Walter Laqueur: Europe's Decline is No Cause for Schadenfreude
Europe used to be, within the living memory of many of us, the cockpit of world power, prosperity and prestige. Today it is raw material for an ouija board. Predictions about Europe’s future range from its impending suicide to its emergence as a unified, leading economic and political superpower. Of late most predictions, especially those coming out of Europe, have been on the dour and pessimistic side. So it is refreshing to come across a book like Steven Hill’s Europe’s Promise, which reaffirms the earlier optimistic take: The European model is not only superior to the American in almost every possible way, but also, as its subtitle proclaims, the world’s “best hope in an insecure age.” According to Hill, Europe’s vastly superior stores of smart power will even allow it to solve the problem of the Iranian bomb....
It is not, therefore, unfair to ask what pieces of Europe’s “promise” should America and others look to for guidance? To Spain’s nearly 20 percent unemployment rate? To Italy’s surreal political melodramas under Silvio Berlusconi? To near bankrupt Greece, Portugal or Ireland? To the para-democratic Balkans or still struggling Eastern Europe? Surely not to Britain, which does not belong to the Eurozone. That seems to leave us with perhaps France and Germany, but their present leaders wouldn’t recommend their own present models for their want of far-reaching reforms. There remains Scandinavia, of course, but Sweden, the biggest northern country, has fallen back substantially on the prosperity index. Norway has been doing well; its per capita average income is now $53,000, and it has the lowest murder rate in the world. But there are problems with generalizing the Norwegian model. What works in a country of only 4.8 million inhabitants is not necessarily applicable to a country of 300 million. Besides, Norway has the special advantage of North Sea oil, and it isn’t even a member of the European Union. Maybe a more accurate subtitle for Mr. Hill’s book would be “Why the Danish and Norwegian ways are the best hope in a secure age.”
I am perhaps being unfair. It may be too easy to ridicule Euro-optimists these days, especially ones whose writing resembles the prospectuses of travel agencies recommending luxury itineraries at cut-rate prices than to serious political description and analysis. The Europeanists have gotten themselves into a strange fix. They have expanded their Union to the point of decision-making paralysis but would consider expanding still further. They cannot deepen the Union, lest residual memories of democratic accountability roil Europe’s individual national souls. But the Union may have to be deepened, for, as the Belgian politician Leo Tindemans noted in a famous report on the future of Europe more than thirty years ago—a house half finished will not last. As Greece (among others) has shown, economic union without considerably more political union will not work. The European Union has established new central offices but dare not staff them adequately. They have created a common currency and a bank to manage it but not the political counterpart to steady it in rough weather. The liberal immigration protocols they have enacted are stimulating a widespread anti-immigrant backlash, yet the demographic collapse of the native populations demand immigration to keep economies from collapsing as well. In nearly every sense, then, the European model, and the European promise with it, is locked in a “crisis of wishing.” The further the Europeanists try to go forward, the harder it is for them to move anywhere at all....
The postwar generation of European elites aimed to create more democratic societies. They wanted to reduce the extremes of wealth and poverty and provide essential social services in a way that prewar governments had not. They wanted to do all this not just because they believed it was morally right, but because they saw social equity as a way to temper the anger and frustrations that lead to violence and ultimately to war. They had had quite enough of war.
For several decades, many West European countries nearly achieved these aims, and they had every reason to be proud of that fact. The reaction to this accomplishment in some circles in the United States, which fell under the Cold War-induced fear of “socialism”, bordered on the hysterical. Otto von Bismarck, the godfather of the welfare state, was not, after all, an extreme socialist. The usual line in the United States in those days was that Americans did not want to levy the extravagantly high taxes necessary to pay for such achievements, or imperil liberty by financing the activities of a more activist state.
I for one never understood why the United States “could not afford”, as it was often phrased, the benefits of the so-called European welfare state, since America, richer than Europe, could have financed them at a considerably lower tax rate. To some extent that is what eventually happened anyway in the late 1960s and 1970s, but it happened unevenly. The United States ended up spending almost 17.3 percent of its GNP on its health services, yet could not deliver care as comprehensive and equal in quality as that of France, which, like most other European countries, spends only about half that percentage. Extravagance and inefficiency are, one has to admit, relative and even fungible terms. And did a somewhat less activist state better preserve American liberty than would otherwise have been the case? Did more activist European states stifle democracy? These are very hard cases to make....
All of this is self-evident; but how do we explain it? Several reasons come to mind. For one thing, Europe’s decline reflects the changing global balance of power. Europe’s prior source of strength, its economy, is no longer so vibrant. Europe will recover to a certain extent, but for demographic reasons if for no others it will not recover its former leading position. Europe’s weakness also stems from its energy dependence on Russia and the Middle East, and from social unrest linked to large numbers of unassimilated immigrants.
Immigration may be necessary to keep European economies going and its welfare states financed, but it causes political tensions. The decisive issue is not even whether European cities will have a Muslim majority thirty years from now, but whether the immigrants will be integrated, whether they will contribute to the culture, competitiveness and general strength of their adopted countries as earlier waves of immigrants did. Integration will take place in the long run; predictions of Eurabia are, I think, exaggerated. But it will take at least a few generations and the strain of mutual adaptation will affect European foreign policies in the meantime....
Europe hasn’t even been very good at pretending that it is serious about a common European foreign and defense policy. If it were, it would have chosen some politicians of international renown to give the new set-up the appearance of importance. Instead, the wizards behind the curtain chose two unknowns who lack both experience and reputation: the British Baroness Lady Cathy Ashton, who began her political career with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1977–83 (embarrassing questions arose during this period about the financial aid given to this group by the Soviet government); and Herman van Rompuy, a former Belgian Prime Minister who has left even most Belgians impressionless. Their welcome has not been enthusiastic: One widely cited source called them “garden gnomes.” It would be churlish for me to comment further on their qualifications....
Some will smile at Europe’s comeuppance. Oh, how the braggarts have been brought low, the insufferably smug do-gooders put in their place. But Schadenfreude would be unwarranted, especially coming from Americans. It is not as if there were no need for a world power that expresses European values and validates the European aspirations and achievements of the past half century. The hopeful assertions of Kishore Mahbubani and others about the loss of Western moral authority and the ascendancy of Eastern leadership seem a little premature, or we should in any event hope so. New Asia might be more efficient than old Europe for the time being, but as for moral values, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s feelings, expressed some 150 years ago, still seem closer to reality: “Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.”