Timothy Garton Ash: Decadent Europe

Timothy Garton Ash, in the Guardian (6-9-05)

[Mr. Ash is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author, most recently, of Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West. (April 2005)]

Contemplating the European Crisis (I think a capital C is called for) I find myself driven even to reading Toynbee. Not Polly Toynbee of the Guardian, whose work I always follow with the greatest pleasure, but her long-dead and largely forgotten ancestor, Arnold Toynbee, the philosophical historian of the rise and fall of civilisations.

For one plausible long-term interpretation of the chaotic reaction in Europe since the French non of May 29 is that these are the symptoms of a civilisation in decline, if not in decadence. How ludicrous that the prime minister of Luxembourg should insist, like some east European communist leader of old, that black is white and everything can therefore continue just as before. The government will dissolve the people, and elect another. How absurd that, confronted with the greatest popular challenge to the European project since its inception, France and Britain can think of nothing better than to face up for a vicious cross-channel squabble over their respective contributions to an EU budget that costs the average British taxpayer less than £3 a week. Like the Bourbons, our leaders have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

If I were Chinese I'd be laughing all the way to the bank. After the European centuries, from about 1500 to 1945, and the American century, from 1945 until some time in the first half of this one, the Asian century dawns on the horizon. As Tom Friedman of the New York Times acidly observes, while Europe is trying to achieve the 35-hour week, India is inventing the 35-hour day. Whatever our "knowledge-based" advantage, no economy can compete successfully on such terms. Things must change, if they are to remain the same....

...Of course, looked at from another viewpoint, liberal in a different sense, the very low birth rates in countries such as Spain, Italy and Germany are an expression of increased liberty: namely a woman's right to choose. But it's com mon sense that welfare states then need someone else to support so many pensioners. That someone is to hand: a young, vigorous, growing population just across the Mediterranean, eager to come and work here. But Europe is proving very bad at making Muslim immigrants feel at home. The Dutch nee vote was in significant part a vote against Muslim immigration, and the French non was in part against Turkey joining the EU.

It may not have escaped your attention that this analysis of European decadence bears a startling resemblance to that of American neoconservatives and anti-Europeans, against whose crude caricatures I have so often fought. To this I would say two things. First, American neocons would be idiots to gloat. Europe and America are two parts of one larger civilisation. If the old Europe on this side of the Atlantic goes down, it may help the new Europe on the other side of the Atlantic in short-term power relations, but it will be enormously damaging to US interests in the longer term.

Second, it's up to us to prove them wrong. Nothing I have darkly hinted at here is inevitable. Jeremiads are meant to be self-denying prophecies. The European project has many times moved forward precisely through and out of crisis. My formula, from Romain Rolland via Antonio Gramsci, is "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will". At a time when most columns in British and European newspapers are engaged in the familiar, admonitory rhetoric of "we should do this, we must do that", it can help to stand back and, with the pessimism of the intellect, calmly contemplate the abyss. But then, after a period of reflection, we should act. Give yourself a treat: prove a neocon wrong.