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The End of Europe?
Some of you told me they other day you’d prefer me to write more about Europe and less about Trump. Since I’ve got thousands of words of notes on my computer about Europe, I’ll try to oblige, although of course it’s impossible to write about the former without noting the latter’s effect upon it.
Our podcast guest the other day was Jamie Kirchick, the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. As it happens, I’d just published a review of his book in National Review. The subject of his book is very similar to the one I’m writing, so unsurprisingly, I found it thought-provoking; in fact, I found it essay-provoking; I ended up writing a chapter-length response to it. Of course, National Review couldn’t run a 5,000-word review. They ran what they thought were the best 1,800 words. (Mike Potemra, the book section editor, did a great job of choosing them.)
But as a result, some of the points I made in the review had to stand as assertions, rather than full arguments. Since one of our members asked about it, I decided to publish the original review. You can read the whole thing here:
Journalist James Kirchick’s first book is about Europe, not America, but throughout the reader will sense that it rests upon unvoiced axioms about America and its role in the world. These are axioms upon which no argument can rest confidently in the age of Donald Trump. As a consequence, although the book contains no obvious anachronisms, it feels as if it was written in another era, for a reader who no longer exists.
Kirchick was based in Prague and Berlin for much of the past decade, sending dispatches back to America about Europe and the former Soviet Union. During most of those years I did the same thing from Istanbul and Paris. Every writer imagines his readers; Kirchick’s imaginary readers seem to be much like mine. Call them Postwar Americans. Americans who feel it important to take a lively interest in the rest of the world, ones who are familiar, roughly, with the history of the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, ones who instinctively feel the lessons of these catastrophes. Americans who elected such presidents as Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush; who understood that the relative global order in which Americans flourished for some seventy years did not emerge in sua sponte but was created, deliberately, by great postwar statesmen and maintained by American power, hard and soft.
The United States was at the center of a system designed to promote peaceful trade among reasonably decent and democratic people, and for the most part, it did. Those readers knew this system to be imperfect, but better than the alternatives. And they believed – wrongly, as it happened – that their country was sufficiently exceptional that such things as happened in Europe could not happen to them.
To the extent spectral qualities may be assigned to Donald Trump, there is a specter haunting this book …
I can only sympathize with Kirchick. I assume he wrote much of it well before Trump’s nomination, no less his election. I’m in the same boat. None of my theories about Europe, America, history, politics, or the world quite make sense in light of Trump; it seems I predicated them all on a massive initial error: the idea that America was too exceptional to fall victim to Europe’s pathologies. What does it mean that this is untrue?
I don’t know, and I’m no closer to knowing having read Kirchick’s book. But that’s not a fair criticism of it; it doesn’t purport to answer that question, and it doesn’t obviate his observations about the malignity of these trends in Europe. Still, the suppressed premise of the book is that these are exclusively European pathologies, and that suppressed premise is wrong. I sensed that a frantic, last-minute round of revisions and skillful editing brought the book largely up-to-date, but only superficially. The thing has a what-universe-are-you-living-in-Jamie quality.
Take the chapter about Germany. Much of it is devoted to the fallout of the Snowden revelations and the fit Germans pitched upon learning that Americans spy on them. Kirchick tells them to grow up: Everyone spies. What’s more, Germany needs to be spied upon, he argues, for Russia “continues to penetrate German politics, industry, media, intelligence, and armed forces.” Some German politicians, he notes, are particularly dodgy; Gerhard Schröder, for example, in 2004 declared Vladimir Putin “a flawless democrat,” and backed a loan guarantee for the Kremlin-backed gas pipeline Nord Stream. He subsequently took a post as chairman of the pipeline’s shareholders’ committee. That’s dodgy indeed. The “most concerning” aspect of the Nord Stream affair, Kirchick concludes, is that “Nord Stream puts the perceived national interest of Germany before solidarity with its democratic NATO and EU allies to the east by allowing Russia to restrict gas supplies to Eastern Europe while causing no pain to Western Europe.”
