A Swan-song For Europe

It didn't have to be this way.

I’m pleased to say that a little Substack bird has told me that we have just passed 9000 subscribers. Far more than I ever hoped for, let alone expected. Thanks to all of you, and especially those who subscribed recently. And especial thanks to those who have selflessly taken out paying subscriptions.

A reminder that these essays will always be free, but you can support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️

As always, thanks to those who tirelessly supply translation in other languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here. Hubert Mulkens has completed another translation into French, which I intend to publish this coming weekend. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. Now then:

*******************************

And so, by common consent, Europe faces its gravest collective political crisis since 1945. And so, by equally common consent, its political class has never been so weak and incompetent, and so evidently out of its depth, encountering for once a problem that cannot be solved by well-judged tweets and complicated financial instruments. Socked around the face by the large wet fish of Real Life, the European political class retreats into silly games, hallucinatory fantasies and futile aggressivity.

So much would be widely accepted, I think. But I’ve lamented the decline of the European political class before, and there’s not a lot left to say. Nor is there a great deal of interest, frankly, in following the day-to-day manoeuvres and mutterings of politicians who are clearly out of their depth and out of their heads: studying the the flight patterns of headless chickens is rarely illuminating. And I don’t intend to join in the vitriol directed against Mr Trump and Mr Vance, nor the unattractive sneering dismissal of the Europeans, both of which you can find almost anywhere you look.

Rather, I want to go back to the core questions that animate these Essays, and made me want to start writing them in the first place. Behind all the handwaving, shouting and empty gestures, What is going on here? In other words, what are the deeper forces operating? How are the laws of politics playing themselves out? What are the various underlying stresses on the fabric of the political system? And of course, where might things reasonably go?

As it happened, I accidentally caught part of a Very Serious radio programme on the BBC a few days ago, where a Very Serious interviewer was Very Seriously interviewing Very Serious pundits about what Europe should do now “for its defence.” I listened for a while in fascinated horror, marvelling at the collective capacity of supposedly intelligent people to be utterly ignorant of the real world, and to construct a fantasy one with its own rules and play together in it, rather as children do. (“Let’s pretend …”)

OK, let’s not pretend. Europe is in a hell of a mess. The reasons for are not the extravagant ones that you find in certain quarters (CIA mind-control techniques, the operations of the Bildeberg Group or the City of London,— you know the kind of thing I mean) but are instead buried in history, and particularly in the terror of repeating it. What makes it worse is that we have a European ruling class which is haunted by fears that it doesn’t fully understand, and which have their ultimate origin in events it only ever studied superficially at school, if that.

So I’m going to discuss three topics in order. First, the ultimate historical origins of the current collective nervous breakdown of the European political class; second how, paradoxically, attempts to deal with the problems caused by these original events backfired spectacularly; and third, how that political class therefore finds itself incapable of so much as understanding, much less of dealing with, the consequences of the past and the challenges of today. A few weeks ago, I sketched out what I thought might be a sensible security policy for Europe—essentially a non-provocative but not disarmed posture—and I won’t go through all that again.

So: origins. What distinguishes (mostly western) European history is its long periods of political turmoil, military conflict and insecurity. There’s no complicated set of reasons for this: Europeans are no more inherently violent than any other people. But Europe has always been relatively densely populated, relatively fertile, and with good communications by river and by sea. This allowed the creation of large numbers of distinct political units, in an economy where land-holding was the basic ingredient for acquiring wealth and thus power, and so the basic object for competition. And there were various other built-in incentives to conflict at different times (the Pope vs the Emperor, the French King vs the Hapsburgs, Protestants vs Catholics). Some of these wars were exceptionally destructive (the Hundred Years’ War, for example) but most were also dynastic in whole or in part, and reflected the limited ambitions of rulers: who should be the King of Spain for example. In this, they were not massively different from the dynastic wars in, say, medieval Japan.

