The End of History…for Europe

by Robert Bruce (August 2014)

Hubris seems to catch up quicker in the 21^st century, and our Belle Époques are certainly shorter – we moved from the end of history to the death of the west in a mere four years and the note of optimism struck by Fukuyama’s essay now seems a remote and utopian memory. In western book markets it is Spenglerian pessimism that sells, the events of 9/11 spawning a cottage industry of dismal prophets recycling much the same fin de siècle angst which pervaded Europe’s educated classes during the thirties and seemingly with far less justification. There are, needless to say, risks to this flirting with the abyss; some people might take it seriously and this alone gives reasonable grounds to be cautious. Reactionaries, moreover, are always drawn to visions of catastrophe, the plight of the Last Roman providing a comfortingly reassuring self-image for those who, much like the revolutionaries in Conrad’s novels would rather burn than rot. To such individuals the end is forever nigh.

When all is said and done however, one still has to contend with certain incontrovertible facts. Europe may not be buried by ashes, but the evidence of a protracted Spanish decline is too stark to overlook and nowhere is this more evident than in its geopolitical retreat. Having occupied the centre stage of world politics for so long, Europe is now in danger of becoming a pawn, a collective fate hinted at by the high dudgeon of Greece, the cradle of western civilization reduced almost to the rank of a failed state and kept afloat by surplus Chinese capital. Few episodes are more powerfully symbolic of the continents ebbing prestige, and as Europe increasingly morphs into a cultural theme park for the nouveau riche of globalization the future can only store up similar slights.

It is difficult not to read into this metaphors of civilizational decline, but it is only trivially related to Europe’s sclerotic economic performance. Something like the malady of abulia coined by French psychologists in the nineteenth century to describe an inexplicable paralysis of the will seems to infect the European mind, and it manifests itself in a characteristic confusion over its very identity. Judging by the Laeken Declaration, and the eternal fantasy of a united Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, the quest for imperium is boundless, but what ultimately does it mean to be European? Here the silence has been deafening and it is an identity crisis which its gluttonous appetite for expansion cannot conceal. Rome, after all, expended as its virtue faded and if Europe has managed to avoid its dramatic denouement it is only because it refuses to draw battle lines. It takes two to fight but Europe is fast losing the ability to make those elementary distinctions on which national survival rests, and it is a predicament all the more difficult to escape for being considered a virtue. The highest compliment for the modern European is to be found non-judgmental, and whatever the moralizing tones associated with this secular commandment it is more suggestive of neurasthenia than the healthy tolerance of a secure personality. Tis is the disintegration of the instincts Nietzsche railed against and it shines through all the labored amens to the European project.

 As Jurgen Habermas, the opaque prophet of the nascent European public has helpfully informed us ‘The common core of European identity is the character of a painful learning process it has gone through as much as its results’, the experience of religious and  nationalist conflict having given its citizens a characteristically ‘low threshold towards exclusion’. This is not exactly tub thumping stuff and it suffers from all the weaknesses of its soggy ecumenicalism. Vital faiths thrive on the narcissism of small differences: only those with flagging convictions fritter their energies in the search for inclusion – cosmopolitanism inevitably yields before fanaticism  

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Expecting under such circumstances that a Constitution might be able to fill this vacuum in pan European sentiment was in effect to put the cart before the horse; peoples after all create constitutions not vice versa¹, and this confusion was inevitably reproduced in the declaration of European values. Superficially at least this should not have been a difficult matter – the Laeken Declaration had already declared with grandiloquent self-importance that ‘the only boundary the European Union draws is defined by democracy and human rights,’ and the final draft highlighted the importance of the values of the Enlightenment. All this however left unanswered a more challenging question; what kind of culture transforms these indeterminate formal virtues into a living creed? As the conservative philosopher Oakeshott noted, ideas are sediment, they have significance only so long as they are suspended in a religious or social tradition, and here the identity crisis of Europe was thrown into stark relief over the question of Europe’s Christian heritage. Though the secular Enlightenment values prized by the constitution are only intelligible as the reflex of a Christian culture (something even Marxist thinkers like Habermas have been willing to concede), and the Christian Democrat founders never doubted that they were engaged in an essentially Carolingian quest to unify Christendom, the most its authors were prepared to entertain was a vacuous nod towards Europe’s ‘moral and spiritual traditions’.

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How then to explain this fanatical agnosticism towards ones heritage? For the most part it is a testament to the stricken conscience of postmodern Europe which still finds the assertion of values indecent. Two World wars have exacted a heavy toll on its self-confidence, and exhausted its capacity for strenuous exertions of the spirit. The temptation, in these circumstances to retreat into calculating prudence is overwhelming. Just as European philosophers like Hobbes writing against the backdrop of Wars of Religion, sought to evade the costs of vainglory by cultivating the base appetites of homo economicus, so this impulse was carried on into the sterile visions of European technocrats who hoped to rouse a nascent European public with clunking Ur foundation myths, some of which have managed to be even less rousing than Habermas’s. Behind it all is an anemic spirit of solemn and banal pragmatism.

‘The genius of the founding fathers’, as Jose Manuel Barraso the Commission President intoned ‘lay in translating extremely high political ambitions into a series of more specific, highly technical questions. This indirect approach made further action possible. Rapprochement took place gradually. From confrontation we moved to willingness to co-operate in the economic sphere and then on to integration’.

When reading this paean to the European genius, one has to remind oneself that it is intended as high praise, and it captures perfectly the ethos of the EU. Whilst in theory at least, the USA remains, to use Renan’s poignant phrase, a spiritual principle built on the proposition that anything is possible, Europe has tailored its ambitions in line with a creeping senility of purpose. It has renounced any global ambitions and when confronted with the American hyperpower it is fond of parading its jaded world weariness as if it were a higher virtue. Warming to a familiar theme the French Foreign Minister Villepien proclaimed ‘Europe and France have had a head start over other countries. We have survived numerous wars, ordeals, and barbarities from which we have learned’ – all of which prompts the question: learned what? The Second World War, which presumably was uppermost in his mind, is not a good argument for pacifism, and is war in any aces the greatest of evils? Is war, as John Stuart Mill asked, not preferable to that sunken state of apathy in which men do not fight only because they have nothing worth fighting for? This is no idle question and it was one of the central preoccupations of Alexandre Kojeve, the great Hegelian scholar whose work has cast a heavy shadow over Fukayama’s work. Like his mind’s idol, he saw history as a cosmic drama in which man’s greatness was a tribute to the historical challenges he was compelled to overcome. Struggle and contestation were his raison d’être but what would happen to human culture when there were no battles left to fight. For Kojeve it offered nothing less than a reversion to the brute inclinations of happily regimented animal nature, and whatever his misgivings he had enough residual Marxism to accept the verdict of History as a vocational commitment, toiling faithfully as a senior civil servant in the European commission where this drab utopia was taking shape. Kojeve, as is well known, had a considerable effect on Fukuyama’s thought and the pessimism behind his vision, so often overlooked by critics, is neatly hinted at in the extended title of his book sequel to his original National Interest article; “The End of History and the Last Man”. The distance between the End of History and Spengler was never that great after all

[1] Some Americans may disagree but it is clear to any balanced observer that the constitution is an abridgement of patiently cultivated Protestant traditions and beliefs. Witness the discord sown by judicial activism when this organic connection is broken.

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The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.

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