By Mark Hemingway
Friday, March 17, 2017
Americans don’t think much about Europe, let alone what
does or does not constitute the European ideal. Mostly this is a matter of
geographic realities, but in his new book, The
End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age journalist
James Kirchick observes that when these matters do come up, American concern
about Europe often devolves into contempt.
“There is a tendency among American policy makers and
pundits, particularly those on the right, to hold up their collective nose at
Europe,” he writes. “They shudder at Europeans’ deference to the state, their
willingness to turn over so much of their incomes to the government, their
limits on free speech, and their reluctance to pay for militaries, never mind
use them. So widespread and deeply held is this conception in some quarters
that ‘Europe’ has become a dirty word in American political discourse,
shorthand for a sort of feeble collectivist impulse. Americans complain that
Europeans are ‘free-riders’ whose lavish social programs are possible only
through the defense umbrella thanklessly subsidized by American taxpayers.”
These criticisms of Europe aren’t completely off-base,
but with rise of a populist-driven “America First” foreign policy they are
increasingly being used to justify American disengagement from Europe. Further,
Brexit and Europe’s own populist movements suggest Europe itself is on the
verge of disengaging from a host of formal and informal economic and security
alliances that have been built up over decades.
Unless you’re Pat Buchanan, you have to concede that
there have been at least two rather notable examples in the last century where
the United States ignoring mounting intra-European tensions has literally blown
up in American faces. Looking at current continental tensions, it would be the
height of foolishness to assume that, to paraphrase a quintessentially American
tourist slogan, what happens in Europe stays in Europe.
The key question is how threatening Europe’s current
problems are. Kirchick is well-qualified to make an assessment. He’s former
reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and The End of Europe consists of a series of well-researched sketches
of various European hot spots, augmented by his on-the-ground reporting. Early
on in The End of Europe Kirchick warns,
“In some ways, the region’s geopolitical turmoil evokes the perilous 1930s.”
Pax Europaea
The End of Europe
is a pretty stark departure from the relatively recent consensus on Europe.
Supposedly, the fall of communism and the rise of the European Union meant Pax
Europaea far into the future. In fact, Kirchick notes his book is something of
a corrective to a number of recent tomes on Europe. In 2005, the director of
the European Council on Foreign Relations, Mark Leonard, “boasted that ‘Europe,
quietly, has rediscovered within its foundations a revolutionary model for the
future and an alternative to American hard power’ in the unfortunately titled Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century.”
This rose-colored thinking has also had a direct
influence on foreign policy in the White House: “In 2002, Charles Kupchan,
director of European affairs on the National Security Councils of both Bill
Clinton and Barack Obama, published The
End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the
Twenty-First Century. America’s chief rival for global influence, Kupchan
prophesied, would not be China, but ‘an integrating Europe that is rising as a
counterweight to the United States.’”
It’s now obvious that this optimism was wholly
unwarranted. In its place, Kirchick offers a useful frame for thinking about
the cultural and security conflicts that are likely to rend Europe until the
underlying issues are resolved:
Imagine the continent on an x-y
axis. The vertical dividing line, running roughly ‘from Stettin to Trieste’ as
Winston Churchill described the Iron Curtain, divides an Eastern Europe
demanding a harder line against Russia from a Western Europe desiring
accommodation. The eastern half also to Germany’s insistence that Europe absorb
well over a million African and Middle Eastern migrants. The horizontal
dividing line pits the budget-conscious nations of Europe’s north against the
more prodigal economies of its south. Britain, more detached from continental
affairs than at any time since it joined the European Economic Community (the
EU’s precursor) in 1973, scarcely fit into the diagram, even before voting to
leave the EU in June 2016.
Russia, Russia,
Russia
Obviously, Europe’s central security problem—and by
extension the source of many other European problems—is Russia. Unlike the
issues of Europe writ large, Russia is an issue that Americans have put a lot
of thought into as of late. However, given the hysteria and partisan political
baggage that has accompanied this concern, it’s an open question as to whether
this sudden concern about Russia’s scheming against the West has been terribly
productive.
Kirchick’s extensive first chapter on Russia is, once again,
a useful corrective. If you’re familiar at all with Kirchick’s prolific byline,
you know Kirchick has been a strident critic of President Trump since the
beginning. True to form, he pauses here to excoriate Trump for his handling of
Russia, relating to everything from his rhetoric undermining NATO to Trump’s
assent to letting Russia seize Crimea. (One senses Kirchick has more to say,
but at the time he was writing the book the thought of the inspiration for the
villain in Back to the Future II
becoming leader of the free world still seemed like a very unlikely
possibility.)
