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April 11, 2006 Edition
A Collective Loss of Europe's Will
London Letter
BY DANIEL JOHNSON
April 11, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/30759
"The lamps are going out all over Europe," the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, declared on August 3, 1914, as the Continent descended into world war. April 10, 2006, was not so apocalyptic, but its symbolism is nonetheless potent. Two years ago, the Madrid bombs panicked Spain into electing a left-wing government that would pull out of Iraq. Now it is the turn of two other Mediterranean peoples to put out their lamps.
Yesterday was a dark day in the history of Europe, not only because both France and Italy turned their backs on economic reform, but because both of these great nations have visibly lost their nerve in the face of an even greater challenge - a challenge to Judeo-Christian civilization itself.
For the real beneficiaries of this collective loss of nerve will be Al Qaeda and its Islamist power base, who pose a more immediate threat to freedom in Europe than they do in America. The failure of the Berlusconi government to win a ringing endorsement may leave Italy bereft of the courageous leadership that has seen Italian troops standing alongside their NATO allies in Iraq for three long years, in the teeth of public opinion. Mr. Berlusconi, for all his faults, had begun a renaissance of the entrepreneurial and family values that made post-war Italy great.
By contrast, Romano Prodi, who may emerge as the new Italian prime minister, ran on a ticket distinguished solely by its barely concealed anti-Americanism. While still president of the European Commission, he showed that he was fierce in opposition to the spread of free markets and democracy, but soft on the enemies of the West. Mr. Prodi belongs to Italy's mandarin class of socialist professors, notorious for neglecting their students in order to meddle in public life. A second career as a Brussels bureaucrat has left him even more aloof.
The humiliating retreat of the French government from its youth employment contract is less spectacular than the defeat of Mr. Berlusconi, but for France it may prove no less decisive.The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, had staked everything on this last-ditch attempt to reverse the rising tide of unemployment. But Mr. Villepin had already shown himself unequal to crushing the "French intifada" last November,when Muslim youths burned cars in the suburbs of Paris. Even the imposition of a state of emergency failed to deter the rioters. Now the mob has triumphed again, after weeks of violent demonstrations and picketing, backed by the threat of a general strike.
Street violence has been the most dangerous force in French politics ever since the sans culottes stormed the Bastille in 1789. Since then, France has had five republics, two monarchies, two empires, two occupations, and one dictatorship. Student riots, backed by leftist trade unions, eventually brought down General de Gaulle, France's greatest post-war leader. Les evenements, as "the events" of May 1968 are still known, have ever since provided a blueprint for those who wish to defy or overthrow an elected French government - as the events of November 2005 and April 2006 demonstrate.
Mr. Villepin has been left a busted flush. The sooner he vacates the stage, the better for France. Even more contemptible, however, is his patron, President Chirac. Although he calls himself a Gaullist, Mr. Chirac is not big enough to fill De Gaulle's waistcoat pocket, let alone his shoes. Having tried to stay aloof from the riots, both last fall and this spring, Mr. Chirac no doubt hopes to avoid collateral damage. His cynical attitude, however, is a grave miscalculation, which underestimates the significance of the trial of strength that has just been lost by a prime minister who was indubitably his creature.
That trial of strength was no longer mainly about the hiring and firing of young employees, which the government wanted to make easier and the unions opposed.The conflict was about a much more fundamental question: Who has the right to exercise authority in a democratic society? That question leads directly to another: Who has a monopoly on violence? The French state has now given its answer to both: "Not us."
In other words: Might is right. The authority of the institutions of the French state has been irreparably weakened, just as it was during the 1950s, when it nearly succumbed to a military coup. The political system may not survive its next big test. And Jacques Chirac may yet find his niche in the history books - as the gravedigger of the Fifth Republic.
The political classes in both Italy and France are still struggling to come to terms with the relative decline of the core states of the European Union. Both elites were suspicious of the New Europe to the east; both still cling to dreams of a United States of Europe, despite the rejection of the European Constitution in last year's French and Dutch referendums. Mr. Prodi may try to exploit his victory to lead a new attempt to revive such dreams of a centralized European federation.
If he does, I predict he will fail.The European Union is not only more diverse but also more divided than ever. France and Italy may have signaled that they reject the Atlantic world of open markets and open societies. But the Poles and other central European peoples are mostly eager to belong to the Anglosphere. So Margaret Thatcher's vision - a Europe of free trade and nation states - lives to fight another day.
What, though, do the events of April 10 mean for America? The loss of a small Italian contingent in Iraq, which was due to be withdrawn eventually, is not a major blow to American prestige. Nor does the failure of the French to reform their sclerotic economy in itself damage American interests. Even as two of the big four countries in Europe take the wrong direction, Angela Merkel's government is slowly but surely moving Germany in the right one.
