While “angry French youths” burn down their neighborhoods, including their public transport buses and schools, Polish plumbers, construction workers and nurses are too busy to be angry.
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For some years now West European city folk and police officers have been familiar with the reality that certain areas of major European cities are no-go areas, especially at night and certainly if you are white or wearing a uniform. Anti-Americanism is more widespread in Western Europe now than it has ever been before, and its roots are much deeper than mere opposition to the Iraq War. The inaugural issue of the new American quarterly The American Interest (Autumn 2005) includes an interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In the course of the conversation AI editor Adam Garfinkle asks Rice a question on anti-Americanism: During the Cold War we were all familiar with varieties of anti-Americanism, mostly on the Left. A lot of people now claim that not only is there more anti-Americanism, but that its sources are more diverse. Do you think that’s so and if you do, where does this new anti-Americanism come from? Is it just a reaction to American conduct after the 9/11 attacks or is it because we’re No. 1 and there’s a natural envy? What do you think accounts for it? It is a very pertinent question and it goes to the roots of one of the major problems confronting Europe but also America today, with not only political but also economic consequences. Is there more anti-Americanism today than before? Are its sources more diverse? Where does the new anti-Americanism come from? Is it a reaction to America’s reaction to 9/11? Or is it envy? What does the leading American foreign policy maker think? These were the things Garfinkle asked, but, unfortunately, Rice did not answer. What she said was as evasive as it was trivial: I think people have to be more rigorous about what they mean by anti-Americanism. Clearly this is still the most popular place in the world to come if you want to be educated, or if you want to immigrate. The United States is still a pretty popular place. American culture, both good and bad, is very much sought after abroad. And I still think that the values of the United States are the most universal of all values. Now, I do think that we’ve gone through a period of time in which the United States has had to do very difficult things, as the most powerful state in the international system, to shape the environment so that things began to change. And I would give a couple of examples where those decisions were wildly unpopular at the time but now have become almost common wisdom. For example, the decision that we weren’t going to deal with Yasir Arafat because he was a failed, bankrupt leader and there was going to be no peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians had new leadership. Now it’s almost common wisdom. But when the President said that in June of 2002, it was considered an outrageous statement. Garfinkle and Rice then go on about the Middle East and a range of other issues but the topic of anti-Americanism is not raised anymore. Frankly, to me as a European, Rice’s answer is disappointing. She just says that America is still “the most popular place in the world” for those seeking an education. (Nobody will deny that. The conspirators of 9/11 came to America to take flying lessons.) She adds that immigrants still flock to the US. (That is true for Europe, too. But these immigrants are not necessarily pro-American, or pro-European for that matter: it is doubtful whether most of them come to the West because they share Western values.) If America is still a “pretty popular place,” it would be interesting to know if its culture and values are less popular today than they used to be. If so, that would be a clear indication of growing anti-Americanism. Rice seems to imply that anti-Americanism is diminishing, because she refers to the “very difficult,” “wildly unpopular,” seemingly “outrageous” decisions that America had to take a few years ago (as in 2002), but that are considered “almost common wisdom” nowadays. My impression is that anti-Americanism is more widespread in Western Europe now than it has ever been before. If so, there must be a reason for it. I have argued that I do not think it has to do with the Iraq war, because the Western Europeans heap as much scorn on the American conservatives who oppose the war as on the so-called neo-conservatives. They are not even aware of what Joshua Muravchik pointed out in an article about “Iraq and the Conservatives” in the October issue of [the neo-conservative magazine] Commentary, namely that “the most interesting arguments are not between Left and Right. The Left long ago lost any coherent voice on national security […] The most interesting arguments are within the Right, most of which supports the war but some of which contains its most trenchant and acerbic critics.” Europe’s anti-Americans reject not only America’s foreign policy, but also its economic and cultural values. The growing anti-Americanism, at least in Europe, predates the 2003 American intervention in Iraq. Well, then, is it simply, as Garfinkle asked Secretary of State Rice, “because [America is] No. 1 and there’s a natural envy?” Anti-Americanism as the equally irrational, deeply psychological envy that Freud said women feel towards men: a kind of