HELP PORTUGAL RESIST! --A follow-up:
...Another similarity is the equally striking upsurge in EU life of large, fast-growing non-European immigrant communities, large numbers of them from Islamic countries (in Britain there are also large numbers of Hindus and West Indians, and in Holland Indonesians, while in Southern Europe it's mainly North African Arabs or, in Italy, Albanians and Yugoslav refugees: in Northern Europe, there are lots of Yugoslavs and other Southeast Europeans, while Germany has a big Turkish population).
This, as the notes indicate, is putting strains on the traditional ethnic nationalisms on the Continent, where citizenship was seen as a matter of having descended from family to family over the generations (Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Holland until recently, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece). Even in France, the one EU country with strong civic nationalism---going back to the revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity)---the nationalism has been of a strong unitary type until recently: lots of immigrants have come to France over the generations and been absorbed, but on condition that they learn good French and assimilate quickly to French life, rather than create foreign enclaves in France. This reflects partly the divisions within French life, going back to the revolutionary tradition, with strong counterrevolutionary tendencies as well (between 1789 and today, there've been something like 12 different political systems, including 5 Republics, two imperial systems, three monarchies, including the absolutist Bourbon monarchy that collapsed in 1789 . . . followed by the king's beheading, a Vichy-occupied Nazi collaborator, and a 4th Republic that collapsed in the face of a military rebellion out of Algeria in 1958, which brought de Gaulle to power and led to the installation of the French 5th Rep, the existing mixed-Presidential-Parliamentary system today). It also reflects strong regionalism on the periphery in France, and a fear of internal disintegration: hence the 3rd Republic created, back in the 1870s and 80s, a mandatory educational system for the first time in which the majority of French citizens, who didn't speak French at home---in Britanny, Corsica, throughout the South, including Provence and the Savoy area-- which was strongly anti-clerical and bent on creating a unified French nation. The struggle with the Catholic church was ended at the turn of the century, with
its dis-establishment as the state-religion, and even then the Catholic church and most voters were strongly conservative or reactionary until changes that occurred in the small resistance movement of WWII (Catholics, liberals, anti-clerics, socialists, and communist along with Gaullists of all stripes), and even more in the 4th republic. For a while there was even an explicit progressive Christian Democratic Party, the MRP, which disappeared in the late 1950s.
Britain has evolved, in evolutionary fashion---everything since the tumultuous and violent 17th century (a civil war, a beheading of a king, a puritan fanatical republic, another king deposed peacefully, Dutch royalty brought in as the monarchy in 1689, is evolutionary and incremental.---into a civic semi-multicultural nationalism that embraced England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (the South, the vast majority of Irish Catholics, struggled for independence and achieved it, violently, in 1922---the sole exception to the evolutionary process); but the arrival of large numbers of Pakistani, Indian Hindus, and West Indians created new challenges, and Britain today is multicultural in numerous respects, without however fully solving the problems that such a switch imposes. For a while, it even had a National Front Party like the French, but its electoral system discourages splinter parties (a simple first-past-the-post constituency system of voting). Recently, it has created local parliaments in Scotland and Wales (England: about 47 million, Scotland about 7, Wales about 1 million---less really--and Northern Ireland about 2 million).
From these viewpoints, the similarities between an immigrant, multicultural America (which also once had a Wasp-dominant elite, but which stresses learning English and subscribing to the US constitution, a pre-requisite of citizenship) and West Europe have grown markedly: a decline in class structured life in the EU (without disappearing especially in some countries) and the rise of large, fast-growing immigrant communities, along with the political tensions and conflicts these generate.
[...]
On the differences, we explained in class last month why industrial societies are more statist or less---we're much less---which in this case divides the EU continentals from the US and to a large extent the English too (who once had a big welfare state and shook a fair amount of it off in Mrs. Thatcher's time, followed by the Australians and New Zealanders, with the Irish following much of an Anglo-American model too). Some combo of four circumstances, historically, explains this.
On ideological differences, we raced through this at the end of yesterday. The blanks are easy to fill in from the lecture outline.