But the Bush administration should be wor ried that Europe is in such disarray on the very issue that should be uniting the West: the threat of Islamism. Prime Minister Blair has a good grasp of both the internal and external danger, but with Mr. Berlusconi's departure he is now more isolated than ever and his days in office are numbered. Italy seems to be imitating Spain's ostrich-like posture. France is split. The Chiracs and De Villepins believe the threat would vanish of its own accord, if only the Anglo-Saxons would join in a European policy of appeasement, but Nicolas Sarcozy, the interior minister who hopes to succeed Mr. Chirac, is keen to put up more resistance.
Remarkably, Mr. Sarcozy seems sanguine about the failure of the French state to pacify its Muslim population, the largest in Europe. Indeed, Mr. Sarcozy reminds me of Marshal Foch, hero of the "Miracle of the Marne" in 1914, whose battlefield dispatch read: "My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking." Come to think of it, that wouldn't be bad advice for Europe in general.
Sunday, Apr. 09, 2006
Liberty, Equality, Mediocrity
The strangest revolution the French have ever produced
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
The French are justly proud of their revolutionary tradition. After all, 1789 begat 1848 and 1871 and indeed inspired just about every revolution for a century, up to and including the Russian Revolution of 1917. Say what you will about the outcomes, but the origins were quite glorious: defiant, courageous, bloody, romantic uprisings against all that was fixed and immovable and oppressive: kings, czars, churches, oligarchies, tyrannies of every kind.
And now, in a new act of revolutionary creativity, the French are at it again. Millions of young people and trade unionists, joined by some underclass opportunists looking for a good night out, have taken to the streets again. To rise up against what? In massive protest against a law that would allow employers to fire an employee less than 26 years old in the first two years of his contract.
That's a very long way from liberty, equality, fraternity. The spirit of this revolution is embodied most perfectly in the slogan on many placards: CONTRE LA PRÃCARITÃ, or "Against Precariousness." The precariousness of being subject to being fired. The precariousness of the untenured life, even if the work is boring and the boss no longer wants you. And ultimately, the precariousness of life itself, any weakening of the government guarantee of safety, conformity, regularity.
That is something very new. And it is not just a long way from the ideals of 1789. It is the very antithesis. It represents an escape from freedom, a demand for an arbitrary powerful state in whose bosom you can settle for life.
Nor are the current riots about equality. On the contrary. Their effect would be to enforce inequality. The unemployment rate in France is 10%. For young people under 26 it is 23%, and almost 1 in 10 kids who leave high school don't have a job five years after taking the baccalaureate. Much of that unemployment encompasses those of the alienated immigrant underclass, who are less educated, less acculturated and less likely ever to be hired than the mostly native student rioters. And these young rioters want to keep things just that way--to rely not just on their advantages of class, education and ethnicity but also on an absolute guarantee from the state that their very first job will be for life, with no one to challenge them for it.
Ironically, the better imitation of the spirit of 1789 came from precisely those immigrant challengers kept locked away in France's satellite suburbs. It is those poor ambitious huddled masses who late last year lit up the country for three weeks with nights of burning cars. Those underclass riots were politically inchoate, but they did represent the fury of people desperate to escape the marginality imposed on them by their ethnicity and the rigidity of the French bureaucratic state. Those immigrant riots, which had an equal touch of the existential anarchy of the student revolution of 1968, were, if anything, a revolt for precariousness--for risk, danger, upheaval.
Against precariousness? The vibrancy of a society can almost be measured by its precariousness. Free markets correlate not just with prosperity and wealth but also with dynamism. The classic example is China today, an economic and social Wild West with entire classes, regions, families and individuals rising and falling in ways that must terrify today's young demonstrators in Paris. In France not a single enterprise founded in the past 40 years has managed to break into the ranks of the nation's 25 biggest companies.
Precariousness is an essential element in the life of the entrepreneur, a French word now more associated with the much despised Anglo-Saxon "liberalism" and its merciless dog-eat-dog capitalism. But these days the best examples of the entrepreneurial spirit are hardly Anglo-Saxon: China, India, Korea, Chile, all rising and growing, even as France and much of Europe decline.
Against precariousness? That is perhaps to be expected in a country where 76% of 15-to-30-year-olds say they aspire to civil service jobs from which it's almost impossible to be fired. This flight from risk is not just a sign of civilizational senescence. It is a parody of the welfare state. Yes, the old should be protected from precariousness because they are exhausted; the sick, because they are too weak. But privileged students under the age of 26? They cannot endure 24 months of precariousness at the prime of life, the height of their energy?
There have, I suppose, been other peoples in other places who yearned for a life of mediocrity. But leave it to the French to make a revolution in its name.