Transatlantic “penis envy” that Europeans, who are said to come from Venus, feel for Americans, who are said to come from Mars? And could this, perhaps, be the subconscious reason why Rice evades the question? Envy of those who are richer, or rather the egalitarian impulse to cut everyone down to the same level, is the driving force behind the Westeuropean welfare model. Since America is not only stronger than Europe, but also richer, this might go some way to explaining Europe’s attitude towards America. It does not explain, however, why anti-Americanism is growing, unless America is growing rapidly richer than Western Europe or the egalitarian impulses in Europe are rapidly increasing. A better psychological explanation for the growth of anti-Americanism might be anger rather than envy. In the latest issue of The National Interest (Fall 2005) — not to be confused with The American Interest mentioned above — John Hulsman and William Schirano write that “the European Union is dead.” For fifty years the European elite has been harboring the dream of an ever closer union, described by the two authors as “a willful ignorance of the Continent’s amazing diversity assumed in an effort to force an artificial one-size-fits-all approach.” There is little doubt, following the twin ‘no’ votes in France and the Netherlands, that the European Union, long proudly proclaimed as the future model of international relations, is dead. So, to understand what is happening here, we must think unconventionally about the end of the dream of ever closer union – about death and the process of coming to terms with it. In 1969, in her seminal work On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross eloquently detailed the five stages of dying – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance. Hulsman and Schirano argue that the European elites, after the initial stage of denial that their attempt to create the “postmodern, post-Westphalian, post-nation-state” has proved impossible, are now in the second stage described by Kübler-Ross: the state of “anger, rage, envy and resentment” — a state which “usually begins innocently, with a thought such as ‘why me, why not him or her?’” The authors do not draw the parallel between this psychological state and Transatlantic relations, but apply the analysis to the relations between the European elite and the European people, where angry politicians such as the former head of the rotating EU presidency, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, told voters that “the countries that have said ‘no’ [to the European Constitution] will have to ask themselves the question again.” Jacques Chirac, too, they write, “behaved exactly as Kübler-Ross would have predicted.” The leaders are angry with the people because “the cozy corporatist economics in the face of globalization or political elitism instead of broad-based support for Europe, can no longer be sustained.” I believe the psychological model is more appropriately applied not just to the European federalist project but to the general plight of Europe as a whole, namely the fact that it is a dying continent in the most literal sense, as its demographic rates indicate. This issue (among others) is explicitly raised by Conrad Black in an article entitled “Europe’s Dream Disturbed,” in the same issue of The National Interest. Black sees the European Union not only as an attempt “to be emancipated from the straitjacket of national identity” but also as an attempt to “[impose] Euro-Socialism” and “casting off the soft hegemony of the United States.” That Europe is dying can be seen in its “collapsed birthrate” — “it is ultimately unnatural for people not to reproduce themselves,” says Black — but also in “stagnant economic growth in France and Germany, double-digit unemployment, impending pension crises, and demographic levels sustained by relatively unassimilable immigration from Islamic countries.” One can easily see that, as this situation worsens, anti-American feelings are likely to grow because the “Why me, why not him” feelings will be directed towards the US. Indeed, in the perception of many egalitarian Europeans it is a gross injustice that the economy of the “social” European model is collapsing while that of the capitalist American model keeps growing. And yet, there is also a foreign policy reason for why anti-Americanism has grown even deeper than it was twenty years ago at the height of the Transatlantic debate over the deployment of American cruise missiles in Western Europe. At that time the Left in Western Europe succeeded in convincing part of West European public opinion that the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were basically of the same, evil, nature. This was the theory of moral equivalence, where some regarded the US as an “occupying” force in Western Europe on par with the Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Europe. While the East Europeans had to liberate themselves from the warmongering Soviets, the West Europeans were told that they had to “liberate” themselves from the warmongering Americans. This explains why in the early and mid 1980s hundreds of thousands took to the streets in anti-American “peace demonstrations” in various West European capitals. These were the largest mass demonstrations that Europe had ever seen. Interestingly, the moral equivalence idea was shared by others. This is where the Muslim