WHAT'S LEFT OF EUROPE FOR THEM TO ASSIMILATE TO?:

Raymond Aron and the End of Europe (Christopher Caldwell, April 7, 2005, Bradley Lecture Series)

I’d like to spend our time this afternoon trying to figure out what European identity is, and how much of it can reasonably be preserved. There are many ways to do this. My plan, a somewhat arbitrary one, is to use the work of Raymond Aron, the French political scientist, philosopher, sociologist, and historian who died in 1983 and would have turned 100 last month. For the benefit of those in the audience who are under, say, 30, Aron was a brilliant young student at the Ecole Normal Supérieure, studied in Germany during the first Hitler years, established himself as a top-flight academic philosopher, fled to England with De Gaulle, where he was editor in chief of the main resistance publication, La France libre. After the war, at age 40, despite never having written a real news article in his life, he went to work at Le Figaro. He never left journalism, but he did become professor of sociology at the Sorbonne in 1955. He closed out his career at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and founded the truly great French quarterly Commentaire.

Aron was, for the French right, what Jean-Paul Sartre was to the French left—a standard-bearer matters of both day-to-day political position-taking … and deep theoretical reflection. Sartre, incidentally, was Aron’s youthful friend, and will also have his centenary this year, a couple months from now. Their friendship did not survive Aron’s conversion to anti-Communism. He saw in Stalin’s Russia the same kind of imperialistic insatiability that he had seen in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. Aron, I would say, was a rightist only in a French sense. He was probably the pre-eminent Atlanticist in post-war France, keen to correct what he saw as a generalized French ignorance of the United States--although he was not an unthinking supporter of the U.S., either, particularly during Vietnam. That said, he applied the same generally anti-colonialist attitude to France, particularly during the Algerian war. We would consider him either on the far right of the left or the far left of the right.

Aron wrote about 40 books of sociology, history, philosophy, and journalism, and there are another dozen posthumous collections of articles and essays. He has been extremely well anthologized--I highly recommend the 800-page behemoth edited a decade ago by Christian Bachelier called A History of the 20th Century. But the works of Aron are a very large country--and I am a stranger in most of it. I hope you’ll forgive me if my reading of him is selective. And the last thing I want to do is to assume what position Aron would have taken on issues affecting Europe today. As the Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield said recently about Aron, we do not “have his advice; we only have his wisdom offered for previous emergencies.”

Aron’s wisdom was, if you’ll pardon the expression, phenomenological. He cared about things and actions more than he did about ideological labels. I’ll give you an example. A key theme in much of his work--and one that I’ll return to before the end of this talk--is that until very late in the 20th century, people were judging events according to 19th-century conceptions. Particularly intellectuals, who had an understanding of socialism that time had already shown to be largely mythological. “In theory,” Aron wrote, “a revolution is defined as a liberation. Yet the revolutions of the 20th century seem, if not revolutions of enslavement, at the very least revolutions of authority.” [...]

There is one thing that separates Aron from the run of political journalists in France and the United States. He actually knew something about how a modern economy worked. Although he was prescient about the global economy, he did not live to see globalization in full flower. What would he have made of it? We can get an approximation by way of an analogy. The change in economic organization that results as we move from a state-based to a global economy is structurally similar to the change in diplomacy as one moves from a state-based to an Empire-based foreign policy (“Empire,” by the way, is a word that Aron was quite comfortable using to describe both of the nuclear-armed blocs in the Cold War--he called the United States an imperial republic--but he did not use the term, by any means, the way today’s hard left uses it). For Aron, the Eastern European nations in the aftermath of the war were only “fictively restored.” There was no real Poland in 1945--there was a space run by the Soviet army in which Poles lived. “Political units, such as they exist according to international law, are national,” he wrote. “Military units, such as they exist in reality, are imperial.”

