. India was too big to put up a fight for. War in Malaya, unlike Indochina, could be won because the communist movement was based on an ethnic minority. Rhodesia, unlike Algeria, was logistically out of range. The costs to the colonized were another matter, in the bloody skein of partitions left behind: Ireland, Palestine, Pakistan, Cyprus. But British society appeared unscathed. Yet, like the welfare state with which it was often coupled as a principal achievement of the postwar order, withdrawal from empire too eventually lost its lustre, when the abscess of Ulster reopened. The decisive development of the period lay elsewhere, in the abandonment after the Suez expedition of any pretension by the British state to autonomy from the US. Henceforward the adhesion of the nation to the global hegemon—internalized as a political imperative by both parties, more deeply by Labour even than Conservatives—cushioned loss of standing in the popular imagination, while exhibiting it to the world at large. Intellectual life was not so dissimilar, vitality after the war coming largely from external sources, emigrés from Central and Eastern Europe, with few local eminences. Here too there was subsidence without much tension.

A sense of decline became acute only within the British elites when fierce distributional struggles broke out in the seventies, with the onset of stagflation. The outcome was a sharp shift of gravity in the political system, and Thatcher's mandate to redress the fall in the country's fortunes. Neo-liberal medicine, continued under New Labour, revived the spirits of capital and redrew the social landscape—Britain pioneering programmes of privatization and deregulation internationally as it had once done welfare and nationalization. A modest economic recovery was staged, amid still decaying infrastructures and increasing social polarization. With the recent slow-down in Europe, claims of a national renaissance have become more common, without acquiring widespread conviction.

Overseas, Thatcher's most famous success was regaining the puny Antarctic colony of the Falklands; Blair's, brigading the country into the American invasion of Iraq. Pride or shame in such ventures scarcely impinge on the rest of the world. Internationally,
the country's cultural icon has become a football celebrity. Little alteration of political arrangements; moderate growth but still low productivity; pinched universities and crumbling railroads; the unmoved authority of Treasury, Bank and City; an underling diplomacy. The record lacks high relief. The British way of coming down in the world might itself be termed a mediocre affair.

France has been another story. Defeat and occupation left it, after Liberation, at a starting-point far below that of Britain. The Resistance had saved its honour, and Potsdam its face, but it was a survivor rather than a victor power. Economically, France was still a predominantly rural society, with a per capita income only about two-thirds of the British standard. Sociologically, the peasantry remained far its largest class: 45 per cent of the population. Politically, the Fourth Republic floundered into quicksands of governmental instability and colonial disaster. Within little more than a decade after Liberation, the army was in revolt in Algeria, and the country on the brink of civil war. The whole post-war experience appeared a spectacular failure.

In fact, the Fourth Republic had in some ways been a period of extraordinary vitality. It was in these years that the administrative structure of the French state was overhauled, and the technocratic elite that dominates the business and politics of the country today took shape. While cabinets revolved, civil servants assured a continuity of
dirigiste
policies that modernized the French economy at nearly twice the clip of growth rates in Britain. French architects—Monnet and Schuman—laid the foundations of European integration, and it was French politicians who clinched the Treaty of Rome: the birth of the European Community, just before the Fourth Republic expired, owed more to France than any other country. French literature, in the days of Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir, enjoyed an international readership probably without equal in the post-war world, well beyond its standing between the wars.

So when De Gaulle came to power, on the back of military revolt in Algiers, the estate he inherited—apparently dilapidated—in fact offered solid bases for national recovery. He, of course, promised much more than that. France, he had famously announced, was inconceivable without
grandeur.
In his vocabulary the word had connotations that escape the vulgar claims of ‘Greatness' attached to Britain; it was a more archaic and abstract ideal, which appeared
even to many of his compatriots out of keeping with the age. Yet it is difficult to deny it to the man, and the reconstruction over which he presided. It is conventional to pair him with Churchill, as statues in the national pantheon. But, beyond romantic legend, there is a discrepancy between them. De Gaulle's historical achievement was much larger. Colourful as it was, Churchill's role in twentieth-century Britain proved by comparison quite limited: an inspirational leadership of his country, crucial for a year, in a war won by Soviet troops and American wealth, and a brief epilogue of nondescript office in time of peace. The image he left was huge, the mark modest. Little in post-war Britain, save lingering imperial illusions, is traceable to him.