radicals and the West European Left meet. According to Osama bin Laden the Muslim victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan, in which he took part, convinced him of the possibility of conquering the other infidel power, America. Having played their role in bringing down the Soviet Union, the fighters of Islamic Jihad turned their attention to the US. For them the attacks of 9/11 were a logical follow-up to the attacks on the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The US had armed the Jihadists in the 1980s only to discover a decade later that it had been supporting its new mortal enemy. In Western Europe, however, the idea of moral equivalence was reinforced after the collapse of communism in 1989. Contrary to the so-called “denazification” which took place in Germany after 1945, with prosecutions of Nazi criminals and collaborators and moral condemnations of civil servants who had remained silent, there was no “decommification” after 1989. On the contrary, many of the fellow travelers of the old regime simply turned their coats, rising to high positions in post-communist society. The Russian President Putin, a former high-ranking KGB official, is one example that immediately springs to mind. Imagine a former Gestapo officer of high rank becoming Chancellor of Germany in the 1950s! In Germany, the pivot and cornerstone of Europe, the former Communists were allowed to reestablish their own party after German reunification in 1990, as if the former Nazis had been allowed the same in 1945. Others (such as Wolfgang Thierse and Rolf Schwanitz) who had been university professors in economics or law in East Germany — a position that was only open to collaborators of the regime — joined the SPD and became high-ranking Social-Democrat politicians in the new Germany. This reinforced the message that, indeed, there was no real moral difference between the collaborators of the old communist puppet regimes installed by the Soviet occupiers in Central and Eastern Europe and the Western politicians who had backed the Atlantic Alliance. It reinforced the message of the “peace” movement of the 1980s that the Soviet occupation was basically on a par with the American domination of Western Europe. Now that the Soviet domination has ended, West European public opinion wants America out as well. It is a sentiment they share with the Jihadists. It is a pity that Condoleezza Rice does not seem to realize how dangerous this growing anti-Americanism in Europe is. Paul Belien founded the Brussels-based think tank Centre for the New Europe, and acted as CNE’s first managing director and research director from 1994 to 2000, when he left to write his Ph.D. dissertation and homeschool his five children. He is the editor of the Flemish quarterly Secessie and the editor-in-chief of The Brussels Journal. His most recent book is A Throne in Brussels. Republished with permission of The Brussels Journal. Email Paul Belien George Weigel on his new book, the secularization of European culture and politics, and the nature of religious belief in America. George Weigel, a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., is the well-known biographer of the late Pope. In 1999 he wrote the international bestseller Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, which was widely translated. Weigel has just written a new book, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America and Politics Without God. The cathedral in the title is the Notre Dame in Paris and the cube the modern Great Arch of La Défense in the same city. The latter houses the Foundation for Human Rights, in accordance with the intention of the former French president François Mitterrand when he had the building constructed to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution of 1789.Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal interviewed George Weigel about his new book, in which he tackles what he calls “Europe’s problem.” According to Weigel, Europe is dying in the most literal sense: it is depopulating itself. Why is a continent that is richer, healthier and more secure than ever before failing to create the human future in the most elemental sense of creating successive generations? According to Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian, Europe’s problem has to do with the loss of the cult at the heart of the culture. Niall Ferguson writes about Weigel’s new book that it is “at once an elegy and a warning — an elegy for a venerable culture that is being effaced by a vacuous secularism, and a warning to Americans that their assumptions about a shared ‘Western civilization’ are fast becoming obsolete on the Eastern side of the Atlantic.” ***** Paul Belien: The title of your book — The Cube and the Cathedral — is a metaphor. Can you explain what these images stand for? George Weigel: The book began in my mind when I was in Paris in 1997. I visited the Great Arch of la Défense, this angular, rationalistic, stunning piece of contemporary design which imagines itself to be a human rights monument. Moreover I noticed that all the guidebooks boast that all of Notre Dame — tower, spire and all — would fit inside this cube. That popped a question into my mind: what culture is better able to provide the foundations for the human rights that this monument celebrates: the culture of the cube, rationalist, skeptical, relativist, secular, or the culture that