A Continent Made Up of Nations

Well, up to a point. A great deal of what makes life congenial is a sequence of little white lies–I think it looks fine, no one will notice, I respect your position–and diplomatic language is the expression of hard truths in soft phraseology. But no statesman should misunderstand the equation: Whatever is said for public consumption should seldom be mistaken for private conviction. And European unity is one of those instances where diplomacy–general agreement on compatible principles–was taken much too seriously for its own good. The little white lie, in effect, was believed.

It is not difficult to understand why, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, Europe’s wise men should have put their faith in some kind of European political league. The unification of Germany had so destabilized the balance of power in Europe that, three times in the previous 80 years, the continent had been ripped apart by war. No one, surveying the wreckage of the British Empire, the weakness of France’s Fourth Republic, and the armies of refugees and displaced persons–not to say the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the rubble of German cities–would have argued that the cure for Europe’s incessant civil wars was the exaltation of individual nation-states. So what began as an effort in joint economic recovery–the Coal and Steel Community, the Common Market–was, in due course, transformed into a utopian, all-encompassing ideal.

For its part, the United States had every reason to pay lip service to European unity. The Marshall Plan was never intended to be a permanent subsidy to postwar Europe, and the Soviet Union was a common adversary. So long as the nations of Western Europe were rebuilding their economies and threatened by nuclear war, European unity made strategic sense. No doubt, President Eisenhower wished that a “United States of Europe” might prevent a recurrence of the tragic conflict that had both tested him and made him famous, but there is no evidence to suggest he believed it would really happen. He knew how difficult it was to maintain harmony within a democratic, English-speaking alliance, much less across ancient borders and customs. For him, as for all subsequent presidents until 1991, NATO was the European union that mattered.

Yet even at the dawn of the European movement, the elements of subsequent discord were evident. Writing in the late 1950s about Robert Schuman, the French premier and foreign minister, Dean Acheson noticed that “as one studies all the French-inspired postwar proposals looking toward the unification of Western Europe . . . one sees that the power–and very possibly the right–to secede remains in the various states. Even short of that, it is not always apparent how decisions of the organizations could be enforced against strong and determined dissidents.” Moreover, France, especially under General de Gaulle, conceived of the Union not so much as a European initiative, but a French, or perhaps Franco-German, project to isolate Britain and challenge its fellow “Anglo-Saxon” power, the United States. This makes sense from a French point of view, but is not necessarily in the interests of Europe.

Still, the French, in their way, have been admirably candid. Given the size and economic dominance of Germany on the continent, it has been said that belief in the European Union allows Germans, for the first time in their modern history, to be both good Germans and good Europeans. For France, however, the E.U. has been more problematic: Since it does not bestride Europe in the way Germany does, France has chosen to attach itself to Germany diplomatically while dominating the E.U. bureaucratically.

Which, in the end, has led to the recent votes in France and the Netherlands on the E.U. constitution. The European idea has always been a nice proposition, and a pleasant nostrum for the State Department; but once we move beyond the corridors in Brussels, or the language of transatlantic diplomacy, or examine it apart from French and German realpolitik, it is plain to see how deeply estranged European political unity is from reality. The United States of America was a federation of ex-English colonies united by common language, religion, law, and customs–and, lest we forget, divided on principle between 1861 and 1865. Europe is a continent divided by language, religion, law, nationality, customs, cuisine, and a thousand other obvious historic distinctions and differences. An Englishman may acknowledge that he is a “European” in the planetary sense–as opposed to, say, an “American”–but sees little resemblance between himself and a European citizen of, say, Spain or Hungary. As the Marxists discovered in 1914, the national identities of Europeans mean more to individuals than any economic dogma or synthetic alliance, let alone one tied together in the bundle of a 485-page constitution.

One irony, of course, is that the fierce American advocacy of Turkish membership in the E.U. might well have tipped the balance and upset the edifice of Europe’s little white lie. The average French shopkeeper, or Dutch mechanic, might have had misgivings about making common cause with Britons or Greeks, but the prospect of Turkey–gigantic, Muslim, impoverished, oriental–was absurd beyond Brussels’s capacity to see.

So nationalism lives. Sixty years after the end of World War II, Europe has reason to be worried about the impulses that lurk within nations; but such impulses are not invariably destructive, nor can they be willed away by consensus. The end of the Cold War was not the end of history, but the resumption of history, and the disintegration of any empire is chaotic. The European Union works in certain ways: It has kept the peace among traditional enemies, rewarded German democracy, generated wealth, and given states on its periphery an ideal to emulate. But there are limits to Europe’s unity, and history means more than any regulation.

Philip Terzian is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.