BRET STEPHENS: THE GHOSTS OF EUROPE
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On the view that there’s a silver lining to most things, consider the European election results. Yes, fascism is back, officially, ugly as ever. But at least Americans might be spared lectures from the bien-pensant about the crudeness of U.S. politics vis-à-vis Europe’s.
Now, whenever I hear about the National Front, I’ll reach for my Second Amendment.
Many are the blameworthy in this disgrace to a continent, but let’s start with the most blameworthy: the French electorate. Last week, Jean-Marie Le Pen, National Front founder and the party’s hyena in winter, suggested a method for how Europe could solve its “immigration problem”: “Monseigneur Ebola,” he said, “could sort that out in three months.”
One in four French voters cast their ballots for the National Front, edging out the center-right UMP and trouncing the governing Socialists. On election night Sunday, Mr. Le Pen’s daughter and current party leader, Marine Le Pen, declared: “Our people demand just one politics. The politics of the French, for the French.” What’s French for Ein Volk ?
Ms. Le Pen is supposed to be softer and smoother face of her father’s party, but the evidence of that is hard to see. Last month she paid a visit to Moscow, lambasted the European Union for declaring a “Cold War” on Russia and embraced separatism in Ukraine. As for Vladimir Putin, she praised him in a recent interview as a “patriot” who “upholds the sovereignty of his people” and defends “the values of European civilization.”
Values, presumably, such as invading and intimidating neighbors, stuffing ballot boxes, jailing dissidents and attempting to restore the reputation of the Soviet Union.
The Kremlin has also made overtures to Hungary’s Jobbik party, which took nearly 15% of the vote in last week’s election, as well as to Greece’s Golden Dawn, which got 9.4%. These parties aren’t neo-fascist, in the early Benito Mussolini mold. They’re neo-Nazi, in the late Ernst Röhm mold. Golden Dawn marches under a swastika-like banner. As for Jobbik, when the World Jewish Congress held a meeting in Budapest last year, the party organized a rally to denounce “the Israeli conquerors, these investors, [who] should look for another country in the world for themselves because Hungary is not for sale.”
This, too, is a voice of “European civilization.”
Next up on the guilty list is Europe’s elite political class, the let-them-eat-cake aristocracy of reptiles that still hasn’t figured out why their political forbears were marched up to the guillotine.
In the New York Times NYT +1.56% on Sunday, former Le Monde editor Sylvie Kauffmann wrote about the rehabilitation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or DSK, just three years after the former International Monetary Fund chief famously fell from grace. A new French documentary on the euro crisis gives DSK prominent billing. “Watching the documentary at home,” Ms. Kauffmann relates, ” Antoine Cachin, a French business consultant, said, ‘D.S.K. stood out as the smartest one,’ adding: ‘That’s what I like about him. He made you feel intelligent. He gave the impression that France has a strategy.’ ”
Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s contribution to French political economy, when he was finance minister in the late 1990s, was the 35-hour workweek, the scheme to increase employment by treating people as matters of arithmetic. When the French smart set become nostalgic for DSK, you begin to understand, almost, how 25% of the French electorate winds up voting for thugs.
And then there is Brussels.
When a political genius named Jean Monnet began the work of creating the European Economic Community in the 1950s, he understood, as the historian Brendan Simms notes, that “unity could only be achieved through stealthy cooperation between the major European governments, beginning with the economy.”
The best achievements of European institutions have all stemmed from removing restrictions—to trade, travel, residency and financial transactions. But for at least 30 years, the EU has mainly been in the business of imposing restrictions on everything from the judicial sentences that national courts can impose to the shape of the vegetables that Europeans get to eat. Stealth Europe transmogrified into Busybody Europe.
A decade ago it was conventional wisdom to observe that Europe had become a zone of perpetual peace, an agent of soft power and international law, Venus to America’s Mars. But history is coming back to Europe, and not just at the far margin in places like Donetsk. The European Parliament may be mostly toothless as a political institution. But now there’s no blinking at the fact that fascism is no longer just a piece of Europe’s past but also a realistic possibility for its future.
There will be a temptation to bury the implications of this vote for another five years. But if youth unemployment remains at 25% in France and 57% in Spain, these elections will only be the beginning of another ugly chapter in European civilization. Mr. Putin can sense that the ghosts hovering over the continent work in his favor.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
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