Motus Mentis

What’s at the root of the deepening crisis in the European Union? George Friedman of STRATFOR attributes it to persistent nationalism, and in recent weeks has written a pair of substantial posts articulating this view.

The first, The Crisis of Europe and European Nationalism, was published on September 13th. We read (boldface emphasis added by me):

From my point of view, the pressure and slaughter inflicted by two world wars on both countries created a collective mental breakdown…

…The Europeans were searching for a way to overcome their history.

One problem was the status of Germany. The deeper problem was nationalism. Not only had Europe failed to unite under a single flag via conquest but also World War I had shattered the major empires, creating a series of smaller states that had been fighting to be free. The argument was that it was nationalism, and not just German nationalism, that had created the 20th century. Europe’s task was therefore to overcome nationalism and create a structure in which Europe united and retained unique nations as cultural phenomena and not political or economic entities. At the same time, by embedding Germany in this process, the German problem would be solved as well.

The European Union was designed not simply to be a useful economic tool but also to be a means of European redemption. The focus on economics was essential. It did not want to be a military alliance, since such alliances were the foundation of Europe’s tragedy. By focusing on economic matters while allowing military affairs to be linked to NATO and the United States, and by not creating a meaningful joint-European force, the Europeans avoided the part of their history that terrified them while pursuing the part that enticed them: economic prosperity. The idea was that free trade regulated by a central bureaucracy would suppress nationalism and create prosperity without abolishing national identity. The common currency ”” the euro ”” is the ultimate expression of this hope. The Europeans hoped that the existence of some Pan-European structure could grant wealth without surrendering the core of what it means to be French or Dutch or Italian.

Yet even during the post-World War II era of security and prosperity, some Europeans recoiled from the idea of a transfer of sovereignty. The consensus that many in the long line of supporters of European unification believed existed simply didn’t. And today’s euro crisis is the first serious crisis that Europe has faced in the years since, with nationalism beginning to re-emerge in full force.

In the end, Germans are Germans and Greeks are Greeks. Germany and Greece are different countries in different places with different value systems and interests. The idea of sacrificing for each other is a dubious concept.The idea of sacrificing for the European Union is a meaningless concept. The European Union has no moral claim on Europe beyond promising prosperity and offering a path to avoid conflict. These are not insignificant goals, but when the prosperity stops, a large part of the justification evaporates and the aversion to conflict (at least political discord) begins to dissolve.

How could anyone with an understanding of history and human nature have expected this to work? Perhaps the example of America gave a false hope to the transnationalist elites who imagined that one could, with a promise of prosperity as a sop, simply switch off the deep, and ancient, cultural and ethnic loyalties (and resentments) of the various indigenous European peoples. But America is a very different place than Europe: its immigrants (until recently at least) have always come here with the explicit intention of becoming part of the historic American experiment, setting aside national allegiances, and joining the ambient American culture. Europe, on the other hand, had just emerged from two horrifying paroxysms of war — and it is a much overlooked fact of the history of the late 20th century that the relatively stable peace after the second great war was the result, in large part, of the sanguinary disaggregation of ethnic and cultural blocs that had been left politically and socially entangled by the victors of the first. (It took further years, and the dissolution of the Soviet empire, for the same violent process to unfold in Yugoslavia.)

In other words, no sooner had the different peoples of Europe at long last sorted themselves out, at a hideous price, into relatively independent and homogeneous living arrangements, than they found themselves being yoked together once again.

A couple of weeks ago, Lawrence Auster summed up his own very similar view:

[T]he ultimate cause of the European financial crisis is not economic, but moral and spiritual. To sum up the argument:

— After World War II, the leaders of Europe made a disastrous moral error, associating the ordinary life of the European peoples, including the very existence of their nations, with Nazi-like evil.

— Therefore the nations of Europe had to be eliminated at all costs, by merging them into one sovereign power.

— Merging them into one sovereign power required, inter alia, that they all have the same currency.

— But the adoption of a common currency for all of Europe has created the financial crisis, and the insistence on keeping the common currency makes it impossible to cure the financial crisis.

Sixty-six years after Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head, the fear of him still rules Europe, driving it to commit not only national and cultural suicide but economic suicide as well.

This is the same point that George Friedman made above — that the postwar elites of Europe, aghast at the fathomless horrors their high civilization had created, sought not only prosperity through economic union, but moral redemption. The demon that Europe’s elites knew they had to slay on this new, secular altar was the ethnic and cultural distinctiveness of Europe’s indigenous peoples and their various nations — and with it the natural human tendency to enjoy, take pride in, and seek to preserve and defend the character, traditions, autonomy and identity of one’s homeland. (Indeed, I have believed for some time that modern Western civilization’s phobic and dangerously radical aversion to all forms of discrimination is in large part a kind of ideological hysteresis in reaction to Nazism — a point that Mr. Auster has made as well.)

Mr. Friedman posted another essay on the subject today, Europe, the International System and a Generational Shift. He continues in the same vein:

National identity was as deeply embedded in Europe as elsewhere, and historical differences were compounded by historical resentments, particularly those aimed toward Germany. The real solution to European wars was the creation of a European nation, but that was simply impossible. The European Union tried to solve the problem by retaining both national identity and national regimes. Simultaneously, a broader European identity was conceived based on a set of principles, and above all, on the idea of a single European economy binding together disparate nations. The reasoning was that if the European Union provided the foundation for European prosperity, then the continued existence of nations in Europe would not challenge the European Union. Perhaps, over time, this would see a decline of particular nationalisms in favor of a European identity. This assumed that prosperity would cause national identity and tensions to subside. If that were true, then it would work. But there is more to Europe politically speaking than an enhanced trading area, and the economics of Europe are hardly homogeneous.

… Between 1991 and 2008, all of this was buried under extraordinary prosperity. The first crisis revealed the underlying fault line, however. The U.S. subprime crisis happened to trigger it, but any financial crisis would have revealed the fault line. It was not a crisis about the euro, nor was it even a crisis about economics. It was actually a crisis about nationalism.

… This system was created in a world in which European politics had been declared in abeyance. Germany was occupied. The Americans provided security and inter-European fighting was not allowed. Now, the Americans are gone, the Germans are back and European international politics are bubbling up to the surface.

In short, the European project is failing at precisely the point that it had been attempting to solve ”” nationalism. The ability of leaders to make deals depends on authority that is slipping away. The public has not yet clearly defined the alternatives, but that process is under way.

Mr. Friedman is right about all of this, I think. He does go on to make one point I’m not so sure about, though:

It is similar to what is happening in the United States with one definitive exception: In the United States, the tension between mass and elite does not threaten to disintegrate the republic. In Europe, it does.

I wish I shared his optimism about the prospects here at home.