I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. Kirchick wrote that chapter for the reading audience I always thought I knew, people who didn’t need to be told why it’s a problem, big league, if Germany sells out its neighbors to the Russians, Rapallo-style. He continues in that vein: “When it comes to presenting a united front against Russian aggression and subversion, Germany’s Social Democrats are one of Europe’s weakest links.” He earnestly catalogues their flaws: “Signing a deal with an extortionist Russian energy concern and then taking a job on its board, lauding Vladimir Putin as a ‘flawless democrat,’ garlanding those who facilitate the exposure of America’s national security secrets, attacking NATO as a bunch of ‘warmongers’—such is the recent foreign policy record of German Social Democracy.” He assumes his readers won’t need to be told why this record is disturbing. But as we know now, they will. Germans, he continues, have taken to the streets to protest TTIP, their minds addled by hysteria, economic illiteracy, and recrudescent nationalism, so the NSA, he concludes, would be remiss not to spy on them. (We can expect to hear variants on this argument again and again in the coming days, thanks to the latest Putinleaks.)
I do understand: the book was due, the advance was paid, and you can’t call your publisher to say, “It seems we put Donald Trump in the Oval Office, and nothing I ever thought about anything makes any sense anymore. Let’s just throw this whole book out.” I admire Kirchick’s professionalism in plowing on as if the whole thing never happened. The show must go on.
And on it goes. He offers an entirely accurate account of the mendacity and bad faith of the charlatans who broke the United Kingdom, particularly Nigel Farage. “Farage’s sympathy for the Kremlin view of the world is long-standing,” he notes, “and comes naturally to a ‘Little Englander’ who seeks a diminished place for his country in global affairs.” (Again, the suppressed argument seems to be that Americans would never make the mistake of seeking a diminished place for their country in global affairs.) “It is incredible to behold Great Britain, which once occupied more than 20 percent of the earth’s landmass, moving ever closer to the brink of its own disintegration.” And if you thought that was incredible, reader, just you wait. …
I’d argue that Kirchick’s treatment of the EU is relatively weaker because he too has succumbed to exaggeration about the effects of the refugee crisis. Not everything you hear about the ill-effects of this influx is Russian propaganda, to be sure; it is a crisis. But a lot of what you hear is, in fact, for real, Russian propaganda. Look at the photo: This isn’t reds-under-the-beds paranoia, that is the Russian propaganda channel; and unsurprisingly, neither the photo nor the caption has anything to do with what the article purports. This is one reason I feel entitled to be as strident as I am about Trump even though I live in Europe: I can see for myself, right in front of my eyes, when Trump lies about Europe, or gets his information straight from Putinist outlets, and I can see the effect it has on our allies, on common decency, when he says these things. I too see the effects of Trump firsthand — just like you do, in other words — and they aren’t good. During the Cold War, the United States countered Soviet propaganda in Europe through such outlets as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – Kirchick’s former employer. Breitbart now plans to expand into France and Germany with new bureaus to cultivate and promote Europe’s populist-nationalist, pro-Putin parties. Steve Bannon is now on the National Security Council; his name is almost synonymous with Breitbart, a news organization that plans actively to work against American interests in Europe. It is almost too strange to believe that the United States now seeks to amplify Russian propaganda rather than counter it.
One imagines that Kirchick wrote his denunciation of Europe’s short-sighted and protectionist trade policies, too, in that universe where American trade policy was far-sighted. “EU trade policies,” he writes, “protecting heavily subsidized domestic agricultural interests at the expense of third-world farmers hoping to export their goods to the common market—similarly increase migratory waves to Europe by pricing out producers from underdeveloped economies, thereby exacerbating poverty and economic torpor.” Quite! How could these foolish Europeans indulge this self-defeating impulse to protectionism? How fortunate are we Americans that we were born and weaned on The Weath of Nations and see right through these species of folly.
Except: We don’t.
