IT WAS MARSHALL, NOT MORGENTHAU, WHO PERMANENTLY ENDED THE EUROPEAN PROBLEM:

Life On Venus: Europe’s Last Man (Adam Kirsch, World AffairsJournal )

[T]hen came 1989 and the end of history—or at least The End of History and the Last Man, as Francis Fukuyama put it in his influential book. It is almost always referred to simply by the first part of its title; to his critics, Fukuyama is the man who declared “the end of history,” triumphally and, needless to say, prematurely.

But the second part of the book’s title is actually more telling, and more representative of Fukuyama’s argument. No sooner had humanity emerged from a century of hot and cold wars than Fukuyama was resurrecting Nietzsche’s admonition that a world of peace and prosperity would be a world of Last Men. “The life of the last men is one of physical security and material plenty, precisely what Western politicians are fond of promising their electorates,” he pointed out. “Should we fear that we will be both happy and satisfied with our situation, no longer human beings but animals of the species homo sapiens?”

While Fukuyama appreciates the seriousness of the Nietzschean warning, he hears it from the perspective of a partisan, not a foe, of liberalism. The danger he foresees is not simply that bourgeois democracy will cause human beings to degenerate, but that degenerate human beings will be unable to preserve democracy. Without the sense of pride and the love of struggle that Fukuyama, following Plato, calls thymos, men—and there is always an implication that thymos is a specifically masculine virtue—cannot establish freedom or protect it:

It is only thymotic man, the man of anger who is jealous of his own dignity and the dignity of his fellow citizens, the man who feels that his worth is constituted by something more than the complex set of desires that make up his physical existence—it is this man alone who is willing to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers. And it is frequently the case that without such small acts of bravery in response to small acts of injustice, the larger train of events leading to fundamental changes in political and economic structures would never occur.

When Fukuyama published his book in 1992, he was specifically concerned about the loss of thymos among Americans. Today, his predictions about the debility of the post-historical world still pass for common currency among neoconservatives; what has changed, dramatically, is the consensus view about where that post-historical world can be found. The American response to the 9/11 attacks—the war on terror, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—have banished any fear that America might grow passive and debellicized. The opposite complaint is much more likely to be heard, especially from European critics of America. And partly for that reason, it is to Europe that Americans now look for examples of the Last Man. The opposition of Europeans to the Iraq War, from a neoconservative perspective, all but epitomizes the inability “to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers” that Fukuyama warned about.

This was the essence of Robert Kagan’s argument in Of Paradise and Power, published in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq War. Europe, Kagan wrote, “is turning away from power” and “entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity,” while the United States “remains mired in history.” He dwelled, in terminology purposefully reminiscent of Nietzsche and Fukuyama, on the psychological frailty, the thymotic decay, of contemporary European society. “The real question,” he writes, “is one of intangibles—of fears, passions, and beliefs.” Kagan’s much-quoted formula, “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus,” is a more or less overt accusation of European effeminacy. Or, as James Sheehan puts it, in more value-neutral terms, in Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: “The eclipse of the willingness and ability to use violence that was once so central to statehood has created a new kind of European state, firmly rooted in new forms of public and private identity and power. As a result, the European Union may become a superstate—a super civilian state—but not a superpower.”

Is it true that Western Europeans, after half a century of peace and prosperity, suffer from the kind of moral malaise that Nietzsche warned about, and that Fukuyama and Kagan diagnosed? One way to answer this question is to listen, not to American pundits, but to Europeans themselves—in particular, to their novelists. In the nineteenth century, a reader of Dostoevsky and Flaubert could have gained insights into the state of Europe that a reader of newspapers would have missed. In the twenty-first, it is at least possible that the most significant European novelists can give us similar insights. Precisely because novels are not, and should not be, political documents, they offer a less guarded, more intuitive report on the inner life of a society. And when novelists from different European countries, writing in different languages and very different styles, all seem to corroborate one another’s intuitions, it is at least fair to wonder whether a real cultural shift is under way.

The three novels I wish to consider are not, of course, anything like a representative sample of the fiction being written in Europe over the last two decades. But W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday are as distinguished and emblematic a selection as might be made. All of these writers were born in the 1940s and 1950s, and emerged as major novelists in the 1990s. In other words, they are members of the post–World War II generation, and did or are doing their most important work in the post–Cold War period. They belong to, and write about, a cosmopolitan, peaceful, unified Western Europe: McEwan (b. 1948) is English; Sebald (1944–2001), a German, spent most of his adult life in England; and Houellebecq (b. 1958), who is French, has lived in Ireland and Spain.

While all of these writers are celebrated and critically acclaimed, they in no sense form a school or movement. Houellebecq is an often-crude satirist, whose misanthropic, pornographic novels have won him a scandalous reputation. (The most recent of many affaires Houellebecq came last year, when his own mother attacked him in viciously personal terms for misrepresenting her in his fiction.) He could not be more different from Sebald, who had a considerable reputation as a literary scholar before he began to publish a series of unclassifiable books—hybrids of fiction, memoir, and history—in the 1990s. Sebald’s melancholy works were immediately acclaimed in Germany and then in the United States, and before he died, in a car accident, at the age of 57, he was often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. McEwan has been at the center of the English literary world since the 1970s, but he has emerged in the last decade as probably the best novelist of his generation, on the strength of books like Amsterdam and Atonement. The New Statesman has described him as “the closest thing we have to a ‘national novelist.’”

Three more different writers could hardly be invented. Which makes it all the more suggestive, I think, that their portraits of the spiritual state of contemporary Europe are so powerfully complementary. They show us a Europe that is cosmopolitan, affluent, and tolerant, enjoying all the material blessings that human beings have always struggled for, and that the Europeans of seventy years ago would have thought unattainable. Yet these three books are also haunted by intimations of belatedness and decline, by the fear that Europe has too much history behind it to thrive. They suggest currents of rage and despair coursing beneath the calm surface of society, occasionally erupting into violence. And they worry about what will happen when a Europe, gorged on historical good fortune, must defend itself against an envious and resentful world.