produced the “holy unsaneness” of Notre Dame? I do not think the answer is necessarily an either/or proposition. It can be a both/and proposition as it is in the United States, as it was in Europe up until the past 40 years, until 1968 and the concerted attempt to create a Europe that is a genuinely secularized and, indeed, secularist public space. PB: In the book, however, you move back further in time, even to the First World War, to say where things went wrong in Europe. GW: I go back even further than that. I go back to the middle of the 19th century with what Henri de Lubac called “the drama of atheistic humanism.” I think you can make the case that the First World War was the first dramatic episode of the playing out in history of this utter forgetfulness of the God of the Bible and the moral reasoning that one learns in a Judeo-Christian world view. PB: What puzzles me is why the Americans, who are originally Europeans, are not infected by this mentality? When I read the book I get the impression that the cube for you is also a metaphor for Europe, while the cathedral, or the society with God still in a prominent place, can be seen as a metaphor for America. This is strange because the cube is the more modern building and the cathedral is a mediaeval building. So you might even argue that America is a more mediaeval culture than Europe. GW: Well, I did not intend it that way, because there are elements of the cube and the cathedral in both the United States and in Western Europe. Why has America not gone so far on this road? Because America was not founded against biblical religion. America was founded from biblical religion. America’s experience of democracy is democracy as the product of Christian culture. However, that is changing here too. If you read the New York Times and the Washington Post, the liberal media in general, or if you listen to Senate Democrats interrogating John Roberts for the Supreme Court you know that Europe is in America. The idea that the only public space safe for democracy, the only public space capable of civility, is a thoroughly secularized public space, this idea is present in the United States as well. But it is not dominant in the United States. What has happened in Western Europe since 1968 is that secularization has been transformed from a sociological datum to an ideology. This ideology was most manifestly clear in the bizarre argument over whether the preamble to the European Constitutional Treaty should acknowledge the Christian roots of European civilization. PB: One can also see the book as a metaphor of what is nowadays called the “red” versus the “blue” America. The “red” stands for the conservative, faith centered American culture and the “blue” is basically the more “European” America. You focus your book on Europe and you say that what happens in Europe is the logical result of secularization. The subtitle is Europe, America, and Politics Without God, so is the book also a warning for Americans? GW: No, there are certainly cube elements largely present in the United States. Moreover, this “blue America, red America” thing is a bit tiresome after a while, particularly since the good guys have the wrong color. “Red” America should be the Left, but that is an accident of an NBC electoral map of five years ago. There are at least two, probably even three, justices on the Supreme Court who would like to import into the United States, via a very strange interpretation of the Constitution, the kind of secularist mindset that I think has done such damage in Europe. That is a real problem here. On the other hand, it is not simply that America was founded differently. The United States is being replenished in a different way, in part because “red” America tends to have much larger families than “blue” America and also tends to transmit religious conjunction, and in part because the largest immigration into the United States, both legal and illegal, is Hispanic, which is to say Christian. It is confusedly diverse, but nonetheless Christian. Houston is now forty percent Hispanic, but it is still Christian. This is not Marseille or a place which is ten to fifteen per cent Islamic. PB: But then a title like “The Mosque and the Cathedral” might have been more topical, mightn’t it? GW: No, because I think it is unclear whether the Eurabia hypothesis is anything more than a hypothesis. What is killing Europe right now is not the Mosque, what is killing Europe and what I believe is most manifestly shown in its demographic rates, is a secularist cast of mind. It foreshortens people’s horizons of expectations of themselves and of the future so drastically that they do not even create the future in the most elementary sense. You cannot blame that on Islam. I think you can blame that on the cast of mind that expressed itself in the Habermas-Derrida manifesto that the EU must be a political community neutral among worldviews. First of all, this is an absurd statement. There is no room in Habermas or Derrida for a resurgence of fascism, so it is not a Europe “neutral among worldviews.” Secondly, there is a great hostility to the worldview of serious orthodox Christianity as there is to the world view of serious Aristotelianism where people believe they can get at the truth of things in a way that these guys believe is impossible. This is simply intolerance masquerading as radical tolerance. PB: I agree there is a demographic