Brexit, Euro 2016, and the Past and Future of Europe

Oh, no—I wasn’t referring to the Brits and Brexit, but the Russians and the UEFA European Championship, which involves the top 24 national soccer teams in Europe playing for the title of the continent’s best every four years.

The tournament’s group stage ended last week, and the Russians were vanquished, which seems to have made everyone here happy since their fans were eager to prove they’re the toughest, nastiest hooligans in the world. Maybe it should come as no surprise that they’re often deployed by the Putin government. “Sometimes fans call us the Kremlin’s billy club,” said one thug following mass soccer riots in Moscow in 2010.

The European Championship, nicknamed Euro 2016 for short, is now down to the round of 16. France beat Ireland Sunday afternoon to get into the quarterfinals, and the city partied like Cleveland, with cars honking horns, and large bands of drunken, albeit friendly, guys with their faces painted red, white, and blue singing and chanting. Ireland will be missed, however, since they seem to have charmed the French. Late Saturday night I watched a group of Irishmen team up with French fans to sing a rousing 3 a.m. rendition of La Marseillaise—a beautiful friendship, it seems.

One of the surprise teams is Wales, which features the super speedy and powerful Gareth Bale. I watched them defeat Northern Ireland Saturday afternoon with a Lebanese friend, Van, and a couple of Welshmen, Gus and Owen, in what’s become Paris’s trendy eleventh arrondissement. We sat outside on the sidewalk watching the game on a big-screen TV with a few dozen people. I wondered why soldiers were coming and going in the apartment building next door, and a friend explained it was a Jewish school. Every Jewish site, whether it’s a synagogue, community center, or school, is heavily guarded.

“One of the misimpressions of last November’s attacks is that the Bataclan was not a Jewish target,” the novelist Marc Weitzmann told me. Weitzmann’s book on the situation of French Jews, Hate, will be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2017. “But the Bataclan was very high on the list of Jewish targets—in fact a militant of Jaysh al-Islam had named the Bataclan as ‘Jewish owned’ to a French police officer during an interview as far back as 2009. Among other things, the venue had hosted a benefit for the IDF. So this fact was lost. When the Islamists were hitting obviously Jewish targets, the implicit rationale in France was, first, you Jews cry too much when you’re hurt. Besides, there is Israel, so it makes some kind of sense; you had it coming. Now that ‘non-Jewish’ targets have been hit, people are saying, ‘It’s all of us, why are you Jews being so particularist?'”

The Wales game was a scoreless tie until late in the second half, when Bale launched a cross from the left side that a Northern Ireland defender unwittingly kicked into his own net for an own goal.

“Own goal” is how my Welsh companions described the Brexit vote. They’re both worried about what it means for the Labour party, which has failed what they see as its core working-class constituency that voted to leave Europe. They insisted that the entirely wrong approach would be for those who voted Remain to contemn the Leave voters, which would further divide an already fractured polity. Owen was also concerned that the U.K.’s exit from Europe would leave the rest of the continent vulnerable to Vladimir Putin.

The same might be said of the U.K., where the former mayor of London Boris Johnson is a leading candidate to replace David Cameron as head of the Conservative party and therefore prime minister. Johnson was one of the chief advocates for leaving Europe, and if his rhetoric was in the vein of Churchill and Thatcher, it’s hard not to conclude his mind lacks their humane clarity. Johnson thinks (mistakenly, I believe) the U.K. needs to deal with Putin to stop ISIS, but that’s no reason to heap praise on Bashar al-Assad for liberating the classical ruins of Palmyra. When a leading U.K. political figure lauds Assad for saving ancient statuary from ISIS, an Oriental despot who has killed hundreds of thousands of human beings, it is a pretty good indication that something is off in London.

It’s not entirely clear the French have made up their minds on the Brexit vote yet, though we might get a better sense of that according to how fans will respond to the England team when it takes the field Monday against Iceland. An English friend flying in from New York overheard an Air France flight attendant nonchalantly explaining that now France will just allow all the refugees it’s warehoused in Calais to cross the channel. Classic French sangfroid is certainly one way to express displeasure.