The narrow US ideological spectrum runs, essentially, between left-wing and right-wing liberalism, with the latter called conservatism here (which mixes both libertarian and moral majority types, as well as moderates from northern states). No socialist traditions, no Christian democracy or other paternalistic conservatism (which still finds some home in the broad British conservative party, along with Thacherite libertarian or liberal traditions), let alone fascism, right-wing extremism etc. Note that when David Duke, the neo-Nazi, ran for office in Louisiana, he didn't campaign on a hate platform: he claimed, rightly or wrongly---obviously, the former---to be reformed, a born-again Christian (even his campaign manager quit before the election, saying it was all hokum). We tried to account for the absence of socialism: a much higher wage for US workers in the 19th century (which is why millions of poor Europeans came here), much greater geographical and even occupational mobility, a much more even distribution of property (thanks to homesteading) and hence a much larger middle class property-owning tradition, and a divided working-class along ethnic lines, all combined to inhibit a class-based socialist party, along with the early franchise of the white working class as democratic voters (completed in the Jacksonian period, if not earlier). None of these conditions existed on the Continent of Europe, all of whom were late-industrializers to one degree or another (much later in East and Southern Europe), and where capitalism was resisted mightily on both the left and right: the working class itself had to fight to get trade union legality and a democratic franchise, and were early organized by Marxist intellectuals and bureaucrats, even in the trade unions. Later, after the Russian Rev, the left-wing parties split into Communist and Social Democratic Parties, with the former hardly existent in Scandinavia or Holland or Britain (which had a Labour Party only in 1900, never an explicit Marxist Social democratic party, and which never embraced a notion of class conflict); and in Latin Europe, anarchism and syndicalism---a spontaneous hatred of the boss-classes, with a belief in direct organized general strikes to overthrow the system---had lots of followers in the interwar period too.
Since the end of WWII, all the Social democratic parties have renounced their explicit socialist goals of nationalization, opted for moderate centrist policies (Mitterrand's socialist rhetoric of 1981-82 spluttered into nothing in France), and are pillars of a strong welfare state even as, in Jospin's and Schroeder's case, they are covertly trying to enhance the competitiveness of their firms in capitalist ways. Even then, the welfare state consensus hems in open change, as it does throughout the Continent.
A right-wing conservatism, paternalist, partly anti-capitalism, with strong emphasis on local community, law and order, hierarchy, and paternalistic welfarism to overcome class tensions, also is absent from the US.
The simplest reason? All these parties in Europe, even the Tory wing of the Conservative British party, are rooted in pre-industrial, pre-democratic life (feudal traditions were strong in much of the Continent, especially the east and south, right through the 19th century). An added twist is found in Christian democratic parties that flourish in Catholic Europe (though the Italian party, the largest in Italy in the cold war period, more or less self-destructed because of its vast corruption: maybe the German CDU will follow suit): the Catholic church opposed both liberalism and socialism and modern democracy right through the 19th century as destructive of tradition, hierarchy, custom, and religion; and clerical and anti-clerical struggles were intense throughout Latin Europe and parts of East Europe that were Catholic too. Franco and many of the right-wing authoritarian, militarized regimes in East Europe in the 1930s were called clerical-fascists, though the term is pretty broad, and even in Spain the Francoist movement, which overthrew the Republic in a bloody civil war with the aid of Mussolini and Hitler (Stalin ended up the main aid of the Republic, destroying much of the socialist-anarchist independence), fascism was never the main current. After WWII, these Christian democratic parties emerged as supporters of a strong statist welfarism even as they also embrace and get moderate liberal votes. (Much of Haider's support in Austria, his freedom party, comes not just from xenophobes, but also from moderates sick of the extensive, patronage-filled statism in Austrian life.)
In France, the right is dominated by an explicit nationalist movement founded by General de Gaulle, the leader of Free France after 1945. He was the first President of the 4th Republic, but soon resigned (1947, I believe) to protest the return of parliamentary politics and weak coalition executives, going into self-imposed exile in Lorraine, along the German-Belgium border. An explicit Gaullist party was then formed, and in 1958, when the 4th Republic collapsed owing to the Algerian imperial war and the mutiny of the French military there, de Gaulle came back to power, wrote
quickly a new constitution (with his first PM) that created a very powerful presidency (in 1962 or 63 it was reinforced by a move, judged unconstitutional by the conseil constitutionnel, to elect the president every 7 years by universal suffrage: de Gaulle was the first President, then resigned in 1969, followed by his protégé [Pompidou], then a moderate centrist (Giscard), then Mitterrand on the left (14 years, 2 terms), and now Chirac on the right since 1995, with a socialist-communist-green government, dominated by socialists, heading the cabinet and dominating the parliament. Gaullism is an explicit French nationalism that has succeeded in developing a strong nationalist current in all of French life, left and right, that stresses a great role for France in Europe and the world, opposes excessive Americanization (or Anglo-Saxon influences, it comes as a surprise to lots of Americans that they're Anglo-Saxon), promotes national unity, stands for a strong centrist state (despite some changes in the last 20 years here), and seeks to protect and promote French culture in the world. In Britain, the right is dominated, by contrast, by Thacherite Conservatism, and Tony Blair's New Labour is pretty accommodating to it.