But while criticism of Trump and his attitude toward
Russia is hardly in short supply, Kirchick’s chapter is largely focused on the
damning missteps the Obama administration made with regard to Russia. Obama
blunders here continue to be largely ignored. As Obama was entering office,
Central and Eastern European leaders—including those who know a thing or two
about Russian agression, such as former Czech and Polish presidents Vaclav Havel
and Lech Walesa—published an open letter to President Obama warning “Russia is
back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century
tactics and methods.”
Nonetheless, Obama ignored those who knew better and
moved full steam ahead with plans to placate Russia. The administration’s
incompetent “Russian Reset” came just six months after the invasion of Georgia,
for crying out loud. The Snowden affair—and by now, anyone who doesn’t think
Snowden is actively abetted by Russia needs to have his head examined—should
have made it clear that Russia’s ambitions and skullduggery were also directed
at America, and more specifically, cleaving America from its allies in Europe.
In fact, later in the eye-opening chapter on Germany, Kirchick explains at
length how the revelations that America was spying on the German chancellor did
incredible harm to American and German relations, and turned Snowden into
something of a folk hero in Germany.
Yet the absurdly conciliatory attitude toward Russia continued
very nearly to the end of the Obama administration. This was demonstrated most
famously by Obama’s retort in the 2012 debate against Romney, who had quite
correctly warned of the Russian threat: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for
their foreign policy back.” By the time Russia invaded Crimea, Kirchick notes
that Obama’s response—“You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in
nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up
pretext”—betrayed an obdurate lack of self-awareness. If only Obama had been
warned of Russia’s nineteenth-century mindset…
Even with the first hostile land grab in Europe since
World War II and Russia zig-zagging over Obama’s red lines in Syria while
400,000 died, it took the hacking of Democratic Party turnspit John Podesta and
Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss for Obama to start acting tough. By then he
was on his way out the White House door, and a new president who once openly
wondered if Putin will “become my new best friend” was on his way in.
Moving Backwards
Obviously, this is a book on Europe, and accordingly
there’s so much more here than just Russia. Kirchick’s reporting on much of
what’s going on in pockets of Europe will likely be both unfamiliar and
horrifying to American readers. Other topics include how influential
ethno-nationalists in Hungary are trying to whitewash the country’s Nazi
complicity, and the alarming rise of anti-Semitism in France, where you have to
get patted down whenever you enter a synagogue.
There are good surveys of the underpinnings of Brexit and
the failure of the European Union to deal with the problems created by mass
Islamic migration into the continent. Finally, more good reporting from Greece,
where the economic crises and anti-capitalist sentiment are leading to yet more
political revolt, and he details in depth the tense security situation in the
Ukraine, which Kirchick calls “the new West Berlin.”
There’s so much ground to cover, that Kirchick wisely
approaches all of this with a reporter’s eye. While he’s not one to lack
opinions, Kirchick doesn’t pontificate excessively, as the concerns about
creeping illiberalism mostly speak for themselves. That said, the occasional
generalization does slip through. Kirchick is critical of certain realist approaches
to Europe, and at a time when we desperately need to square the circle of the
apparent hankering for an “America First” foreign policy with the obvious need
to find smart ways to assert American power in Europe, this could turn off some
of the very readers most in need of considering Kirchick’s case.
Further, because Kirchick’s book is focused on relatively
recent events and is reported, at times there is a desire for a deeper
background on the big-picture causes of modern Europe’s woes—Christopher
Caldwell’s amazingly prescient Reflections
on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West would make an
excellent companion volume to better understand the roots of Europe’s political
upheaval. But this is hardly a criticism of Kirchick’s book, because
shoehorning a comprehensive topic like modern Europe into a single volume is
always difficult and The End of Europe
does what it does very well.
While reading the book there’s a constant, gnawing sense
that Europe is moving culturally and politically backwards. “Europe’s manifold
crises collectively represent a crisis of liberalism,” Kirchick writes. “As the
memory of World War II, the Holocaust, and the gulag fades, so too does
antipathy to the illiberal ideologies that spawned Europe’s past horrors.” He
further warns in the conclusion that, “Where Europe once had men and women like
Havel, Kohl, Thatcher, Mitterand, and Walesa, today the likes of Zeman, Corbyn,
Orbán, Kaczynski, and Le Pen are ascendant. Belief in joint prosperity and the
rejection of zero-sum politics—necessary precursors to Europe’s unprecedented
peace and prosperity—are losing adherents.”
Indeed, Europe appears to be on the precipice of swapping
out a bunch of feckless liberals-in-name-only for a new set of nationalist
populist leaders, and the last time Europe made this trade, to say things did
not turn out well might be the literal understatement of the century. It’s not
clear whether this new breed of populists will prove to be as threatening as
they’re made out to be, but the situation is alarming enough that by the time
readers finish The End of Europe
Kirchick’s suggestion that the situation “evokes the perilous 1930s” doesn’t
carry one whiff of hyperbole.
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