Reappraisals (66 page)

American-style belligerent patriotism, as Garton Ash notes, is rare in contemporary Europe. This dislike of bellicosity goes well beyond traditional pacifism: Europeans no longer even
think
about interstate relations in martial terms. But
pace
American critics, this makes Europeans and their model more rather than less effective when it comes to addressing international crises. The U.S. is still rather good at the old-fashioned art of making war. But war making is the exception in modern international affairs. The real challenge is preventing war, making peace—and keeping it. And this is something at which Europe is going to be increasingly adept.

The countries of the EU already provide the largest share of the world’s peacekeepers and international policemen. Europeans have a real, if limited, military capacity—though they will need to commit more resources to the planned 60,000-man “Euro-force” if it is to be effective. The best European troops—for example, the British army—have been trained for decades to work with occupied and warring civil populations, a skill with which the U.S. Army is shockingly unfamiliar. It will be a long time before the EU develops and implements a common foreign policy—though the new constitution would facilitate that, if only by creating a European foreign minister authorized to speak for the whole union. But when it does at last speak with a single voice in international affairs, the EU will wield a lot of power.

The reason is not that the EU will be rich or big—though it already is both. The U.S. is rich and big. And one day China may be richer and bigger. Europe will matter because of the cross-border template upon which contemporary Europe is being constructed. “Globalization” isn’t primarily about trade or communications, economic monopolies or even empire. If it were, it would hardly be new: Those aspects of life were already “globalizing” a hundred years ago.
²²
Globalization is about the disappearance of boundaries—cultural and economic boundaries, physical boundaries, linguistic boundaries—and the challenge of organizing our world in their absence. In the words of Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the UN’s director of peacekeeping operations: “Having lost the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what creates the bond between humans that constitute a community.”
²³

To their own surprise and occasional consternation, Europeans have begun to do this: to create a bond between human beings that transcends older boundaries and to make out of these new institutional forms something that really is a community. They don’t always do it very well, and there is still considerable nostalgia in certain quarters for those old frontier posts. But something is better than nothing; and nothing is just what we shall be left with if the fragile international accords, treaties, agencies, laws, and institutions that we have erected since 1945 are allowed to rot and decline—or, worse, are deliberately brought low. As things now stand, boundary breaking and community making are something that Europeans are doing better than anyone else. The United States, trapped once again in what Tocqueville called its “perpetual utterance of self-applause,” isn’t even trying.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XXIII

ENVOI

The Social Question Redivivus

The little town of Longwy has a ghostly air. For many years it was an important center of iron and steel manufacturing in the industrial basin of the northern Lorraine and a proud stronghold of Socialist and Communist unions. Since 1975, however, the local industry, like steelworking everywhere in Western Europe, has been in trouble. Today the steelworks are gone, and so, at first sight, are their workers. At noon on a working day the town is quiet, with empty shops, a few sad-looking bars, and a deserted railway station occupied by a gaggle of drunks. The erstwhile steelworkers, grown old, wait out their lives in bars and cafés, or else stay at home with the television. Their wives and daughters have part-time, nonunion work either in new factories and offices distributed in the fields outside the town or else at commercial centers deposited optimistically at crossroads some twenty miles away. Their sons have no work at all and mill around at these same commercial centers looking at once menacing and pitiful.

There are towns like Longwy all over Europe, from Lancashire to Silesia, from the Asturian mountains to the central Slovakian plain. What makes the shattered industrial heartland of northeastern France distinctive is the political revolution that has occurred there. In the legislative elections of 1978, when the Left was defeated nationwide, the voters of Longwy returned a Communist deputy to Paris, as usual. Twenty years later, in the legislative elections of May 1997, the right-wing National Front—which did not exist in 1978—came within three thousand votes of overtaking the local Communist candidate. A little farther east, in the similarly depressed industrial towns and villages around Sarrebourg that abut the German frontier, the National Front did even better: moving ahead of both Communists and Socialists, its candidates secured more than 22 percent of the vote in half the local constituencies.

The neo-Fascist right, whose program constitutes one long scream of resentment—at immigrants, at unemployment, at crime and insecurity, at “Europe,” and in general at “them” who have brought it all about—did better still in the decayed industrial valley of the upper Loire west of Lyons, where one in five voters favored it, and best of all in the towns of Mediterranean France. In the greater Marseilles region nearly one voter in four chose the candidates of the National Front. If France had a system of proportional representation, the front would have not one but seventy-seven deputies in the new French parliament (double its number under a short-lived system of proportional representation introduced for the 1986 elections), and the Left would not have a parliamentary majority.

All these regions, and many others where the Far Right is now the leading local party, were until very recently strongholds of the Left. The demographics of most such places have not altered significantly—former Communists, not newcomers, are now voting for Jean-Marie Le Pen. The community of these men and women has been destroyed, and they are looking for someone to blame and someone to follow. This is not Wigan Pier, the world of British industrial unemployment chronicled by George Orwell between the wars. There the economy buckled and the state withdrew from all but its most minimal commitments, but the community held fast and was even strengthened in its shared belief in itself and the justice of its claims. In postindustrial France (or Britain and elsewhere) the economy has moved on while the state, so far, has stayed behind to pick up the tab; but the community has collapsed, and with it a century-long political culture that combined pride in work, local social interdependence, and intergenerational continuity.

It is ironic but not mystifying that Le Pen, like other European demagogues, picks up some of his strongest support in frontier districts. Longwy and Sarrebourg are right next to the vanishing borders, once so contested, between France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. In today’s Europe you can live in one country, shop in another, and seek employment in a third. But the free movement of people, money, and goods that is so central to Europe’s much-advertised entry into a postnational, global era has not brought prosperity to this region—indeed, the most salient economic effect on the locality has been the loss of jobs in the customs service. The Europe debate, in France and elsewhere, is thus readily cast in terms of security, stability, and protection versus vulnerability and change, with Brussels serving as a lightning rod for a broad range of criticisms directed at globalization and the hegemony of the Anglo-American model of minimal state and maximized profit—what the French nervously and revealingly label
la pensée unique
.