I saw the writer Michel Gurfinkiel, who did not reminisce about May 1968, explaining how he was probably the only 20 year old at the time not to get swept up in the excitement of that Paris spring. “It was two things. First, I’d just started reading William F. Buckley,” said the essayist who identifies himself as one of France’s few genuine conservatives. “And then, just a few months before I’d read Sentimental Education.” For Gurfinkiel, Flaubert’s novel of the 1848 revolution helped shine an ironic light on the events of 1968, an exercise in utopian politics that in retrospect is hard to believe anyone took seriously. But they did, and it was perhaps only the edifice of Cold War American power that kept it from turning into a bloodbath, and prevented France from being pulled into the Soviet orbit.

Gurfinkiel and I were sitting in Café de Flore, one of two famous cafes on Boulevard Saint-Germain, the other being Les Deux Magots, just a few doors down. The latter spot was Sartre’s favorite hang-out, while the former hosted figures like Georges Bataille and other apostles of the literature of purgative violence that was supposed to cleanse France in particular and Western civilization in general of the sins that had led it to slaughter many tens of millions in the first half of the 20th century. Or maybe the proposed blood-letting wasn’t supposed to wash away anything—perhaps it was just an elegant conceit promising to continue the destruction, but this time full of meaning.

Looking at the photographs of the various intellectuals and celebrities who’ve patronized Café De Flore, it occurred to me that during the Cold War every check here and next door was covered by America, in particular by the many millions of young American servicemen and women who rotated through Europe to protect the continent from the Red Army. Sartre and Co. sang the praises of Stalin and his successors, as well as the USSR’s Third World assets, a luxury afforded them thanks to the same America for which they expressed total contempt.

That this is no longer the default position of the French elite owes partly to the fall of the Soviet Union, but also the assiduous work of American policymakers who spent the last 70 years convincing Paris, as well as the rest of the continent, that there was such a thing as Europe, and it was worth saving. In reality, European states had set out on a 30-year war of apocalyptic destruction, and the rebuilding of the continent was an entirely American idea. Bataille, Michel Leiris, and others wanted to torch what remained. Sartre wanted to hand it over to the politburo.

America’s Europe was born not only of self-interest but also sentiment. The tastes and ideas of the 19th-century rising American elite documented by Henry James were popularized by American soldiers after they’d buried their countrymen on the battlefields of World War I. Never before had the Grand Tour cost so dearly, which only proved there was a Europe, because young Americans had fought for it. With World War II, Europe was put in receivership. Germany would serve as the front line in the Cold War, because no country so richly deserved to be a deadly frontier, and Paris, as Weitzmann argued to me several years ago, became the ideological battleground.

It is here, in spite of the intellectual fashions of the post-War period, where the idea of the West was forged, an idea that legitimized American Cold War leadership over something we chose to describe as a long tradition unifying certain peoples and standing for principles of liberty and the individual that started in Jerusalem, gathered steam in Athens, and was revived in America: Western civilization. The Brexit vote then was not simply a protest vote about jobs, immigration, and sovereignty, it was also a referendum on American leadership.

After first warning that leaving Europe will put the U.K. in the back of the line, Obama now says that Brexit will not affect the special relationship. The concern, of course, was never really about London, but rather the rest of Europe, where the U.K. was partly an American surrogate, or how we worked to pull the rest of Europe in our direction. Obama never saw it this way, but rather was keen to have our European allies prove they could pull their own weight, especially in Libya. When they couldn’t, he called them “free-riders”—which was effectively a dare for them to strike out on their own.

They’ve started the process now, perhaps marking the end of Europe, and the beginning of something else. The rise of Putinism across the continent shows that the attraction of the Soviet empire was not really about the Communist idea at all, or brotherhood, or solidarity. Put simply, it’s just some sort of gravitational force in the other direction, against us, yet another a variation of anti-Americanism. What exactly is it? A slave mentality? The signs are not good. It does not augur well, for instance, for a society that has to protect its Jews and resents having to do so. But before we know what it’s against, we’ll have to figure out again what we’re for.