What made the situation radically worse was the triumph of the idea of the nation-state as the basic political structure in Europe. Progressively during the nineteenth century, and then explosively after 1918, nation-states replaced Empires, and demanded a new and unprecedented level of obedience and identification from their freshly-minted citizens. Allegiances before then had generally been to distant rulers who changed from time to time, to towns and cities that often had a great deal of independence, and to local communities, often organised on a religious/linguistic basis. The concept of belonging to a “country” was recent and fragile: in France, and even more in Italy, regionalism and regional languages and dialects remained extremely important. This was, unfortunately, something the British understood only imperfectly, and the Americans not at all.

The next step was the famous “self-determination of peoples,” Now, in principle, who could be against such an idea? Who would deny people the right to determine how and by whom they should be governed? Yet from the beginning it was obvious that there were insoluble problems attached to the concept: who defined “the people” who were entitled to self-determination? What about those who did not wish to be determined by the majority? And how small could a “people” be before the right to self-determination had to be refused them? The situation was made no easier by the vague and often careless use of terminology in different languages, where words that could be rendered by “people” “nation” “country” and even “state” were tossed around as though they were equivalents. (Neither Volk in German nor Narod in various Slavic languages has a strict English equivalent.) But in many contexts, the “people” seeking self-determination were scattered over various “countries” or “states” (or even “nations” by some usages) and their idea of self-determination was to control all of the lands in which their “people” lived. Thus, what we these days call “ethnic cleansing,” from the Former Yugoslavia to Gaza, is not a bug in the “self-determination” ideology, it’s a feature.

And the inevitable outcome was therefore conflict: not necessarily wars, though we think of those first, but rather long-term tensions, sporadic violence and short, vicious conflicts for the control of terrain. (And the subsequent coming of democracy has made things worse: democracy gives your neighbours power over you, and if they are from another ethnic group, you could be in trouble.) And so nationalists assassinated Emperors, imperial powers imprisoned nationalists, revolutionary societies seeking self-determination at the expense of other revolutionary societies seeking self-determination proliferated. Some of the bloody conflicts that resulted have just dropped out of sight because they were rapidly overshadowed by even bloodier ones. Consider, for example, the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, in which perhaps a quarter of a million people died. First; it was Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria against the Ottomans, then Bulgaria fought the others, and Romania as well. Something to do with the right to self-determination, apparently, but it was all forgotten about after August 1914.

The disconnect between “peoples” and borders, inherent in the practice of self-determination, haunted Europe for the best part of a century. It was less the wars, cataclysmic as they were, than then fact that the wars themselves arose because there was no solution to the problem of many nations and “peoples” in the same relatively small space, with borders that did not reflect the distribution of populations. Thus, the wars of the twentieth century could not by definition “solve anything,” because the factors that had produced them still largely existed. The French had recovered Alsace and Lorraine in 1918, but the two departments still had German-speaking minorities, and the Germans wanted them back. (Indeed, in World War 2 young people from the region were forcibly conscripted into the German Armed Forces.)

But this was only a small part of the post-1918 problems. Postwar violence, ethnic cleansing, revolutions, mass killings, ethnic conflict, civil wars and even wars between nations (Russia and Poland for example) led to millions of dead, millions more displaced and a legacy of resentment and perceived injustice inviting retribution. And all this to produce a series of weak, divided and often authoritarian states. Perhaps the most important thing about World War 1 was that it actually “failed to end” in 1918, and indeed was arguably just an early phase of a European Civil War which had started before 1914, and ended after 1945. This Civil War was in different degrees nationalist, religious, ethnic, ideological, commercial, class-based, and the simple and brutal struggle for power. And like all Civil Wars, much of the violence was not in orderly battles between uniformed and disciplined troops, but scrappy atrocities and massacres carried out by improvised militias.

A couple of weeks ago, I pointed to the effect of the terrifying level of casualties in World War 1 as something essential to understand, but often overlooked, in the politics of the 1930s. If I had had the space, I would have mentioned this issue also. To many decision-makers at the time, it seemed that Europe could simply not survive another war: yes, there would be victories and defeats on the battlefield but that was not the main point. Even the ostensibly “victorious” states would collapse into violence and revolution, and Europe would become a political wasteland.

