Best of the Blogs: Old Europe Roundup
by The Editors
February 26th, 2006
This month’s “Old Europe” issue inspired loads of high-quality online comment. Let’s take a look!
In a stimulating essay on his eponymous blog Jay Reding argues Europe suffers from a lack of spirit:
What Europe lacks is what the ancient Greeks called thumos - a term which implies passion, spiritedness, but also a willingness to fight for one’s beliefs. The great Greek heroes will filled with thumos. Europe has lost that sense of passion, that sense of daring, that quality of thumos that pushes a culture away from stasis. The European social experiment is one in which the state provides for all, and individual initiative and the entrepreneurial spirit is systematically discounted. Why work hard when advancement is difficult if not impossible to achieve? How can an economy assimilate new workers when strict labor laws make it difficult, if not impossible to shed excess capacity when times are tight? The “social safety net” in Europe has become a snare in which the values that advance a society have become forgotten. F.A. Hayek spoke of “the road to serfdom” and Europe is on the brink of become a kind of feudal society in which the landed gentry from been replaced by the nomenklatura of the European political elite. High positions in the French government are almost exclusively reserved to graduates of the prestigious École National d’Administration - a school that would be like if Harvard and Yale merged into one massive training ground for the ruling class. The énarques control the politics of France, and they have every interest in keeping things in a comfortable stasis. If the concept of thumos is taught there, it’s lessons go unlearned.
The true lesson of Europe’s gradual decline is in understanding that fundamental tension between a “social safety net” and upward mobility, between thumos and stasis, between the entrepreneurial spirit and slow decline. The essential fallacy of Europe is in believing that you can have it all, a generous social “safety net” and a dynamic economy, masses of Muslim immigrants and multiculturalism, a post-modern society and societal cohesion. All of these things are in tension with each other at a fundamental level, and European society is failing to deal with these tensions, preferring to revel in the comfortable illusion that their socialized medicine and unsustainable pensions somehow cover up for their crumbling culture and society.
Bradford Plumer on the Mother Jones magazine MoJo Blog doesn’t see the big deal about Europe. Is there even a problem?
Europe’s growing at a slower rate than the United States primarily because, as Pozen says, its population hasn’t been expanding as quickly as ours—a “problem” that could be easily corrected if the EU continues to swallow up countries to the east. Plus, as Olivier Blanchard has argued, Europeans have less income per capita because they prefer to work less and take more vacation than we do. It’s a choice they’ve made, certainly a fair one, and hardly reason to think they’re “doomed.”
Nor is unemployment in Europe necessarily as bad—or at least as disastrous—as people make it out to be. According to the OECD, Germany has an official unemployment rate of 9.5 percent. (Compared to 5.5 percent for the United States—although this number likely understates the problem.) But that figure includes the former East Germany, where unemployment still hovers above 20 percent; in West Germany, unemployment is about 7.5 percent, hardly a catastrophe.
So Germany just hasn’t been able to integrate a developing country into the fold all that successfully over the past decade and a half, though I’d like to know how quickly the United States could achieve success if it assimilated, say, Central America. But that doesn’t mean Germany’s labor policies and regulations are fatal to job-creation, either. (One culprit for Germany’s unemployment rate is probably the European Central Bank’s tight monetary policy, for instance.)
Beyond that, there are also reasons to think that the United States won’t trounce Europe economically forever. In the future, the U.S. could become increasingly burdened by high defense spending and persistent budget deficits. One might note that part of the reason for the huge productivity boost in the United States over the past few decades has been that women have been entering the workforce in large numbers, a process that’s only begun in Europe. (65 percent of American women work outside the home, compared to only 55 percent of European women—and countries like Italy and Greece are particularly imbalanced on this front.) Moreover, this study argues that European firms are still trying to implement fancy new IT technologies and learn various new retail techniques, and once they do, they’ll rapidly catch up with their American peers. Maybe some of that’s wrong, but it’s reason not to be entirely confident that the European economy is “doomed.”
On the other side of the political magazine spectrum, the denizens of National Review Online’s the Corner are not so sanguine. Commenting on the comment essays, Ramesh Ponnuru writes:
To my mind, the most alarming [response to Dalyrmple] is the one that tries hardest to put on a happy face. “Dalrymple portrays the EU as an economic basket case, but its aggregate wealth now rivals that of the United States,” writes Charles Kupchan. “The EU represents a single market of over 450 million consumers, compared with a U.S. population of roughly 300 million.” Doesn’t the second sentence rather undercut the first? Later, he explains that the economy isn’t really so bad as all that: It’s just that the existing population isn’t growing and doesn’t want to work.
But Ramesh is cautious about gloom-mongering:
Anne Applebaum doesn’t try as hard to be chipper and offers more reasons for hope. I would add only that in the early 1980s a lot of smart people were buying Revel’s How Democracies Perish, and that in the early 1990s a lot of smart people thought that New Yorkers were trapped in a vicious circle from which they could not escape.
In his inimitable pull-no-potentially-offensive-punches style, NRO’s John Derbyshire opines:
Without discounting the importance of having a confident domestic culture for immigrants to integrate into, to what degree is it fair to say that the great waves of immigration prior to 1965 were “very alien”? They were pretty solidly European-Christian, or at furthest Judeo-Christian. In the case of the post-Famine Irish, they actually spoke English (which is why the Irish got all the gummint jobs). Even the great wave of Ashkenazi Jews were from a culture familiar to Europeans for centuries–the centuries in which Jews had been living among Europeans! The difficulties of modern immigration arise not only from our loss of confidence in our own culture, but from the fact that big chunks of the current immigrant population come from backgrounds far more alien to that culture than were the Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Italians, and East Europeans.
Taking the large view, what is happening is a downward adjustment of Europe’s power & prestige (& population) relative to the rest of the world. Remarkable to think that just 90 years ago, and then again just 60 years ago, the Europeans could be so blithely indifferent to the rest of the world as to engage in ferociously destructive wars against each other. Nowadays they would not dare. They huddle like sheep in a fold, watching the descendants of their grandfather’s coolies assemble nuclear weapons.
Tanner Pittman of News from Kisbacs, commenting Dalrymple’s claim that “multiculturalism is not coucous; it is stoning adulterers,” writes:
And were he right that “Muslim culture” necessarily implies “stoning adulterers,” I’d say he’s on to something.
But he’s not right. Europeans aren’t xenophobes when they deny Muslims’ rights to beat their women. They’re xenophobes if they deny Muslim girls’ rights to wear a head scarf in a French school, or pray at Salat.
As to multiculturalism not stopping extremists, even if he were right on this point (a notion I’d debate - chances are that there would be less extremism in a Europe with greater religious tolerance), stopping extremism isn’t exactly one of the stated goals of multiculturalism. Respecting another man’s right to live life and serve God as his own conscience dictates, on the other hand, is.
Dalrymple wrote that Old Europe, though not doomed, is “sleepwalking.” Dymphna from the Gates of Vienna wonders if the Danish cartoon imbroglio might awaken Europe before it is shuffles into decline:
Perhaps the frenzied attack on Denmark will rouse the Europeans before it is too late. The cause of Islam’s hysteria is so patently trivial that even the elites must see through the ruse. If such is the result, then this bears consideration: one Danish newspaper’s decision to test the waters of freedom of speech may well have opened the floodgates. Europe may be roused to start caring for itself robustly, with firmness and a strong sense of pride and identity. The despair may be drowned by the living waters of hope. Even its immigrants may be drawn in by the vision of something greater than themselves, something more important than their grievances.
Looking for more commentary? Why not check the blogosphere’s pulse at Technorati?
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:27 pm
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