Daniel Johnson’s question—“Does Europe Have a Future?”—appears increasingly to be the question of the hour. Of course, it has been asked before, and many times over. The specter of European failure has been our civilization’s constant companion for a century or more, certainly at least since the horrors of World War I. Yet in our own historical moment the question seems to have achieved a kind of ripeness in a Europe that looks too exhausted either to reproduce or to defend itself.
Still, much depends upon what one means by “Europe.” Is it the ambitious but fraught project of welding the continent into a fluid, borderless, ever more tightly unified economic, political, and cultural union, held together by an abstract invented supranational identity, a common currency adorned with generic secular symbols, and the tentacles of a vast administrative magistracy headquartered in Brussels, and intended to serve as a disinterested substitute for obsolete historical conventions or customs? That is one thing.
Or does “Europe” refer to a certain rich, complex way of life, along with the values and institutions and forms of consciousness that have made that way of life possible: free and self-governing institutions, constitutionally limited governments, prosperity-generating economies, equality before the law, protection of fundamental human rights, freedom of expression and of rational inquiry and imagination, recognition of the dignity of the individual person, a high regard for criticism and self-criticism, and a glorious and cosmopolitan heritage of ideas, stories, artifacts, sciences, languages, faiths, cuisines, literatures, historical consciousnesses, and arguments, all laid out before its heirs as if on a single vast table stretching from antiquity to tomorrow? That is something else again.
The two meanings of “Europe” are obviously closely related, but they are by no means the same, and it is a grave error to conflate them. In fact, the first, newer understanding of “Europe”—the one encapsulated in the initials EU—has in the end necessarily come about at the expense of the second, older one, and the two have inevitably become antithetical. It should by now be evident why this is so. The deep rationale for the EU project lay in a particular conception of the lessons of modern European history—namely, that the very existence of the modern nation-state was to blame for the rivalries and savage wars that in the 20th century wreaked such havoc upon the European continent and much of the rest of the world.
This very influential but very flawed simplification, as Daniel Johnson rightly notes, has never received the searching criticism and correction it deserves. But even if the nation-state’s inherent menace could be made plausible and demonstrable, it would still fail by miles to take the measure of the lost benefits that have ensued from the consequent decision to disregard national polities and cultures and to abandon the forms of sovereignty and the institutions of self-rule that have been essential to the perpetuation of such nations.
The current migration crisis has been a startling reminder of those ignored tradeoffs. Such a crisis could not have occurred without the weakening of the nation-state imposed by the postwar order. Indeed, the crisis has already forced a de-facto flight from the “Schengen” ideal of a borderless Europe, and in at least some quarters seems to be bringing on an uneasy recognition that there may be no workable substitute for the particularisms inherent in l’Europe des patries (the Europe of nations, in the Gaullist formulation cited by Johnson): an older way of understanding and mapping Europe that is more in accord with the shape of human sentiment. Is it really so surprising that Europeans, qua Europeans, are not convinced they are prepared to defend Europe, qua Europe? Or that a steadily growing number of Germans, qua Germans, are mad as hell about the transformation of their culture being imposed upon them by their guilt-ridden elite leaders, and are determined to stop it?