Looking back from 1945, this judgement did not seem to have necessarily been wrong. Europe had disintegrated under the stress of war, and was bankrupt and starving. Worse than that, nations had split and troops from just about every European country had fought on both sides. Around half of the one million men who served in the Waffen SS were foreign volunteers, mostly anti-communists, from some twenty nations including dissident movements within the Soviet Union itself. Some nations, such as Italy, Hungary and Romania sent large organised forces to fight with the Wehrmacht, whilst others such as Spain allowed volunteers to fight (some 50,000 Spaniards are believed to have taken part.) The Finns were objective allies of the Nazis. Some of these forces, such as the Italians and the Romanians, changed sides later in the war. In Yugoslavia, a bewildering variety of different political and ethnic factions (two SS Divisions of Bosnian Muslims, for example), fought each other, and occasionally the Germans too. A striking feature among those who fought with the Germans was that they used every opportunity to consolidate gains and overturn territorial losses from 1919, so there were a whole series of national and international sub-plots inside the main plot.

If deaths in combat in Western Europe were thankfully fewer than between 1914-18, the amount of physical devastation, suffering of non-combatants and destruction of entire political systems was much greater. And once more, the War failed to end when it was supposed to. There were near civil wars in Italy and France, and an actual civil war in Greece. Borders were wrenched around, especially by the Soviet Union, and millions were forcibly displaced. And yet nothing had really been settled: once more, the question of What to Do with Germany was posed, and there was no obvious solution. The default—a ready-prepared standing alliance against Germany—was being set up, when the Cold War began to freeze over.

The atmosphere of exhaustion, fear and uncertainty that hung over Europe in the late 1940s, and led ultimately to the Washington Treaty, is often believed to be based on fear of the Soviet Union and its military power, but this is, at best, an oversimplification. Western leaders saw their countries and indeed their civilisations as desperately fragile, likely to fall into chaos at the first shock. Imagine that a political crisis such as the Soviet blockade of Berlin got out of hand, and, say, the Italian government decided to ban the large, powerful but completely Moscow-dominated Communist Party? Would the country survive? Would another major conflict in Europe begin?

Europe had confronted outside threats before: the Ottoman Threat, for example, was not finally halted until the end of the seventeenth century. But even then, not all of Europe reacted in the same way:the French were content to let the Emperor fight the Ottomans without their help, since a weaker Emperor was to their advantage. And likewise, there were all sorts of subtle differences in the way that European leaders saw the massive Soviet military presence to the East. But what united them was the fear of the progressive collapse of Europe in the face of Stalin, recapitulating, in the common view, the earlier collapse in the face of Hitler. Bevin’s famous Memorandum of January 1948, which is generally regarded as the beginning of the Washington Treaty process, did not foresee a military threat, but rather intimidation from Moscow, supported by powerful and disciplined Communist Parties, leading to political crisis and conflict in countries like Italy and France, as was just happening in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Some European decision-makers took the threat of actual war in Europe more seriously than others, especially after the outbreak of conflict in Korea. Stalin’s intentions were unknowable, and, as General Montgomery famously said, all the Red Army had to do to reach Calais was to keep walking. Western Europe was essentially disarmed, whereas the Soviet Union maintained massive forces a few hundred kilometres away, even if they were mostly poor-quality conscripts. Such a disparity of power was bound to affect the political mood in Europe, even if you were personally convinced that Stalin was actually a really nice guy. (There were, of course, a fair number of aggressive and unreconstructed Cold Warriors actively hoping for conflict with Russia, but they were decidedly rarer in Europe than in the United States.)

The drafting of the Washington Treaty, imperfect as it was, and its militarisation after the start of the Korean War, had all sorts of effects, including on the Russians. But for our purposes here, it did provide a political counterweight to Soviet pressure, and resolved to some degree the question of how to deal with Germany and its inevitable rearmament. By placing their troops under the ultimate control of a foreign General, and giving up the ability to conduct national operations, as well as being faithful allies of the US, the Germans tried to address their neighbours’ fears of some kind of revanchism. As the years passed, and the anticipated conflict never came, the Bundeswehr became, in practice, a kind of anti-Army, wearing uniforms and driving tanks, but only superficially resembling a fighting force. (“Don’t forget, our Army is not intended to fight,” a nervous Colonel, said to me in a discussion of forces in Bosnia in about 1992.) The Cold War, for all its occasional panics and the lunatic artificiality of its frontiers, was nonetheless a period of general stability. Decades of military integration, endless meetings and committees, joint exercises and personal contacts between leaders made the whole idea that these countries had ever fought each other seem bizarre. And for many smaller European countries, the presence of US troops was a guarantee less against the Soviet Union than troubles with their neighbours.