suicide but what do you say to the argument that it is not Europe that has committed suicide, but rather the Cathedral? I mean: it is Christianity and more in particular the Catholic Church that has actually committed suicide and abandoned the Europeans to these secularist tendencies. GW: The failure of the Church for the last 200 years in Western Europe is a very large part of this problem, a clinging to the old way of doing things, a failure to recognize arrangements compatible with a free church. I recognize that the history of church and state in Europe is far more complicated than the standard account. On the other hand, if you look at a figure like Pope Pius VII [r. 1800-1823] you will see that there was an opening to find an accommodation with the new political order that was not seized by his successors, Leo XII, Pius VIII, Gregory XVI and Pius IX. Hence, you ended up with this situation of maximum confrontation between the Church and the Novus Ordo which only began to be untangled with Leo XIII [r. 1878-1903] and was only finally untangled in the Second Vatican Council [1962-1965], at which point it was about one hundred years too late. Then you had this bizarre embrace of modernity in some interpretations of Vatican II at precisely the point where modernity was about to implode in the kind of irrationalism of the late 1960s and ’70s. PB: The phenomenon that America has not become as secularized as Europe is sometimes referred to as the “American exceptionalism.” Some might say that you owe this to the Protestant Evangelical churches, which are more fundamentalist, rather than Catholicism. If one looks at “red” America I often have the impression that what kept America sane and Christian is this fundamentalist [I use the term in its original meaning, to denote the more traditional beliefs of Christianity as opposed to modernism – pb] Protestantism rather than Catholicism. GW: Evangelical Protestantism is a very elastic term. PB: It is something specifically American. You do not have it in Europe. GW: But you do have it all over Latin America and Africa and parts of Asia. PB: That is true, and it is growing there because people are leaving the Catholic Church and are turning towards this more fundamentalist Christianity. GW: There is a kind of revolving door there. In Latin America people tend to go into these Evangelical churches and then ten years later come out and return to Catholicism. But, anyway, we are talking about North America here. The single biggest event that created the present religious, cultural, political dynamics of the United States took place on January 21, 1973. PB: Roe versus Wade [the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion]. GW: Exactly right. What did that do? It created a hitherto unimaginable alliance between Evangelical Protestants, many of whom were not sure the Catholics were Christians, and Catholics who thought that these were the people who brought you prohibition and other bizarre things, such as the Scopes trial. Suddenly these people found themselves together in the front trench of a culture war. I think what has evolved in the United States, providentially, accidentally, necessarily — I would say it is providential — is a kind of common Christian social ethic, not dissimilar to C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, that has done what a hundred years of ecumenical dialogue could not do: brought Evangelical Protestants and Catholics together in a kind of cobelligerency in the culture war. Now in the course of that, the more intellectually sophisticated part of the Evangelical world (and that is not a contradiction in terms — there are some very sophisticated people in this world) have discovered that Catholics through the natural law tradition have a method of making public arguments that cannot be accused of being sectarian and Catholics have a developed social ethic from the social doctrine of the 20th century popes that is very impressive to people who have a set of policy instincts but are not quite sure how all of this fits together into a coherent vision of the free and virtuous society. So, I think you have a circumstance in which in addition to this cobelligerency there has been a genuine crossfertilisation of ideas that has been beneficial to both parties. PB: And to what extent is the Christian character of America just a layer on the surface? Abortion figures and divorce rates are often higher in America than in certain European countries. GW: The divorce rates are better now than they were thirty years ago. American social welfare policy, crafted by “blue America” types, by “cube” people, did a great deal to deconstruct family life in the United States over a considerable period of time. I think there is a substantial reversal of these patterns everywhere, except among what sociologists would call the underclass in the United States, I mean the permanently out of the economic mainstream sector of society. This is a huge human tragedy. This is a part of society crying out for the kind of transformation of life that Christian faith in its Catholic or Evangelical form can bring to people. What recently happened in New Orleans was widely exaggerated by agenda driven media. Still, the simple fact is that there were 100,000 people who were incapable of basic civic responses. The first thing that the religious community should have been saying about this is not: “Where was the government?” The first thing the religious community says is: “How have we not dented this community, how have we not converted these people?” The reason why Evangelicalism has been successful in Latin America not only has to do with the more warm, fuzzy, emotive dimensions of that kind of Christianity and its worship, it also has to do with the fact that it changes behaviors. It pretty well changes male behavior. When men stop drinking their salaries, stop beating their wives, start saving money, work seriously, they suddenly find: “Hey, I am in the middle class all of a sudden.” That is a powerful reinforcement to the conversions. The Catholic church did this for immigrant populations in the US for 150 years. Most of the Catholics who came to the United States were what we would today call the underclass. It was the church, Catholic education, the network of Catholic social services, all of these ordered to empowering people, to getting people to be what the Catholic church is today: essentially the largest middle class and indeed upper middle class collection of practicing Catholics in the history of the church. That is what we need to rediscover in terms of the underclass in the US today. PB: Why did you actually write the book? For an American public I guess. GW: I wrote the book first of all because I am a transplanted European… PB: Like all Americans. GW: Well, not like all. PB: Like all “red” Americans. GW: No, I have some “red” Japanese American friends. In any event, I am a transplanted European who feels a great debt to the cultures and civilizations of Europe and wanted to ring an alarm bell. It happens that because of Witness to Hope I now have not simply an American audience but a global audience. The book will be translated in multiple European languages. French and Spanish are out. Italian, Polish and Portugese are coming. PB: So it is also a European audience that you want to reach? GW: Absolutely. The lecture out of which this book grew was a lecture three years ago which was called Europe’s Problem — and Ours because the problem of what Father Neuhaus 20 years ago called the “naked public square,” which is at the heart of this argument, is America’s problem too. It is harder to see here, because it has not completely captured the high culture and it has not at all captured the political culture which it manifestly has done in Europe. PB: What do you mean by the “high culture?” The intellectuals? GW: Yes. PB: Many are under the impression that the weird ideas Europeans have, also on the popular level, are being transplanted from America, from American pop culture, but also from American high culture, the American liberal media and academia. GW: We did not invent Habermas and Derrida. PB: No, I know, but the people of the Frankfurter Schule were Europeans who were invited to teach at American universities, and then these ideas returned to Europe. GW: The Frankfurter Schule, the post-modernist impulse which replaced the neo-marxist impulse, is pretty much a continental European invention, although it has its analogues over here, with people like Rorty. PB: Though the universities here… GW: Yes, but these are people talking to themselves. They do not represent America. The kids are far more conservative than the professoriat. This happens in school after school after school. I am going up to Princeton next week to give an opening lecture in a series on religion and world politics in the 21st century. The faculty will be appalled and the students will stand and applaud. Secondly, there is a whole parallel educational network in this country, as you know, that is not the Ivy League, that is not completely infested with this stuff. I think the real difference between America and Europe is that the post-modernist melange of skepticism, moral relativism, soft nihilism, has had such an impact in Europe because it gave people an intellectual excuse for the way they had already been living anyway. That melange of debonair nihilism has less attraction in America because people in the main do not live that way here. I am sure most Europeans are not aware that in the week after Hurricane Katrina the instinctive reaction of most Americans, except for CNN, CBS etc., was not: “Where is the government?” The instinctive reaction was: “What can I do?” You had tens of billions of dollars pouring in at the Red Cross, Catholic charities, all these things, people literally getting up and going down there, people opening their homes, their schools. If we are talking about cultural disparities I think that is pretty indicative. PB: And do you see any positive trends in Europe which might reverse this downhill road that we, Europeans, are on? GW: Yes, a number of them. PB: In Eastern Europe maybe. GW: No, not necessarily. Certainly the fact that you have an intact Catholic culture in Poland, and an arguably intact Catholic culture in Slovakia, as two parts of the new European Union. Poland is going to be a real player because Poland is a larger country than Spain. But that is not all. The Italian referendum of June on reproductive technology was the first time in 30 years that the “cube” trend did not sweep the field. What is even more important is that the church there, which is deeply involved in this campaign, did not make an argument from authority. It made a real public argument, explaining why this is bad for Italian culture, Italian