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May 15, 2005

"The great Continental fatalistic shrug...."

Just over a year ago, in one of those wretched Security Council performances before the Gulf War, the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, turned to Colin Powell and offered the umpteenth variation of the familiar argument that, if we Europeans are resistant to ze idea of war, it is because we have seen so much of ze horrors of ze war. The reality is the other way round: the reason they’ve seen so much of the horrors of war is because they’re so resistant to the idea of it - until it’s too late and conflagration is all that’s left.

If one had to cast the great Continental fatalistic shrug in a less jaded light, one would do it this way: the Second Republics and Third Empires, Fascists and Communists and European Unions come and go; they’re mere political forces. The ancient buildings, the old vineyards, the big stinky unpasteurised cheese your village has made for centuries and which the wimps at that Yankee Federal agency responsible for regulating all the taste out of American food won’t even let into the country: this is the essence of a man’s identity; the political fashions of the day come and go, but underneath you endure. By contrast, an American’s sense of himself as an American is much more explicitly political – it’s about First and Second Amendments, or, according to taste, a “woman’s right to choose”. The United States is a political project in a way that Spain – imperial, Fascist, monarchist, republican, pacifist, Euro-federalist, your-ideology-here-ist – isn’t.

They’re right in a way. For most Communist or Nazi foot-soldiers, the label was a flag of convenience. But that’s not true of the jihadi. And the tragedy for the Continent is that this time it’s their core identity that’s at stake. If you think that Spanish election result is a disgrace, look down the road two or three years, to the next election cycle, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands. In the US, psephologists speculate on the impact of Ralph Nader’s two or three per cent. Think about an election where 20% of the voters are a culturally unassimilated Muslim bloc. If Washington has a hard time getting any useful contribution to the war from Europe now, you do the math five years hence. The incompatible buddy-cop routine works in Starsky & Hutch, but America and Europe have stretched the formula way beyond breaking point. It can’t be put back together.

"Starsky and Putsch," by Mark Steyn, National Review, March 29, 2004

Posted at May 15, 2005 05:59 PM | Categories: Pundits

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