Something else. In parts of the EU---especially Austria, France, Belgium, and to an extent Italy, with echoes elsewhere---a right-wing xenophobia, anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-American extreme-right has emerged, the French National Front (now divided into two competing parties) the best known, though now crowed out of the headlines by the Austrian Freedom party. It plays on European fears of change in a globalizing world, an integrating Europe, a shift in demography (immigrants), worries about traditional morality, and worries about crime (which is on the sharp increase everywhere in Europe: only homicide distinguishes the US from the Europeans on this score, with the homicide rate 5-6 times higher here than there, and even among Americans of European descent it's about twice as high: one serious study found that the European-American rate was actually lower, drawing on Interpol statistics about four years ago, but that seemed to be a mistake, with those statistics in Europe mixing in both actual and attempted homicide. Rape, robbery, muggings are as high if not higher in large parts of Europe, corruption in the South is much higher, and burglaries and car-theft are actually considerably higher in SOME countries. That said, lots of Europeans continue to regard the US as an essentially lawless place, with gun-nuts everywhere; and lately, at least in France and Germany and Italy, there has been a lot of attention paid to US capital punishment and executions.
The remaining three differences that separate the US and the EU democracies are easy to follow in the outline:
1. Religion, especially Protestant evangelical religion, runs much deeper in American life. No surprise there. Most of the immigrants who came here were fleeing religious persecution, from the Puritans and Quakers onward, right through the Irish Catholics (fleeing poverty too), Armenians fleeing persecution in the Ottoman empire, Jews fleeing anti-Semitism rife in Europe, especially in Czarist Russia; and the fastest growing religions are the evangelical ones (and not just in the US). By contrast, it isn't an exaggeration to say that West Europe is essentially in a post-religious phase: very secular, very indifferent to religion, with most Europeans never doing much religiously save being baptized, married in a church (though marriage is sharply on decline in Northern Europe, much more so than here even), and being buried with religious rites. Something like the moral majority, therefore, has no equivalent in Europe, and Europeans have enormous trouble in making sense of the American attachment to religion or see it as hypocritical or intolerant (it's neither).
2. the US is a much more commercialized society. That's pretty evident, and for fairly obvious reasons: capitalism was never resisted on the left or right in this country (though there has always been a relatively non-ideological, powerful populism that hates big business, elitism, and big government), we pioneered mass affluence and advertising and easy credit (1920s on), and the media were privatized early in this country, right or wrong. By contrast, European societies in the 19th and early 20th were much more hierarchical and elitist, the traditional elites, especially intellectuals, opposed capitalism and commercialism, and there has of course been strong left-wing parties opposing it too. As the outline shows, the markers of commercialization are easy to pin down. As it also shows, there is a good side to it as well as bad (the flip-side is that without established hierarchies, or with the Wasp hierarchy under retreat in the early 20th century on, Americans could easily absorb and allow for rapid upward mobility of all sorts of new, non-Wasp groups). The differences on these scores, it should be added, were more noticeably in the 1950s than now, with the European countries becoming more commercialized too, though the differences remain and create a mental gulf that's probably enduring.
Much of the dynamism and rife inventiveness in American life of all sorts derives from the more open, mass nature of American society . . . as well as the more rife commercialism and vulgarity.
You know something? Maybe you can't have it both ways.
Certainly, something has dried up in European creativity, it seems, in the last half century (Britain the odd-man-out, with musical, theatrical, and painting vitality it never had in the past . . . unless you go back in the theater to the Elizabethans.) It's hard to find an important French novelist or short-story writer or poet or dramatist in the last half century, since the death of the great Albert Camus (a novelist of the first order), and the great spurt of French creativity in films associated with the new wave of the 1960s---inspired by the American cinema and in turn influencing the great American cinema directors of the 70s and 80s---quickly dried up too, as did the equally impressive Italian cinema. Bergman, one of the great directors of all time, is an old guy now, and the once laudable Swedish cinema seems to have withered too. For a while the German cinema did well in the 1970s and early 1980s, generating an inventive energy not seen since the great German cinemasts of the 1920s fled Hitler (with the exception of the Hitler-idolator, Lili Riffenstahl), and their great post-war novelists, especially Boell and Grass, either died or stopped doing major work. Austria, a great fount of intellectual and scientific and cultural activity early in the century, has become a terribly provincial place living on memories. There were also, besides its great cinema in the first 3 decades after WWII, some impressive Italian novelists an dramatists, but God knows what happened to them (most were part of the small Italian Jewish community, and maybe something's gone wrong there).