I remember writing this kind of guide to the Old World, in the voice of an American who could observe Europe’s suicidal impulses with rueful detachment, grateful her country was not similarly afflicted, secure in the belief it never would be. “As was once said about the conquest of its erstwhile empire,” Kirchick writes of Europe, “Britain may bring about the collapse of Europe in a fit of absence of mind.” Though he does not say it, I immediately thought, “And America might bring about the collapse of the postwar order in a like moment of absent-mindedness.”
Anyway. Despite my reservations about some of his arguments, I do recommend the book, though I also recommend carefully checking the references, particularly in the chapter on France. I especially recommend his chapter on Hungary. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, he writes, has presided over a campaign to obscure “both the specifically anti-Jewish nature of the Holocaust and the Hungarian state’s active collaboration in mass murder,” one that features “government-sponsored historical institutes, publicly funded documentaries, revisions to school curricula, bestowal of state honors to extreme right-wing figures, and erections of public monuments and museum exhibitions,” all functioning to obscure Jewish victimhood. Jews do tend to be the canary in the coalmine. Yesterday, Orban said that “ethnic homogeneity” was key in fostering economic success, and “too much mixing causes trouble.” You cannot both admire these sentiments and complain that the left calls you a racist. (Or you can, but it makes no sense.)
As the historian Lewis Namier observed, there is a morphology of politics; certain forms occur and re-occur. Historical revisionism appears to be intrinsic to the form that Kirchick terms Orbánism. But you could also call it Putinism or Erdoğanism. Contemporary political scientists describe it as illiberal democracy, partial democracy, low intensity democracy, empty democracy, and hybrid democracy. Namier called it plebiscitary Caesarism,
with its direct appeal to the masses: demagogical slogans ; disregard of legality in spite of a professed guardianship of law and order; contempt of political parties and the parliamentary system, of the educated classes and their values; blandishments and vague, contradictory promises for all and sundry; militarism; gigantic, blatant displays and shady corruption. Panem et circenses once more and at the end of the road, disaster.
The cultivation of nostalgia for an authoritarian past, Kirchick writes, and he is right to do so, tends to presage an authoritarian future: Orbán’s government “has rewritten the constitution, centralized power in the executive, weakened checks and balances, empowered an oligarchic class, dispensed state awards and ceded cultural policy to extreme right-wing figures, rendered parliament a rubber stamp, overhauled public media institutions into partisan outlets, harassed civil society, and reoriented Hungary’s traditionally Atlanticist and pro-European foreign policy toward Russia and other authoritarian regimes.”
It’s easier to do this in countries with a shorter (or no) tradition of liberal democracy, to be sure; it isn’t so easy to do in America. But it is the goal of such personalities to do it. I leave it to you to read the book and decide whether it’s too familiar for comfort. I think it is.
Published in General
Ummm, it sounds like he said exactly that.
Phenomenal comment.
Yes, I agree. I should have said that it doesn’t necessarily come across as raving racism, and “homogeneity” had to be seen in context to fully understand how bad – or not – his statements were.
The question I have pondering, is what does it take to have a “we”
But that seems like ethnic nationalism, which hardly seems consistent with American values. Patriotism or “civic nationalism”, fine. Ties that bind people together in a healthy, free, liberal democracy are shared political values like freedom, inalienable rights, etc., regardless of ethnicity, color, etc. Not an ideology like Orban’s that is scared of icky non-white people.
I agree with Claire:
Great review Claire. I share your concerns about Putin’s machinations across the west, and the illiberal movements he supports. That being said, there might be more reasons to be optimistic than you realize:
First, oil prices- even without Trump and the R Congress expanding fracking, the US oil boom looks set to continue. Low oil prices will keep the pressure on Russia, with or without sanctions. Remember to look at Russia’s weaknesses, not just Putin’s strength. Consider the moral of the west in the late 70’s, as communism was expanding worldwide for the sixth decade and the US had economic issues and lost Vietnam. Yet it was the Soviets who collapsed.
Second, the American-led global world order has been incredible, and has allowed us and all the countries under our protection to grow rich. But now that they’re rich, it’s appropriate that they take on more responsibility for their own defense and foreign policy, and require less from us. If this were happening in the 1990’s no one would worry. As it’s happening now, with Putin and ISIS looming and after a nearly “lost decade” of economic issues, it’s terrifying. But if Putin can be contained, a Europe that focuses more on defense and less on micromanagement from Brussels would be much better for the world.
