The New Old World (95 page)

Yet in a historical irony, out of these a slow change may be occurring in the contours of Europe. Pirenne argued that Europe was born as a distinct civilization when the Arab conquests split the Mediterranean, breaking the unity of the classical world into separate Christian and Muslim universes. His economic argument, based on the rupture of trade routes, has been questioned; at this level, Braudel would seek to rebind what he had undone. But few have doubted that the sweep of Islam, from Syria to Spain within a few decades, made what was no more than a geographical expression to the ancients into a cultural and political world separated from the southern shores of the inland sea. For Morin, Islam remained the external federator that not only had made Europe by enclosing Christianity within it, but against which Europe had made itself by repelling Muslim advances further north.
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What the contemporary growth of Muslim communities within Western Europe, in contact with their homelands, suggests is the possibility of an erosion of this historic configuration. For the moment, only a distension of Europe to the Euphrates is envisaged, and the Arab world is something other, much larger and older, than the Turkish state. But Tangiers or Tunis are closer to Madrid or Paris than is Ankara, and the demographic pressures of what were once the African provinces of Rome are
greater. Europe might finally have achieved unity, only to find that its post-classical identity was beginning to dissolve, towards something closer to Antiquity.

Such speculations are for the long run, in which nothing can be counted out. The present landscape of the Union is another matter. Writing some four decades ago, Tom Nairn observed that ruling-class attitudes towards nationalism had varied historically: resolutely hostile in the time of the Holy Allance, gingerly favourable in the period of Risorgimento, ruthlessly instrumental in the era of high imperialism. With the post-war epoch had come the quest for a post-national hegemony, amid a great latitude for elite manoeuvres, in the absence of any popular internationalism on the left. Should the Common Market, as it then was, be regarded as comparable—certainly not to imperialism—but to the Restoration, or to the Risorgimento? The Marxists of the time were giving it a cold shoulder. But why should it not be regarded as a development of bourgeois society like free trade, the agricultural or industrial revolution, or the nation-state, which with all their cruelties had been judged by Marx progressive, if contradictory, developments? European capitalism appeared to be evolving in a half-blind, unintentionally positive direction, but the left treated it as if ‘time and contradiction had come to a stop'.
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The Union of today has come some way from the Common Market of the early seventies. The scene it offers is not one that inspires much warmth or confidence in its peoples. Politically, it has hardened into an oligarchic structure ever more indifferent to expressions of the popular will, even to legal appearances. The original Treaty of Rome signed by the foreign ministers of the Six consisted of blank sheets of paper, since the text had not been finalized for the solemn occasion. Diplomatic inexperience, in such a bold new enterprise? Nearly half a century later, the procedure was repeated: ‘Although on 18 June 2004 the European Union's leaders had supposedly agreed their “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe”, not one of them could have read it, since there was still no comprehensive version of the text to which they had agreed. The complete text of the treaty,
844 pages in typescript, would not be available until November, after they had signed it'.
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Niceties? It hardly needs repeating that when the Constitution was rejected in the only two countries that held a referendum on it, both founder-members of the Six, it was relabelled the Lisbon Treaty, and when that was rejected in the only country to submit it to a popular judgement, its voters were told they must reverse the decision, and do so before there was any risk of voters in the larger neighbouring country, whose opposition to it was well known, being able to express their views on the matter.

The contempt for elementary principles of democracy shown by the elites of the Council and Commission and their subordinates, not to speak of an army of obedient publicists in the media, is reciprocated by the disdain of the masses for the Parliament that supposedly represents them, who ignore it in ever increasing numbers—electoral participation sinking to an all-time low of 43 per cent in 2009, down a full 20 points since the first such poll in 1979. Internationally, the same elites collude with negationism in Turkey, sanction ethnic cleansing in Cyprus, abet aggression by Israel, and subserve the occupation of Afghanistan. Socially, the EU now has a wider span of income inequality than the US, and harsher inter-ethnic relations. Economically, its performance since the crisis of the neo-liberal regime has so far been worse than that of America, and popular reactions to it more conservative.

Such, more or less, is the conjuncture in the summer of 2009. Like any other, it is subject to change, perhaps without notice. But the current drift of the Union will take more than an alteration of atmosphere to bend or reverse. European integration was conceived in the fifties on one set of premises. It has crystallized around another. Monnet, who set it in motion, imagined it as the positive creation of a supranational federation capable, not simply of freeing factors of production across unified markets, but of macro-economic intervention and social redistribution. He would not have been reassured by what has become of it. Hayek, who watched its inception with silent reserve, and never expressed much support for it––how could he be expected to abide a Common Agricultural Policy?––wanted integration as a negative prophylaxis, the demolition of barriers to free trade and estoppage of popular interference with the market. He would not
have been satisfied by today's EU either. But of the two visions, it has evolved into a form much closer to his own.

The reasons for that evolution have lain in the general metamorphosis of capitalism as an international order since the eighties, and the extension of integration to the east twenty years later. Decisive in this process was the global deregulation of financial markets that has precipitated the present recession, even if its underlying causes go deeper, putting the neo-liberal system of the period for the first time under pressure. After the immediate shock to its prestige, however, the ideological struts of the system have so far proved resistant. In the west, public ownership as a value has remained taboo, even as public funds have been rushed on a massive scale to bail out predator banks and floundering industries. In the east, privatization continues to head the agenda. Blocking any reversion to more ‘coordinated' versions of capitalism, closer in arrangements to the early years of the Community, are not only a formidable array of market and institutional interests, but the steady weakening of labour movements, and gutting of what was once their parliamentary expression in the assorted social-democracies of the continent. The latest decisions of the European Court, injected with the new rigorism of converts to liberal principles from the east, have struck down labour protections considered untouchable even in the nineties.
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Economically speaking, the Union remains, with its dense web of directives, and often dubious prebends, far from a perfect Hayekian order. But in its political distance from the populations over which it presides, it approaches the ideal he projected. What he did not anticipate, though it would perhaps not have surprised, and certainly not disconcerted him, is the disaffection that the regime he envisaged has aroused in the masses subject to its decisions. Yet if weaker spirits might worry about such alienation, he would have had some reason to remain unruffled. To the question whether a political order can be viable with so little popular participation, such low levels of active support, an answer could come from the United States. There, in 2008, the election of a black president was greeted as the dawn of a new epoch, galvanizing voters—above all young voters—to the polls, in a political awakening without precedent since the New Deal. In
reality, no more than 56.8 per cent of the electorate bothered to show up for the historic decision, a mere 1.5 per cent above the turn-out that elected Bush in 2004, and well below the 60.8 per cent which put Nixon into power in 1968. Low-octane systems can run on very modest amounts of fuel.

Among the conditions of such regimes are an absence of much substantive divergence between political parties, and a widespread depoliticization of the population. Reversing historic relations, the first is now even more pronounced in the EU than in the US, where partisan antagonisms remain greater, even if rhetorical clashes typically exceed practical differences, whereas in Europe Centre-Right and Centre-Left have often become all but interchangeable, at times even indistinguishable. Such a reversal does not hold in quite the same way for the second. There, the traditional contrast between the two sides of the Atlantic has certainly dwindled. The abdication of what were once parties of the left before the advance of neo-liberalism, into whose carriers they quickly converted themselves, could hardly have failed of this effect. Once the space of political choice is narrowed so drastically, a certain decathexis of the public sphere is bound to ensue.

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.

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.