What the reasons behind this flagging creative cultural spirit happen to be aren't clear, just the opposite. For what it's worth as someone who has studied and taught in the English, French, Swiss, and German systems, I suspect that educational systems that were once elitist that try to stuff the same curriculum down the throats of a relatively bored, captive young population, the system all test-driven, play a major role---but that's only a hunch. I can add that both French and German are mandarin languages, which make it very hard for the average German or Frenchman to write the language with confidence: from an early age, they're always looking over their shoulders at some critic, an actual teacher or an imaginary audience, who will mock them for making one grammatical or spelling mishap after another.
Spelling in French and German is actually grammatical, the languages being inflected, with German especially so, having three cases---masculine, feminine, and neuter---that have to be conjugated just right: Der Spiegel, the leading German weekly, once administered a 300-word dictation to the
Minister of Education in Bonn, a Ph.D., and he made about 40 errors. Of course, the dictation was full of tricks, but the point was made: the language is hard to master, especially for average people. The German government tried, not long ago, to simplify spelling and some related grammar, only to run into huge protests from the talky intellectuals, who
forced a big retreat. In France, the Académie Française and the government together seem paranoid on the whole subject of English influences---English is about 40% Latin-French owing to Norman influences, and nobody smokes Gaulloises or eats snails as a result---and meanwhile, average French kids
struggle to overcome the huge gap between the way French is spoken on the streets and written in the school system. A British teacher in a French lycée when I ran the Bordeaux EAP program in the mid-70s wrote a letter in to Le Monde, the big intellectual daily there, which was having an ongoing debate about American-English influences ("franglais"); and he noted from his experience that an average American or Briton would write a letter to a newspaper 10 times more readily than an average Frenchman, fearful of some minor grammatical mistake. I myself, lecturing all the time, didn't mind, and when I wrote letters and memos in French, I let them be reviewed by our
chief French administrator, a cordial, bright guy with a college degree (his dad had been a lycee grammarian), and you know what? He and his assistant would get in long battles about this or that minor point concerning a verb
conjugation, with no resolution; and so I learned early on to ignore these tiny peccadilloes and write with confidence, it being obvious that even very educated Frenchmen aren't sure about these minor worrying matters that trip up so many average Frenchmen . . . who are otherwise, in speech, very
articulate, I can tell you.
Anyway, let's hope that the fairly arid period in European culture, save for Britain, is a passing phase, which will change for the better in the future. A world of one-way cultural influence is hardly something to be welcomed, just the opposite.
3. Finally, the attachment to a global role has by now rooted itself deeply in the minds of most American educated elites, and the end of the cold war has overcome most of the gulf that divided the left and right in this country on anti-Communism since the Vietnam war. Most of the American
people, polls show, still favor a large global role too.
And in Europe? Probably, again according to polls, only French elites still aspire to a great power role (through EU cooperation), but the concerns about growing gaps in power and technology and cultural influence between the EU and the
US are clearly on the upswing everywhere in the EU, and one can only expect that over time this will create new, if tractable, tensions in US-EU relations.
In the end, if you ask---which democratic countries do "better" in politics, creativity, and the ways of life---there's no easy answer. We do some things better than them, and vice versa. It'd be nice to have the French train system (I'm a train-nut), the Italian flair for style, the
traditional Scandanavian civic discipline, traditional British police who didn't have to carry guns, so great was respect for the law in the country (this has changed, alas), Italian and Spanish food (American food has, fortunately, grown far more diverse and tasty since the 1950s, with young
cooks galore all over the country opening restaurants), the French and German respect for intellectual achievement (the French name their streets after both writers and artists as well as politicians and generals), and so on . . . while retaining the fluidity and openness of American life, its
creativity and dynamic energies, its lack of elites telling you how to live your life, and its fortunate lack of too much bureaucracy, along with the strong artistic and scholarly traditions that the country has nourished from
the beginning, but which have especially flourished since 1918. All this would be a nice amalgam, but life doesn't unfold in ideal ways, far from it, and we have to adapt to the world as it is. I personally am happy to live in the US, feel very grateful to the generosity, decency, tolerance, and democratic nature of the American people, and am convinced that we are by far a huge benign force in the world, though as I've repeatedly noted, in these lectures, we'd be better off still if the EU could reinvigorate itself
economically, united more coherently, and relieve us of a lot of burdens we shouldn't be carrying, including a huge occupational force in parts of the Balkans. Had the US been as energetically active and as powerful in the interwar period, maybe, just maybe, the worst horrors of WWII could have been avoided (though there could have been no living peacefully in a world with Nazis, fascists, and Japanese militarists running crazy all over Asia and turning it into a charnal house on a vast scale.)
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