Claire,
This is very good advice. I advise you take it.
Z
Seriously?
You guys elected a President who doesn’t have a foreign policy and this is a good thing for the country and reflects well in his supporters?
There’s no reason for concern?
We are talking about Trump and the fate of the ‘universe’ and not Reagan and the fate of the ‘universe’?
This sounds eerily familiar, like Mr Sherman set the way back machine and we found Ted ‘Lion of the Senate’ Kennedy trying to open a dialog with Russia to take down that bone headed ex-actor from California who was going to blow up the word and everything that every right minded ‘liberal’ knew were global truths.
So what do you do with people who DON’T believe that? Revoke citizenship? Thought-police them?
Or give them the right to fundamentally alter the fabric of our constitutional government?
Where does he say that non-white people are icky? Where does he suggest that whites, or more specifically Hungarians, are superior to anyone else? Perhaps he says it elsewhere, but I don’t see it in the quoted passage.
In the quoted passage he seems to be saying that Hungarians are “a single civilisation,” and that Hungarians deserve their own nation. Isn’t the idea of national self-determination central to the system that emerged from the two World Wars, and a big part of the reason old empires like the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were broken up, i.e. so that the various ethnic groups within them should have their own homeland? I’m sympathetic to the idea that the Kurds deserve their own independent nation-state, and I’m very sympathetic to the idea that Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state.
You (and Claire, and Orban) seem to be conflating nationalism with racism.
Some level of in group bigotry is inevitable – for most things. Why not the nation state?
Plus: there’s a reason these are born in blood.
I ran out of time to finish it all the way through, but here is my downpayment response.
http://ricochet.com/415508/the-end-of-fantasy-europe/
I didn’t vote for Trump. But how is Trump authoritarian? There is no cultural policy in the U.S.A. (Thank G-d) The oligarchic classes hate his guts. (Which is good. Like James Madison I love division.) The media is corrupt and biased and dumb but it is independent.
Trump is a very problematic figure but I don’t see any fascism in him.
There’s a new report out from Peter Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute.
There’s been discussion here of Russia’s technological comeback in arms design and manufacture. This has definitely contributed to Russia’s ability to reemerge onto the international stage, and has given the Russians some compelling new arms to sell to some of their old friends. This constrains the options available to President Trump.
Obama and Hillary had a lot to do with it. From the report:
It’s worth remembering Reagan and detente. He was serious about the USSR being evil; he also felt that stopping the nuclear arms race was worthwhile.
I guess that renders every nation in the world except America illegitimate.
Isn’t it precisely in order to ensure that there are shared political values like freedom, inalienable rights etc. that Orban is resisting altering Hungary’s fundamental (heterogeneous, but not excessively so) ethnic character?
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the “icky non-white people” comment is just your invention.
I can understand wanting to use the rhetorical sledgehammer of “racist” for anyone who seems to be opposing one’s cosmopolitan open borders position, but I don’t concede its legitimacy.
I don’t “admire” Orban. But I think 99.9% of the non-Hungarians who demonise him have no idea what his actual views and actions are. (I wonder if the OP took the trouble to find and read the entirety of the speech mentioned in the DW article, for example.)
Editor Note:
Personal attacks.And in your world it has nothing to do with the incompetence of the national security elites of this country to protect those very assets — it’s all Trump’s fault, the Russian’s fault, blah, blah blah. Do you really think the Russians are the only ones spying?
And is it the end of Europe? It is hopefully the end of an incompetent Europe ruled by Juncker, the EU, Merkel, Hollande, and Cameron.
You really are a member of the mainstream press [redacted].
Hee hee, can’t help but giggle!
Love the alliteration: Dictators! Demagogues! Dark Age! Lay me down and D!