Meanwhile, of course, the first steps to European integration were being taken, and explicitly on the basis of Schuman’s proposal that war between European powers should be made “practically impossible,” initially through the common control of coal and steel, the basis for any armaments industry. In effect, a significant part of the European elite had decided that the nation-state, for all its theoretical attractions and its romantic image of self-determination, was simply too dangerous a construct to leave in place. One more nation-state war, and that would be the end of Europe. If certain things had to be sacrificed, so be it. Since it was scarcely possible to go back to the era of transnational Empires, it was necessary to go forward to some kind of supranational Europe (the details were hazy for a long time), where the differences among national groups could be contained, and further wars averted. This kind of thinking was, of course, typical of an era which had seen the explosive growth of international organisations, both regional and functional, as well as the popularity of World State ideas in popular culture, and in the more serious works of writers like HG Wells and Aldous Huxley.

But from the beginning, the European elite made a number of serious mistakes, whose consequences are very visible today. The most important was the complete mischaracterisation of the causes of conflict in general, and of the recent War in particular. Western elites at the time were haunted by their failure to prevent that War, especially as it had been so often and so loudly predicted. But it was difficult to acknowledge this, so, by a process of transference, the guilt was shifted to others, notably the people. This is behind the notorious suggestion in the Preamble to the UNESCO Convention that conflicts begin.“in the minds of men,” and so

it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed; … ignorance of each other’s ways and lives has been a common cause, throughout the history of mankind, of that suspicion and mistrust between the peoples of the world through which their differences have all too often broken into war;.”

And even more that the

“war which has now ended was a war made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation…of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races.”

And since this declaration was made in the names of “the peoples” of Europe and elsewhere, “the people” thus accepted responsibility for causing the Second World War through the suspicion and mistrust they felt for each other, and their readiness to respond to divisive propaganda. This is so fantastically removed from reality that it’s hard to imagine elites ever believed any of it, but at some level it was more than pure hypocrisy and self-protection. It was an attempt to find an answer—any answer—to symbolically explain and expunge the wars of the past, just as the fear of the Soviet Union in the 1940s was in large part a symbolic re-run of the fears of the 1930s, with this time the possibility of a better outcome.

So any solution was bound to be elitist, because “the people” could not be trusted. Thus, perhaps, the origin of the myth that Hitler was “elected” in 1933, which is still being trotted out to explain any political development anyone doesn’t like. (I came across it just this week in a relatively sensible publication.) In reality, of course, Hitler became Chancellor through a squalid attempt by the German political elite to exploit a not very bright rabble-rousing Austrian peasant, that backfired disastrously. But of course the sub-text is very useful: we should not put too much power in the hands of the voters, because they might vote for the wrong people again, and these people might once more plunge the Continent into a disastrous war.

European elites appear to believe this now, or as near as makes no difference, and I think it explains the hysteria with which the “extreme Right” is identified and vituperated today.The merest reminiscence of the 1930s, the merest reference to nationality and culture, the merest expression of interest in one’s history and traditions summon up the memory of nameless terrors from the past, which could arise again to devour us at any moment. To the very reasonable objection that the West is supporting precisely such groups in Ukraine, it can be answered, I think, that Ukraine is Over There, and in any case Russia is even worse, or something.

From this mistake followed another: that “divisive” factors such as history, language, currency, religion, national culture and so forth should be progressively downgraded and eventually done away with. The rich and colourful history of Europe needed to be sanitised because its events could be “instrumentalised” by “extremists” to deceive the common herd into wanting war again. “Mutual understanding” was to be encouraged by cultural and educational exchanges, although such exchanges had notably failed to prevent earlier wars, and anyway were mostly for the benefit of the middle classes: how an industrial worker in Stockport or Nancy was expected to benefit was never clear. The infamous Euro banknotes, totally anonymous as through dropped from Martian drones, are the most obvious example of this sanitising tendency.

