The European Sisyphus

Essays On Europe, 19641994

Stanley Hoffmann

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367291907
• eBook ISBN: 9781000301168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Bringing together all of Stanley Hoffmann's significant essays on the development and difficulties of European integration, this collection highlights the intractability of the divisions that plagued the European Union from its very beginning. Just as the process of integration has displayed the same ambiguities, hesitations, and failings over the

Part One
Europe's Identity

1
Europe's Identity Crisis: Between the Past and America

Europe today is prosperous and disunited. What it will be like tomorrow remains a mystery—both because disunity results from conflicting assumptions about Europe's future, and because prosperity tends to become an end in itself. Europe today has no clear identity, no profile other than that which a process of industrialization and a process of economic integration have given it. Europe today has no sense of direction and purpose; this essay laments its absence and calls for its rebirth.*

But one cannot be asked to choose his future unless it is first established that freedom of choice exists. The point of this essay is to show that Europe's freedom of choice has been destroyed neither by the advent of industrial society nor by the evolution of world affairs. There is no "determinism" of the economic and social system. Nor has a new "European identity" been fully shaped by the European communities. And yet many Europeans behave as if the future course of Europe had been set, and many Americans believe it too. Whereas the former are divided between happy resignation and bitter protest, the latter show pride and some complacency. There is no justification for either of their attitudes.

One factor is involved in both processes which many see as inhibiting Europe's freedom: Europe's relationship with the United States. This essay is an attempt to explore this relationship. Since 1945 it has been one of double dependence, internal and external. The internal dimension of dependence has been called "Americanization." European societies have been transformed by the eruption of the age of mass consumption. Of course other terms, such as modernization or industrialization, could be used; but "Americanization" for several reasons applies. It was the United States which preached the gospel of prosperity and which goaded the Europeans into creating the institutions that would usher in the new age. It is the United States which serves as the model for the "new Europeans"—the businessmen back from productivity tours, or the shrewd fabricators of mass culture, or the party propagandists who look for inspiration on Madison Avenue, or the scientists and social scientists who envy, learn and use American theories and techniques. It is in the context of liberal policies, rather than in a framework of totalitarianism and public property, that the economic and social revolution has taken place. The external dimension shows dependence in a less intellectual and far more classical sense. For the first time in modern history, Western Europe has become a stake in the international competition, and its role in the world has been reduced to that of a protectorate of an extra-European power. To be sure the protector has been benevolent, often self-denying and inordinately generous; but this changes only the edge, not the essence, of the relationship. Thus, were it not for America's presence, one could hardly speak of Western Europe as an entity: to the extent to which Europe has a face, it is a borrowed one.

It is therefore not surprising that a mirage should have bloomed in the vision many Americans and Europeans have of Europe's future. It is the picture of a European society increasingly similar in its institutions, behavior and values to the "American model" of industrial society; of a European entity gradually growing into a federation, speaking in world affairs with a single voice, which, because of the very identity of Europe's outlook and interests with America's would use orthodox "Atlantic" language. This essay, in discussing Europe's freedom of choice, tries to show that such a picture may well be a mirage. Internally, an "American" Europe need not be Europe's future. There are enough differences between Europe's and America's industrial societies to feed and to preserve a separate identity—if the Europeans so desire. Externally, an Atlantic Europe is not likely to be Europe's future; but there is a choice between a "European" Europe if the quest for a new European role in the world succeeds and no united Europe at all if it fails. Thus, as much as a call to the Europeans, this essay pretends to be a warning to Americans. Being free, the former ought to think and act for themselves. Being different, the latter should not expect Europe to become America's twin.

I. "Americanization" with a Difference

The "Americanization" of Western Europe is not a mere cliché. It is a fact recently documented by Dædalus.¹ Economic expansion, higher wages, a peasantry whose numbers dwindle and whose production grows, classes that are less different from and feel less hostile to each other, a "service class" on the rise, a drive for mass education, the "end of ideology" in political life, intellectuals reconverted from tragedy to expertise, collective bargaining with the participation of "technocrats" instead of deliberations by a political class of leisurely generalists: all of this does indeed make Europe much more like the United States. Had Dœdalus included in its issue studies of the new public role of the Catholic Church, the transformation of the family, the phenomenal progress of "mass culture," it would have become even more obvious that Tocqueville's prophecy of the democratic age has come true at last. What Tocqueville did not realize was that egalitarian society would triumph in Europe only after the spread of material prosperity. Nor did he see that those voluntary associations without which he thought liberalism would perish from the twin dangers of social conformity and political centralization would in fact grow out of an industrialization that proceeds in the framework of liberal democracy.