(but surely it was Europe which originally brought us these? It was the EU which was the “end” of Europe as we knew it. )
That” globlandalization”could only succeed in the long run if the original populations were replaced by some other group which had no allegiance to the former nationalities, but was itself united by a global ideology which occupied the place formerly held by religion…
or, hey, wait! There is a group on the move still united (usual schisms aside) by a religion. Whyn’t we just let a million or so of them in?
Frau Merkel, that’s your cue.
Not only that, it was the mentality that Hitler started on, convincing the Germans that Jews, those physically or mentally impaired, etc. were undesirable and out of that rose the worst period of human history. It’s a slippery slope to expect integration and respect for one’s country and laws, which has been a challenge with mass immigration to calling out those that are different. Some governments don’t have the healthy political values of the US.
Claire – getting back to your dismay with Trump, can you draw parallels with his policies, behavior, whatever, that have brought you to the place you are now at? You drew parallels to Turkey’s leader – maybe there are others. Do your arguments hold water or is it too early to draw these conclusions?
I think I should write a post about why I (along with everyone who lived through that time in Turkey, actually) feel a sense of déja vu. Coming up …
Everyone? You’ve raised an incredibly high bar for your “upcoming post”.
Does it include Barack Obama auditioning for the part of Fethullah Gülen?
It is reason for concern. I didn’t object to concern about what we don’t know in regard to Trump’s foreign policy actions. I objected to unproven assumptions. Trump’s appointments do not align with his rhetoric regarding Putin, but Claire’s puts all the weight on his rhetoric divorced from any hints of actual policy.
She assumes the worst, which would be tolerable if she wasn’t also portraying anyone who disagrees as unserious about foreign policy.
And, as others have noted, ethnicity in many countries tends to overlap with cultural and political priorities — not necessarily, but incidentally. So ethnicity is often a fair shorthand for political incompatibility. I’m not familiar enough with European leaders to know who is actually racist or merely not PC. But we’re accustomed to false accusations of racism in this country, so many of us are inclined to afford political figures the benefit of the doubt.
Okay, that sentence was over the top/unnecessary.
But, why doesn’t Orban talk about freedom, commitment to liberal democracy, opposition to terrorism, etc., then- if that is really what he cares about – rather than ethnicity? In fact, he called for “illiberal democracy”. Furthermore, his government has cracked down on opposition, including freedom of the press, and touted Russia, China, Turkey, and Singapore as models for his illiberal democracy – “and maybe not even democracies”. Sounds like a police state and/or a state where not everyone is equal under the law. Another worrying example of the rise of authoritarianism and the end of Europe.
And I’m not sure that the alternative to Orban-style policies, or to the most ethnic nationalism itself, is “open borders”. Seems like a false dichotomy. The situation in Europe is complicated and difficult, and shouldn’t be simply a blanket acceptance, open doors policy-type thing. But that shouldn’t mean liking Orban and his policies, necessarily. Surely regulated immigration, slowing and carefully monitoring the flow of migrants, and expecting integration and respect for the country and its laws could be done without appeal to ethnic homogeneity, fear of foreigners in general (rather than just looking to stop terrorists), etc. When fear of foreigners is added, it’s only a small step to fear of non-ethnic Hungarians already in Hungary, harassment of them, lack of equality under the law, and demands for all Jews to be shipped out to Israel (as the Jobbik party calls for, whose base Orban is courting).
And I agree with Joseph Stanko here:
So I guess a mild, positive ethnic nationalism can be fine in some cultures, where it binds people together, but is not used as a cudgel against minorities to treat them as second-class citizens (whether that treatment comes at the hands of government, or harassment from the dominant ethnic group).
She assumes the worst, which would be tolerable if she wasn’t also portraying anyone who disagrees as unserious about foreign policy.
–I will say one thing about @claire. She is super supportive of me and my posts, and given I am usually disagree with her about foreign policy, that would seem to indicate something other than someone who sees anyone on the opposite end as unserious.
How can you help but not love this guy? (referring to the Gen. here)
Glad we have Mr. Funny here!
The WikiLeaks mess was under Obama, along with selective discrimination (Christians) – Trump has only been in office less than 2 months.