The result, of course, was precisely to abandon large areas of culture and even everyday life to the control of the very forces elites were so frightened of. If an interest in history was to be encoded as a marker of the “extreme Right,” then very well, history would be recuperated by these very forces. It’s often been noticed that history books in France that sell (as opposed to those that win prizes from Brussels) are traditional narratives of battles, heroes and Kings, mostly written by authors from the political Right. Who could have anticipated that, I wonder? And if history is clumsily sanitised and selectively silenced, then who can be surprised if conspiracy theories proliferate?

And maybe we need to do something about the population? For a start, the link between citizenship and political rights needed to be broken, such that voting was just a transactional process, depending on where you happened to be living at the time. National interest and national identity were no longer fit subjects for political debate, and indeed the ideal European was a completely de-nationalised, anonymous figure belonging to no culture and acknowledging no history, with no interests except the maximisation of personal freedom and personal income. Amazingly, not everybody was happy with that.

To replace religion, Human Rights has been adopted as a type of faith and a guide to behaviour, interpreted as Canon Law once was by a distant and ethereal group of learned prelates. (After all, World War 2 was caused by human rights violations, wan’t it? The UNESCO Convention says so.) Yet this has produced all sorts of unexpected conflicts and instabilities. It turns out that people do not like being sliced up by ascriptive identities and told what their relative rights are, and where they stand in the pecking order of competitive marginalisation. Indeed, they often feel solidarity with each other for economic or even identitarian reasons, which is very disturbing because they could be manipulated by “extremists.” Thus also the encouragement of immigration and the “free movement of peoples,” which will undermine social and national cohesion, and so prevent the formation of nationalist blocs which could be exploited by “extremists.”

And this is where we are now. Of course this agenda can be and has been hijacked by those with cruder interests in profits and in a disposable and easily-moved workforce, but that kind of reductive thinking simply isn’t adequate to explain the excessive, and often pointlessly counter-productive, nature of so many initiatives from Brussels. And irony of ironies, we are now in a position in Europe where, there is indeed the long-feared war, but one that the EU is encouraging, with all the bottled-up emotions of violence and hatred that have been so deeply suppressed for so long and are now externalised. So how on earth did we get here?

During the Cold War, defence in Europe was something of a ritual. There were entirely reasonable concerns about living next to a military superpower, and hopes that the US could be employed as a strategic counterweight to it. There were persistent fears that the US would lose interest and go away, or make deals over the heads of the Europeans. But there was very little sense, even under right-wing governments, of the imminence of a possible conflict. So when the Cold War ended, European thinking about defence essentially went off in two parallel directions. One, led by the French, was the need to maintain and enhance European political sovereignty and freedom of decision-making with a serious military capability, and the associated capability for independent action. This didn’t mean getting rid of NATO (“why have Frenchmen die when you can get Americans to die for you?” as they said) but rather a capability for Europe to act where it wanted to, “separable but not separate” from NATO, as the phrase had it. The other focused on actually envisaged roles for European forces. With the spectre of large-scale war now finally lifted from Europe, its forces could concentrate in peacekeeping missions, on humanitarian and rescue operations, and small scale interventions. It was time for the Peace Dividend, and massive cuts in the military.

As I’ve said before, this was not in itself a stupid policy. But it depended on other things, notably a sensible policy towards Russia, for its effectiveness. Yet almost immediately came the crisis in Yugoslavia, and especially the sub-crisis in Bosnia. Initially, the crisis seemed to fully justify the envisaged new military posture: small, well-trained forces capable of difficult operations outside the national territory. But as the sick horror of Bosnia unfolded, only a couple of hours’ flight from Brussels, it looked as if all the worst post-1945 fears were being confirmed. A savage, barbaric conflict had been unleashed through the implementation, once more, of the principle of the Self-determination of Peoples. Thus, the desperate and futile search for “multi-ethnic” political parties, and the demonisation of Milosevic, the nominated Hitler of the Balkans.