And yet industrial society in Europe may remain quite different from America's, for a reason Tocqueville would have well understood. He knew that a single type of society can be ruled by opposite types of regimes. He knew that the face of the polity in the democratic age is shaped by the relations between classes and the state in the predemocratic age. He would have realized that Europe's current emancipation from its past cannot help being shaped by that past—a past entirely different from America's. There are three areas of significant differences. First, there is the problem of the polity: America's industrial democracy was a creation; Europe's industrial society involves a conversion of the previous order. Second, there is the problem of historical conscience: the United States, on the whole, is at peace with itself; Europe's transformation entails a catharsis. In each of these areas, America's originality is double; not only does the American experience diverge from Europe's as a whole, but America's is single, whereas Europe's is fragmented into separate national experiences. Finally, and as a result, there is the problem of beliefs. America's growth is rooted in a creed; Europe's revolution unfolds amidst the repudiation of past creeds.

Creation vs. Conversion

Tocqueville saw the United States long before the age of mass consumption. Yet much in his description remains valid. Obviously, industrial society in America has been affected by the network of pre-existing institutions, laws, customs and values more than it has affected this network. The ideal type of advanced industrial society or that of capitalism tells us little. They are liquids which take the shape of whatever vase they are poured into, although they give their color to the vase. What matters in America's case—it has become a cliché to say so—is that industrialization proceeded in a society already democratic, freed by its revolution not from a previous aristocratic phase but from outside tutelage, and constantly confirmed in its essence by new waves of immigrants. Moreover, industrialization expanded in and benefited from a single national framework, which survived the great test of secession. In both respects Europe's past has been different. It plagues the present and mortgages the future. The industrialization of nations deeply marked, socially and politically, by their "predemocratic" stage and by their rivalries means the laborious breaking down of class barriers and borders. Consequently, on the one hand they are not "like America" yet, for the task of conversion still entails both much destruction of the old and the tough resistance of major residues. On the other hand, the new Europe might not be "like America" ever, for the task involves innovations which either confirm old differences or create new contrasts with the United States.

What is being destroyed in Europe's social structure would not deserve being mentioned in a study that focuses on what is likely to keep Europe lastingly distinct from the United States, were it not for three reasons. One has to do with the difference in social structure and values; the elimination of various groups whose economic or political function has disappeared has left a residue of bitterness not only among the victims but also among other groups who shared the values if not the social position of those victims. The second reason has to do both with the difference in social structure and with Europe's fragmentation into separate states; the process of elimination has put new strains on already fragile political systems, for it is much more troublesome to deal with angry farmers, displaced miners or depressed areas when they represent a large fraction of the population or of the space of a country than when they occur in the "wide open spaces" of a sparsely settled continent. The last reason has to do with national differences in Western Europe; the destructions and dislocations brought about by economic change have affected these nations unevenly, depending on the degree of development they had reached at the start of the process. Thus Germany, despite the influx of refugees, has suffered least; France has had serious troubles with shopkeepers, peasants and workers made jobless by progress; Italy is the country in which change has entailed not only "the disintegration of agriculture and of traditional rural communities" through a huge rural exodus,² but also a problem of regional imbalance of enormous proportions. Despite the common movement toward industrialization and the efforts made by European communities to ease the journey, the fact that each nation has had to deal with its own incidents and its own casualties of progress has strengthened separateness just as it was being undermined.*

It is not only Europe's social structure that is affected by destructions. Partly as a result of those just mentioned the load which Europe's political institutions have had to carry has crushed one vital organ: parliament. The decline of a body that symbolized one important difference between Europe's and America's political systems has, however, not made for any rapprochement. In Europe's cabinet system, parliament was supposedly the fount of all effective and responsible power in contrast with the United States Congress, handicapped by the separation of powers. Today, parliament's share in decision-making and its role in supervising the execution of decisions are far smaller than the share and role of Congress. The dispossession of parliament not only by the civil service and interest groups but also by the executive has been much greater. Congress is now protected by the strict separation of powers, by the fragmentation of the bureaucracy, and by the very looseness of American parties. Whenever the party system worked, parliament's decline has occurred because of the control exerted over the majority by the cabinet or by the majority party's ruling organs; where the party system has failed (i.e., in France), parliament has been demoted to a position legally much narrower than that of the United States Congress. Here again, differences among the Europeans compound the difference with the United States. Outside France, parliament, having lost its role, at least preserves its "myth"— that of the body that speaks for the people and that can overthrow the cabinet. In France's hybrid political system, the president plays the part of the people's voice and combines the advantages of a chief executive in a presidential system with those of a cabinet leader in a parliamentary regime—at the expense not only of parliament's position but also of its reputation. Outside France, it is the strength of the parties that has weakened parliament in parliamentary regimes. In France it is the very weakness of the parties which has brought the demise of the parliamentary regime altogether and which is being perpetuated by the practice of so called "direct democracy."

