Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Europe in Reverse

From the early Middle Ages to the 20th century, Europeans shed buckets of blood to build fiefdoms and free cities into militarized nation-states. Each one sought to dominate the others, and then to dominate the world. Those that could not unify (Italy, Germany), or could not fight off their neighbors (Poland) stayed weak until they corrected those faults.

Slowly, after 1945, and precipitously, after 1990, the continent has thrown that thousand year evolution into reverse. In modern Europe, individual cities can function as world financial powers. The process began with ethnic divorces -- Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia already are gone, Belgium soon may follow -- but economics could split the nations even further, as wealthy enclaves of bureaucracy and investment look to shed poorer regions. Some day the map could look like 1400 A.D. again, with powerful city-states functioning autonomously within weak or only-on-paper nation-states.

The collapse of European militarism has been one of the stunning developments in this evolution. A new book about it, "Where Have All the Soldiers Gone The Transformation of Modern Europe" by James J. Sheehan, is getting a lot of attention.

I haven't read the book. I have read several reviews. The above, by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, is curious for the holes in the story it tells. I don't know if the book has the same problem, but in this review, America is off-stage except when it needs to be ordered in to be insulted and dismissed. It's off-stage at moments when it ought to be on:

The "trente glorieuses" after VE-Day saw three decades of astonishing economic growth, which coincided with another most remarkable change: "With or without a fight, Europeans abandoned their empires."

Now, there's a world of difference in that "with or without a fight," between Algeria and Ghana, but it's quickly elided here. And the role of American policies in both the economic growth and the retreat from colonialism never gets addressed. From Iran to Vietnam, Europe didn't so much retreat from world problems as convince the Americans to take them up instead. From Suez to Indonesia, it was American policy to hurry the Europeans out of their colonial offices.

The continent's postwar prosperity was kick-started with American aid (certainly given with a self-interested motive) and sustained under the aegis of American might. In fact, the European retreat from national armies in the Cold War can be directly tied to the huge American and Soviet nuclear arsenals, which made conventional armies obsolete on the continent. That allowed my generation among Western European youth to grow up out of uniform -- and, more often than not, at least among the ones I knew, they passed the time damning and protesting the American nuclear arsenal.

Here, again, something is missing:

In a bravura final chapter Sheehan explains "Why Europe Will Not Become a Super-power." As he recognizes, the European Union is already a superstate economically, but its failure to develop a common foreign and defense policy will continue to disappoint some enthusiasts.

The European Union doesn't have to steer cash into developing a "defense policy" so long as it knows it has us to do it. Americans have been urging Europe to do more for its own defense since Truman's day. Europe has had better things to do.

Americans like to emphasize their exceptionalism, and Europeans like to keep the greatest possible distance from any responsibility for America. That prevents us from seeing in fact how closely intertwined our histories have been -- the role of European investment in the rise of American industry, for instance -- and how much we have shaped one another.

In even the most basic ways. "We get from every village the most ruthless and the most energetic. The merely discontented stop in England," Ezra Pound wrote of his homeland [Patria Mia, 1913]. America was formed and driven through its youth by a continuous transfusion of greedy, active, energetic, selfish, bold, discontented, narcissistic characters from Europe. Which also means modern Europe is the result of the steady burning off, over decades and centuries, of so much that was greedy, active, energetic, selfish, bold, discontented, and narcissistic in its character. We are not America, son of Europe. We are America and Europe, fraternal twins.

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