I don’t know anyone who was directly involved in the former Yugoslavia during the conflict and its aftermath whose view of the world wasn’t altered permanently by its surreal horrors, its bottomless cynicism and the duplicity of its leaders. (I tried to describe it once as Hieronymus Bosch re-imagined by the Marx Brothers.) But on reflection there was nothing that new about it, or specific to the region. Similar things had happened on the Eastern Front in World War 2: who was to say they wouldn’t again, in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, now floating free, and with an unfinished history of violent territorial disputes? What could be done?

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, virtually no thought had been given to the expansion of NATO. The Cold Warriors in Washington were in a state of shock, and there were a dozen other more pressing subjects than the future of the Alliance, assuming it had one. And the newly-independent states to the East were not keen to join another alliance. Yet as history came back to life, and as first Armenia and Azerbaijan, and then the ex-Yugoslavia descended into war, the calculus started to change. There was also the traditional fear of Russia by its neighbours, now reawakened as that giant country seemed itself to be falling to pieces with unforeseeable results. And so opinion started to change: maybe expanding NATO could stabilise the situation in these countries? There were problems, of course: both the US and Russia were, for diametrically opposite reasons, unenthusiastic, but as often the alternative was considered worse. In the US, various different and often opposing lobbies subsequently coalesced around the idea of at least some NATO expansion. In Europe, this expansion, and the parallel expansion of the EU, was not believed to be something the Russians should reasonably worry about It was bringing stability to their borders, and anyway, it would be a long time, if ever, before either institution actually expanded that far East, and by then we’d all be retired.

So Europe spent thirty-five years not knowing what its armed forces were for, and its elites progressively lost any interest in them. There would be no more wars in Europe, and the small forces that remained would largely Do Good in benighted countries around the world. It’s this, perhaps, that explains the terrifying detachment from reality of the punditocracy. I don’t mean just that they are wrong, I mean that they don’t have a clue what they are talking about. So, what about some European agency to coordinate defence programmes? Congratulations, you have one already: it’s called, surprisingly, the European Defence Agency, and it’s existed for twenty years. Can’t nations collaborate on defence programmes to save money? Well, this has been going on since the 1970s, especially with aircraft, such as the Franco-German AlphaJet and the British-German-Italian Tornado, as well as a lot of more recent aircraft, such as the A400M and the Typhoon. And it turns out that collaborative programmes usually take longer and cost more than programmes by individual nations. OK then, what about a European Army? Well, that was tried in the 1950s, under US pressure and came to grief. There are even several examples today of such units, but the reality is that international forces are at best no more than the sum of their parts, and usually rather less. All this is knowable after a simple Google search, but even that seems too much for our current generation of pundits. There is no way out of the mess that European leaders have got themselves into.

This is why, perhaps, all of the “initiatives” so far mentioned, including the Commission’s, latest contribution, are entirely about money. This, on reflection, is what you would expect from a neoliberal society, where everything can be bought in, including military forces. Specialist working groups will then decide the detail … or something like that. The money is the thing.

But who would want even to contribute money, let alone volunteer and perhaps die? Because the Europe that has been created by Brussels has only a cursory resemblance to the continent you see on your maps, or that has existed for centuries past. All of the history, the culture, the politics, the religion, the art, the cathedrals the great leaders and artists and intellectuals, all this has been abstracted away, in favour of a colourless, tasteless, post-modernist reality of unreality, without beliefs, principles or ethics, and certainly without anything worth defending, if indeed our leaders could even decide what “defending” was supposed to mean.

It’s quite an achievement to have destroyed so much so quickly and left so little in its place. The highest expression of modern European popular culture has for some time now been the Eurovision Song Contest, and the domestic competitions to produce a Song for Europe. (Actual popular culture is potentially dangerous, since it could be “instrumentalised by extremists.”) But then, as Roxy Music famously observed as early as 1973, “Nothing is there/For us to share/But yesterday.” Ironically, some of the song’s lyrics are in Latin, once a language which brought Europe together, now officially discouraged as “elitist”and “eurocentric;”

The Europe we had is gone, the Europe we might have had never was. Why anyone should want to defend the Europe we have, is beyond me.