Destructions and resistance both mark the attempt at transforming the educational system. Nowhere is the difference between the creation of one national industrial society and the conversion of a variety of "old" national societies into a more democratic one so obvious. The need to abandon a system of secondary schools and universities which were the shapers and guardians of societies in which elites were few, access to the elite was restricted and authority was hardly democratic is widely recognized. Most European writers on the subject agree that the new society requires leaders and executives, technicians and bureaucrats in far greater number, that the old curriculums and structures are obsolete, that the new schools ought to be training centers for teamwork and imaginative cooperation. And yet the result of their efforts is not likely to resemble the United States system of education. The United States was able to let its system grow; the Europeans are obliged to let their old one either continue or collapse because they cannot oblige it to adapt. The resistance of the old structures and of the teaching personnel to change is fierce—in the one sector of society where no reform {however much determined from the top, by fiat, or supported from below, by the rising masses) can be adequately carried out without the help of the very men and women whose whole philosophy is being challenged and who are still in charge of training their own successors. Thus the educators try to block reform either by opposing change altogether or through the familiar device of rejecting anything short of perfection. As a result, the reformers are forced either to back down, delay or compromise, or else to try to win by indirection: by undermining that which cannot be persuaded to reform, by initiating new types of school programs or institutes which besiege or submerge the old establishments. The outcome, in either case, is a fearful mess. The status quo ante is obviously impossible, but chaos is not necessarily creative. The new structures and the new personnel suffer from a lack of prestige and a frequently makeshift quality. Here again, national differences complicate the matter. There is a great deal of educational planning in France, none in Germany. Resistance to change is greater in Catholic countries, where the religious schools are particularly devoted to the values of the old society. The Belgian problem has been compounded by the Walloon-Flemish split. Thus the prospects of a unified response to the crisis are slim.

Of course, it can be argued that in the United States also there is a crisis, and that the responses and forms of experimentation are multiple. But whereas it is not impossible to improve and diversify the training of elites within a system of mass education, the forceable transformation of a narrow, rigid, coherent and largely successful system of elite education into a democratic one is a heroic and infinitely more controversial enterprise. In mere financial terms it requires extraordinary budgetary transfers and an entirely new attitude on the part of businessmen or foundations, whose role in education has until now been almost nil. Furthermore, there is a major difference between the experiments of a fantastic number of school districts and state and private colleges and universities, and the laborious decisions taken by a small number of ministers of education in the light of their national situations.

The resilience of old patterns of behavior is also visible in the whole area of class relations. The way in which social groups face each other in the new society remains deeply marked by the past history of social and political contests. To be sure, recent European writings show a longing for the "American model" of group politics, democratic authority, face-to-face discussions and compromises. But the model is not really relevant. Whereas America is a fluid society, Europe remains a set of sticky societies. Mobility within each and between them is less practiced and less highly valued. Such viscosity preserves past obstacles to social harmony and even to further economic development (for instance, in keeping the size of enterprise much below the "American model"). Moreover, despite growing prosperity, inequality remains a major social and political issue: first, because everywhere in Europe the differences in living conditions between the rich and the poor are still huge (the access of the latter to higher education and power is far from assured); second, because the underprivileged groups' attitudes toward inequality remain shaped by the European tradition of global protest against and challenge of the "established disorder"; third, because the discontent and the expectations of the underprivileged are far more focused on the state than in the United States; finally, because of considerable variations from nation to nation. Thus, although one can rightly speak of a moderation of the class struggle and of a decline in revolutionary messianism, the long record of contests between the workers and the upper classes and the constant role of the state as a stake and a force in the struggle introduce a lasting distinction between the American and the European cases. In every European country the workers' organizations—unions or parties—are more concerned with the global economic development of society and with the role of the workers in the management of enterprises than are those in the United States. It may well be that this concern now expresses itself in requests for "participation" instead of the old demands for revolution, but even this points to a difference in scope and temper between America's well-established reformism—more fragmentary and more placid—and Europe's new one.

If one examines not merely the political expression of social grievances in the "new Europe" but political behavior in general, one reaches the same conclusion: despite real changes, old reflexes resist. Ideology in politics (and in the writings of intellectuals on politics) may be declining, in part because of the moderation of the class struggle, in part because of a reaction against the ideological excesses of "secular religions," in part because of the increasing irrelevance of "isms" that grew out of the conditions of preindustrial society. But proneness to ideology (in the sense in which a weak body is prone to diseases) and attachment to old ideological symbols persist, even if the symbols have lost much of their "objective" content. Thus in France and in Italy neither the rise in the standard of living within societies still marked by grave injustice nor the relative decline of groups that provided the bulk of the support of the Communist party (proletarian workers, landless farmers) have seriously reduced the electoral strength of the Communist parties. For where ideology was strong it was never exclusively related to the stage of economic development. There simple discontent still expresses itself in ideological terms, and events unconnected with either the old class struggles or the old stable constellations of political doctrines still provoke ideological reactions. Thus in France the divisions created by the new postwar issues—the Cold War, decolonization, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Credits
• Introduction
• Part One: Europe's Identit
• Part Two: European Unity in the Cold Wa
• Part Three: From Community to Union, From Cold War to New World (Dis)orde
• About the Book and Author
• Index