society, Italian democracy. PB: That is the first time in decades that this happens. GW: They have done that, they finally are learning something. I had three Spaniards in here yesterday who I think are reasonably encouraged by the public expression of discontent with what is perhaps now the most radical attempt to recreate the public square. PB: Gay marriage. GW: Well, it is all of that. It is schools, gay marriage, and so forth and so on. And you look at those million kids in Cologne last August of whom 75 percent had to be European. You realize that 95 per cent of them have cell phones, almost a 100 percent of them computers. This is a network. This isn’t just an incidental thing any more and the linking together of this, you know, is a potentially important thing. I also have to believe along the via negativa that episodes like the Pim Fortuyn and the Theo van Gogh assassinations, the Madrid bombings, which had a different political effect immediately but might have a different long term effect, have given people reason to rethink the kind of mush-headed multiculturalism that is one dimension of this collapse of any sense of the integrity of one’s own culture. Whether all of this is going to come to a critical mass in time to reverse the demographic realities, which I think are fundamental, I do not know. PB: A reversal of the demographic trend will only have an impact twenty years from now. GW: The Eurabia question aside, no-one who can read a balance sheet can deny that Europe, Western Europe, is heading for a severe fiscal crisis. There is a real possibility that this fiscal crisis will lead to a profound social crisis. This is not good news. It is certainly not good news for Europe but it is absolutely not good news either for the United States. PB: One last question, that is a political question. The American government would like to have Turkey admitted into the European Union, while the Conservative forces in Europe are against it. What is your opinion on that? GW: It is a non-issue, because the EU is presently constituted as finished. The French and Dutch referendums marked a dramatic turning point. The question of Turkey was not a real world question for ten years anyway, it is even less of a real world question now. The American governmental view, which has been true of both the Republican and Democratic administrations — this is not something peculiar of the present Bush administration — is that Turkey has been in the main a faithful NATO ally, the EU is the political analogue to NATO, therefore Turkey should be allowed into the EU. My personal view is that Turkey in the EU would be the final concession that the EU is essentially a pragmatic arrangement for purposes of economics and some politics, but is in no sense the expression of a culture. As I have often said, only half-jokingly, “when the Turks change the name of their capital back to Constantinople then we can talk about this.” But I do think it is a non-issue, whatever bureaucratic wheels are grinding on in Brussels and elsewhere. PB: This “non-issue” is at the moment the hot political item all over Europe. GW: But that is an expression, if I may be so bold, of Europe’s terminal unseriousness. I mean, for Germans who cannot even come up with a government [this interview took place on October 6, 2005] at this point to be fretting about Turkey in the EU is simply ludicrous. In so far as the question of Turkey and the EU usefully raises the questions “What kind of Europe?” or “What is Europe?”, that is not a bad thing. But for a Europe that is careering towards fiscal and social crisis, that currently has not even an instrument of governance to manage the expansion, to be fretting about this is somewhere in the order of the bizarre it seems to me. Paul Belien founded the Brussels-based think tank Centre for the New Europe, and acted as CNE’s first managing director and research director from 1994 to 2000, when he left to write his Ph.D. dissertation and homeschool his five children. He is the editor of the Flemish quarterly Secessie and the editor-in-chief of The Brussels Journal. His most recent book is A Throne in Brussels. Republished with permission of The Brussels Journal. Order the book Email Paul Belien Friedrich Hayek used to warn for “the muddle of the middle.” That, sadly, is the situation Germany will find itself in during the next four years. [...] In the end Katrina might become a bigger disaster for Europe (and the rest of the world) than for America. [...] In a speech to the prestigious Mont Pelerin Society, Vaclav Klaus explained that the defeat of communism does not necessarily mean more freedom if new forms of statism are used to control people's lives. [...] Pope Benedict has argued that reason and humanism are at the very core of Christianity, and that Christianity is the true foundation of European culture and values. [...] It would ensure that West German voters get the conservative government they have been voting for, and force the East Germans to do something about their own future. [...] An interview with Richard Miniter on the War on Terror, the media's role in promoting terrorism, and the role of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. [...] Paul Belien interviews James Taranto and Rich Miniter on the Supreme Court, abortion, The Wall Street Journal, and the chances of Hillary in 2008. [...] |
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