The national economies of Western Europe have today become similarly “fictive”. Nowhere is this clearer than in the parts of Europe that present themselves as most typical. You go to an Italian wine town and think, “Wow! Now I’m in the real Italy!” But then you realize the winery is owned by Germans, the town is inhabited by English vacationers, and the people who clean the dishes in the French-owned restaurant are all Romanians. The Italians who used to live there have had to move to poorer towns, maybe along some highway near fast-food restaurants.

This is just life in the global economy, but it matters more to Europeans than it does to Americans. The ability to control a national economic space is central to creating a welfare state, and the welfare state, as I have said, is central to European identity. You see the paradox. There is a very interesting book by the Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, called Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe. It compares American and European welfare policies, and finds that one of the very important reasons that American benefits are relatively low is that America is both a diverse and an immigrant-based country. The taxpaying natives suspect that their money is going to people who are not like them, and may be ripping them off. Whether American voters are right or wrong, they will not vote for European-level welfare benefits. The question is whether, as Europe becomes demographically more like America--both through immigration, and through internal migration within the EU--it will lower its benefits. The answer is, yes, it will.

Demographic change as a policy issue did not really enter public discussion until after Aron died--in fact, in some places, it is creeping into the debate only now--but it is so central to Europeans’ idea of what is de-Europeanizing them that we need to make a brief excursion into it.

An excellent guide to the scope of European demographic change is an AEI paper published by Nicholas Eberstadt last November. It notes that Europe’s population is the world’s oldest, and in little more than a decade its median age will begin creeping towards 50. The continent’s birthrate is well below replacement. In fact, it is the lowest birthrate ever recorded for a major geographical area. Other studies show that Europe’s population is going to start shrinking extremely rapidly by 2015. And as social science statistics go, demographic projections, at least over the short and medium term, tend to be quite accurate. So Europe faces a choice: either allowing massive immigration--and some estimates are that the necessary levels will be around 50 to 100 million over the coming decades. Or … permitting the economy to go massively out of whack, through both unfunded welfare mandates and skyrocketing labor costs. A lot of people up until about 5 years ago held out hope that Europe’s immigration needs could be met through the new member states of Eastern Europe. But in 2002, a book by the German economist Meinhardt Miegel called The Deformed Society showed that the former East Bloc’s birthrates were in most cases even lower than Western Europe’s. Any significant migration from the Eastern European countries would cause a brain drain that would badly damage even the healthiest Eastern economies.

Now, Europeans are not, for the most part, panicking over this. A Eurobarometer poll showed recently that 56 percent of Europeans recognize the need for immigrant labor, while 80 percent favor more stringent border controls. That sounds self-contradictory, but maybe it’s not. Europeans, it seems, are neither so naïve as to think they can maintain the ethnic and cultural make-up of their countries, nor so politically correct as to admit any reprobate who shows up at the gates of Europe. Their problem is they’re having trouble figuring out where the gates of Europe are.

Islam

What worries them is Islam. Americans often snicker at Europeans for having allowed so many Muslims to immigrate over the last three decades. But such snickering is misplaced. I’m reminded of an article Midge Decter wrote a few years ago about the young crowds of Catholic youths who would gather in public squares whenever the late Pope showed up, shouting, We want God! We want God! This was true of immigrants, too, and she said, “Who even knew--or what is more to the point, who even cared--whether they were Catholic or not?”

That is more to the point. I have never heard any American comment in a negative way on the overwhelming Catholicism of our Latin American immigrants. This is somewhat surprising. After all, there are organized forces in this society--such as feminists--whose interests clash with those of believing Catholics, if they stop to think about it. But no one ever did stop to think about it. And Europe behaved as we did.

Fortunately, in America the Left hasn't yet figured out just how antithetical to its values is the immigrant population. When the President got over 40% of the Latino vote in the last election you began to hear them question immigration. If Jeb Bush were to run in '08 and get over 50% the Minutemen would be joined by NARAL and the Human Rights Campaign and the rest. Ultimately though, our immigrants are simply making us more American, while Europe's stand to change it radically--quite possibly for the better.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 8, 2005 5:30 PM