The European Dream

By Douglas Murray

Thursday, February 03, 2022

 

When I first received this book I must confess to having done a slight double take. David Harsanyi is of course well known to readers of National Review. But when I read the subtitle of his new book my first thought was “Who on earth argues otherwise?” Is there really anybody in America who believes that the ideas and customs of modern Europe are to be imitated on this side of the Atlantic? That the European continent’s welfare system, integration system (or lack thereof), and other policy jewels should be replicated in America?

 

I was too optimistic. As Harsanyi shows, there are indeed a large number of politicians, policy professionals, and journalists in America who routinely look to Europe for the answers to American problems. Pete Buttigieg, for instance, while running in the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries in 2020, claimed, “Last time I checked, the list of countries to live out the American dream — in other words, to be born at the bottom and come out at the top — we’re not even in the top ten. The No. 1 place to live out the American dream right now is Denmark.” Buttigieg turns out to be just one of many.

 

There is a small quibble that must be inserted at this point. Which is that most forms of Europhilia are, as Harsanyi knows, more commonly the related affliction of Scandiphilia. Which is quite as common in Europe. This is the condition by which the small, sparsely populated, and highly uncommon Scandinavian countries are constantly looked to for the provision of answers for problems in far larger, more densely populated, and completely dissimilar societies. In recent years Scandinavia has been seen to provide the answer to everything from how to feel cozy (“hygge,” thank you, Denmark) to how to escape the coronavirus (see especially Sweden). It is no surprise that the Europhiles cited by Harsanyi invoke Scandinavian options so constantly. Much though there is to be said for the Mediterranean countries, almost no one has ever cited them as models of economic prudence or organizational genius.

 

Harsanyi uses his book to lay out a number of well-supported claims. Some of the of the ground covered is by now fairly familiar, though always presented with engaging facts and examples. The author looks at the way in which Europe has failed in its migration policies, its efforts at integration, and its attempts to provide a greater sense of belonging than the nation-state was able to offer. He is especially acute on the way in which a certain type of American leftist seems to believe that America can improve its health care by looking to various of the European “welfare state” models. There is much dark fun to be had in these claims, not least by highlighting the problems that exist in Britain’s National Health Service. Often described in Britain, to this day, as the envy of the world, it is a health service so enviable that absolutely no one has copied it. As I have joked elsewhere, the claim that the NHS is the “envy of the world” is correct only if you insert the word “third” before “world.”

 

Still, it provides an allure for the type of American always seeking to find remedies elsewhere for America’s ailments. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in 2009, “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.” Ah, to be able to write with the certainty of the Krug-meister. As Harsanyi says, prior to the pandemic the total number of people awaiting surgeries on the NHS stood at 4.4 million. The NHS itself admitted in February 2020 that the number of patients waiting more than 18 weeks for a treatment referral stood at almost three-quarters of a million people.

 

One problem that Britain and Europe both suffer from today is a challenge that Angela Merkel baldly spelled out in an interview with the Financial Times (“yesterday’s news, tomorrow, in a British accent”) in 2012. Back then the chancellor of Germany said, “If Europe today accounts for just over 7 percent of the world’s population, produces around 25 percent of global GDP, and has to finance 50 percent of global social spending, then it’s obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life.” There has been zero evidence in the years since then that either Frau Merkel or any of her European counterparts has come up with a set of policies to face up to this stark reality.

 

That brings me to another claim Harsanyi devotes one of his chapters to: the lack of innovation in Europe. Take the spread of unicorns around the world (that is, start-ups that currently have a valuation of over $1 billion). A recent Wall Street Journal study found that while in the United States there are now 97 such start-ups, the whole of Europe is home to just 14. Harsanyi sees this as in part a result of specific legislation and incentives on the two continents. But he also sees it as an expression of will. As he says, while a recent World Values Survey found that 70 percent of Americans believe that the poor can escape poverty if they work hard enough, just 35 percent of Europeans share this view. There is a certain European fatalism in this view, for sure. But it is a fatalism that comes from experience: the result of high-tax, high-inflation economies, of a kind America is also now trying out, in which those with money spend their time trying to keep their money, and those who wish to make money find it ever harder to accrue it. There is a book in this subject alone, but Harsanyi covers all the major ground with aplomb.

 

Only occasionally does one find points of fruitful disagreement. For instance, in his chapter “Thought Police,” on restrictions to free speech in Europe, Harsanyi goes into (among much else) the issue of digital control, specifically at one stage the European Court of Justice’s “right to be forgotten” law. This is the means by which European citizens can apply to have articles about themselves removed from the Internet. It is a complex subject, and the law has certainly been misused, as Harsanyi shows. But it is also a subject that requires greater consideration in all our societies. The Internet has changed everything. And as it happens, I know some pretty grizzled tabloid hacks in the U.K. who (like me) think that there is something in the European law. Which is not a sentence you will catch me writing often. There is something not just unusual but cruel about the Internet’s ability to remember perhaps a single aspect of a person’s life (especially when it is a record of someone with otherwise absolutely no public profile) and to spin their whole life and all career options through this one factoid. It seems to me that societies do need to find some means to forget as well as forgive, and that the European Court’s effort is a start at something that we should all consider.

 

Elsewhere Harsanyi enters into what, as I say, is fairly well-covered terrain. Though again I would find a few points to contest. He seems to think that America’s traditions of free speech, for instance, set it up for a better course than Europe in the years ahead. But I would just notice that in the last couple of years it is not politicians, philosophers, or academics from France who have failed to stand up for their traditions, including their right to respect their own history and philosophical inheritance. It is Americans who have allowed these traditions not just to wither but to be assaulted with almost no opposition or defense. Indeed, so bad have modern American assaults on free thought and inquiry become that it is French politicians of Left and Right as well as French thinkers, journalists, and academics who have said that they must resist the intrusion of American thought into the fields of the French Academy and more. What an indictment it is of America today that France should see the need to cut itself off from American cultural influence in such a fashion. And not France alone.

 

The thrust of Harsanyi’s thesis is admirably argued and backed up. But the full-throatedness of its attack does provoke me to a word of praise for the old continent. Which is that whether or not there is still life in it, there is certainly still a good life in it. Many Americans recognize this, and recognize that while they may not envy some of the extremes to which Europeans have been prone, nevertheless there is much about the life of the Continent that even the most ardent Atlanticist must admire. With all the challenges that America is now facing from within, I came away from Harsanyi’s work reflecting (not for the first time) that those islands in the middle of the Atlantic, the Azores, ought by rights to be the perfect place to live out one’s days.