By Luke Thompson
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
President Trump’s first trip abroad has received mixed
reviews. His turn through the Middle East went well, yet for all the success of
the trip’s opening days, its back half disappointed. After a lackluster meeting
with Pope Francis in Rome, the president buffaloed through a series of tense
meetings under the aegis of NATO and later the G7. He blustered about
everything from German automotive manufacturing to the Paris climate accords,
and his European counterparts were happy enough to score cheap domestic
political points by returning the favor. Newly elected French president
Emmanuel Macron described photo-op handshakes like a veteran of gladiatorial
combat. The parliamentary heads of the Nordic states took a photograph holding
a soccer ball, a seeming send-up of the glowing orb featured at the launch of
Saudi Arabia’s new Global Center for Combating Extremism.
Yet the big news came from German chancellor Angela
Merkel. At a political event for her national party’s Bavarian counterpart,
Merkel tossed back a liter of beer and suggested that “the times when we could
completely rely on others are a bit over. I have experienced this in the last
days. . . . That is why I can only say that Europeans must really take our fate
into our own hands.”
This was an epochal declaration, according to the liberal
corners of the American Internet, an end of the transatlantic alliance, an
unprecedented break from the past! Never mind that Merkel’s musing pales in
comparison with that of Western European rhetoric from 2004 through 2008. Lest
we forget, Gerhard Schröder insinuated that President Bush’s proclivity to pray
on weighty matters meant the leader of the free world was effectively a Manichean
madman.
Indeed, far from speaking chiefly of America’s
reliability, Merkel was speaking to a decidedly European, and specifically
German, audience. That audience remains cognitively stunted by its persistent
mythologizing of the European Union’s purpose, a delusion perpetuated by the
unhealthy interpenetration of the continent’s governing elite by its
intellectually desiccated academy.
From the founding of the European Coal and Steel
Community in 1952 through New Year’s Day of 1995, the European project expanded
slowly, deliberately, and pragmatically. The original six nations — the Benelux
countries, West Germany, France, and Italy — were slow to add members. Denmark,
Ireland, and the United Kingdom joined on New Year’s Day 1973. Greece came
aboard eight years to the day thereafter. Portugal and Spain joined together,
again on New Year’s Day, in 1986. Austria, Finland, and Sweden followed suit
exactly nine years later.
From the vista of early 1995, the EU made a great deal of
sense. The Soviet Union was dead. Germany was reunified and rapidly disarming.
The project of decolonization was nearly complete. Spanish democracy, a
close-run thing as recently as 1981, had finally taken hold. The EU’s member
states had comparatively robust economies and reasonably effective
institutions.
True, the Mediterranean countries faced structural
challenges to their economies and Italy was (and is) Italy. But tourism
promoted by the free movement of peoples, plus northern Italy’s robust
manufacturing sector, suggested that these were fixable problems within the single currency. For those
countries unwilling to join the euro, so be it: Accommodations could be made.
Here was Western Europe post–Cold War, prosperous, shrouded in the American
security guarantee, and arguably set on a common mission.
The invasion of Iraq ended these salad days. The European
project went off the rails.
As the American occupation degenerated into a
Mesopotamian mire, many in the European elite decided that by launching a
preemptive war and snubbing the international order in the process, America had
forfeited its claim to be the shepherd of liberal democracy. The European
project, in the Eurocratic mind, could become the new vanguard of Western
values. People wrote books with retrospectively risible titles like “The United
States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy” and
“Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century.” It was a heady time, and a foolish one.
Europe’s leaders forgot that the EU began, and in the
hearts of its citizens remained, the most pragmatic of entities. It was the
coal-and-steel trading bloc still. Francs and deutschmarks, lira and pesetas,
could be traded in for euros — that was just money. But the sense of Europe as
a single entity with a common mission had not penetrated beneath the ranks of
the Brussels set. There was no memory, no community, no mission in the popular
European imagination.
Yet to the Eurocracy, Iraq opened the door to an idea of
Europe bigger than commerce and beyond postwar pragmatism. The EU, in their
minds, could become something more than political. It could become something
historical, even metaphysical. This led in short order to the hasty, foolhardy
eastward expansion of the EU, into the post-Soviet landscape of backward
economies and parchment-barrier institutions.
On May Day, 2004, the EU admitted Cyprus, the Czech
Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and
Slovenia. Bulgaria and Croatia joined less than three years later.
Amid this institutional race east, a mass migration of
labor headed west. The arrival of Eastern European workers en masse in Western
European capitals gave conspicuous lie to the twin myths of economic
interdependence and continental solidarity. At a structural level the wild lust
for an eastward Manifest Destiny undermined the EU. It destabilized the single
currency, rent social trust between and within the countries of Western Europe,
and inspired Brussels to ignore referendum defeat after referendum defeat.
Arguably, Brexit was born that day in 2004.
The belief that Europe could be a historical vessel of
liberal democracy found special succor in the corridors of German academe,
especially in Jürgen Habermas’s account of liberal democracy. Habermas,
Germany’s most prominent intellectual, shrugged off his Marxist education and
embraced liberal democracy. Yet unlike the American philosopher John Rawls, who
tried (and failed) to craft a new theory of the social contract, Habermas’s
account flattens into empty process. Lacking a coherent theory of human wants
and needs, of passions and interests, Habermas reduced liberal democracy to
“intersubjective rationality.” Instead of the rights of man, or even the
prudent republican checking of faction with faction, liberal democracy became
merely people reasoning together. As a result, liberalism ceased to be an
ideology of the individualist and becomes an ideology of conversationalist.
Conversation is all good and well, make no mistake. We
could use more of it in America these days. But conversation glosses over the
institutions of the state, the hard facts of material interest, and the
difficult but necessary work of counting noses and votes. Moreover, it presumes
that politics can be separated from the animal spirits that move everyday
citizens to expend their time and energy in the pursuit of political ends. It
underrates the extent to which politics, like athletic fandom, is about
enthusiastic, participatory tribalism. Intersubjective rationality cannot
account for home-court advantage.
Habermas especially influenced the debate over Europe’s
future thanks to the deep intertwining of Germany’s political class and its
moribund academic elite. At a grubby level, this means many German politicians
get outed as plagiarists when their hollow dissertations come under the
microscope. At a more profound level, it means that many German politicos get
indoctrinated into Habermasian liberalism. Combine a hunger for history with
intersubjective rationality, and one can ignore popular rejection of a sweeping
program. The conversation must go on.
The Merkel statement should be seen in this light. Many
in the German political elite long for a world without American leadership,
never mind that anything that splits the European bloc will allow Russia to
pick the Western European countries apart through bilateral energy
negotiations. Merkel was giving voice to those instincts — those animal spirits
invisible to Habermas — but she was not fully embracing them. For all the
ballyhooing around her statement, Merkel ultimately sounded a cautious note.
She flattered the abiding desire among the German political class to be heroes
of liberal democracy and charge headlong into the future as moral and
historical agents. Yet compared with 2004, it could have been worse. After all,
Merkel hedged her bets with a fist full of qualifiers.
America gains little from overreacting to Merkel’s
statement, turning her words into a self-fulfilling prophecy. We would do well,
however, to remember that the Europeans cannot always be trusted to act in
their own best interests. That, if nothing else, justifies maintaining a
transatlantic order that gives us the final say.
