The End of History…for Europe
by Robert Bruce (August 2014)
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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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’.
[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. _________________________________
The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.
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