Authors: Mark Steyn
So what do they do with all the time?
Forget for the moment Europe's lack of world-beating companies: they regard capitalism red in tooth and claw as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it. And in fairness some of their quasi-state corporations are very pleasant: I'd much rather fly Air
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France than United or Continental. But what about the things Europeans supposedly value?
With so much free time, where is the great European art? Assuredly Gershwin and Bernstein aren't Bach and Mozart, but what have the Continentals got? Their pop culture is more American than it's ever been. Fifty years ago, before European welfarism had them in its vise-like death grip, the French had better pop songs and the Italians made better movies. Where are Europe's men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus 380, the QE2 of the skies, capable of carrying five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the damn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a swell idea. It'll come in very useful for large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015.
"When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do," writes Charles Murray in In Our Hands, "ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome." The Continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those seventeen European countries that have fallen into "lowest-low fertility," where are the children? In a way, you're looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk cafe listening to his iPod, the eternal adolescent charges of the paternalistic state. The government makes the
grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912--before record collections, or even teenagers, had been invented. He understood that the long-term cost of welfare is the infantilization of the population. The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to have total choice over their satellite TV packages, yet think it perfectly normal to allow the state to make all the choices in respect of their health care. It's a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latter-day Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.
FAMINE
In 2005, responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany was reported to be considering the introduction of a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of the media group Axel Springer, put it: "A substantial fraction of Germany's government--and, if polls are to be believed, the German people--believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists."
Great. At least the appeasers of the 1930s did it on their own time. But, in recasting appeasement as yet another paid day off, the new proposal cunningly manages to combine the worst instincts of the old Europe and the new. If you want the state of the Continent in a nutshell, consider this news item from the south of France, 2005: A fellow in Marseilles was charged with fraud because he lived with the dead body of his mother for five years in order to continue receiving her pension of 700 euros a month. She was ninety-four when, she croaked, so she'd presumably been enjoying the old government check for a good three decades or so, but her son figured he might as well keep the money rolling in until her second century and, with her corpse tucked away under a pile of rubbish in the living room, the female telephone voice he put on for the benefit of the social services
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office was apparently convincing enough. As the Reuters headline put it: "Frenchman Lived with Dead Mother to Keep Pension."
That's the perfect summation of Europe: welfare addiction over demographic reality. Think of the European Union as that flat in Marseilles, and the Eutopian political consensus as the stiff, and lavish government largesse as that French guy's dead mom's benefits. Take the one-time economic powerhouse of the Continent--Germany--and pick any of the usual indicators of a healthy advanced industrial democracy: Unemployment? The highest since the 1930s. House prices? Down. New car registration? Nearly 15 percent lower in 2005 than in 1999. General nuttiness? A third of Germans under thirty think the United States government was responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11. While the unemployment, real estate, and car sales may be reversible, that last number suggests the German electorate isn't necessarily the group you'd want to pitch a rational argument to, especially about the urgent need either to give up the unsustainable welfare state or to produce a population capable of sustaining it--whether by immigration, transhuman science, or the old-fashioned method of a box of chocolates, the lights down low, and Johnny Mathis on the hi-fi. Here's another statistic: 30 percent of German women are now childless. Among German university graduates, it's over 40 percent. Yet according to polls taken before the inconclusive 2005 German elections, 70 percent of people want no further cuts in the welfare state and prefer increasing taxation on the very rich (whoever he is), and only 45 percent of Germans agreed that competition is good for economic growth and employment. It seems things are going to have to get a lot worse before European voters will seriously consider "necessary reforms" and "painful changes." And the longer European countries postpone the "painful" reforms, the more painful they're going to be.
Almost every issue facing the European Union--from immigration rates to crippling state pension liabilities--has at its heart the same root cause: a huge lack of babies. Every day you get ever more poignant glimpses of the Euro-future, such as it is. One can talk airily about being flushed down the toilet of history, but even that's easier said than done. In eastern Germany, rural communities are dying, and one consequence is that village sewer systems are having a tough time adjusting to the lack of use. Populations have fallen so dramatically that there are too few people flushing to keep the flow of waste moving. Traditionally, government infrastructure expenditure arises from increased demand. In this case, the sewer lines are having to be narrowed at great cost in order to cope with dramatically decreased demand.
There's no precedent for managed decline in societies as advanced as Europe's, but the early indications are that it's going to be expensive. One notes again that the environmentalists got it exactly backward: it's not a question of "sustainable growth" but of sustainable lack of growth. And no advanced society has attempted that experiment till now. For purposes of comparison, by 2050 public pensions expenditures are expected to be 6.5
percent of GDP in the United States, 16.9 percent in Germany, 17.3 percent in Spain, and 24.8 percent in Greece. In Europe, we're talking not about the prospect of having to reduce benefits but about so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu, adieu, adieu to yieu and yieu and yieu. American reformers like to say that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. The EU has a vastly greater problem: the entire modern European edifice is a Ponzi scheme. And the political establishments in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, et al. show no sign of producing leaders willing to confront it.
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Germany has a shrinking economy, a shrinking and aging population, and potentially catastrophic welfare liabilities. Yet the average German worker now puts in 22 percent fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable would suggest closing the gap. The Dutch and the Norwegians are even bigger slackers.
This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. It's a product of the U.S. military presence, a security guarantee that liberated European budgets; instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. But even with reduced defense expenditure, the European welfare state depends on economic growth and population growth. The former is now barely detectable and the latter is already in reverse. After the rejection of the European Constitution, Jacques Chirac reacted to his impertinent electorate's appalling lése-majesté by appointing as French prime minister a man who was the very embodiment of the ruling elite's serene insulation from popular opinion-Dominique de Villepin, the magnificently obstructionist big-haired foreign minister in the run-up to the Iraq war. Aside from his Byronic locks, M. de Villepin also writes sub-sub-subByronic doggerel. Whenever he turns up on CNN, starry-eyed Democrat viewers send cooing e-mails to Wolf Blitzer and Jack Cafferty, wondering why their own vulgar republic can't produce a political leader who speaks English with such suave erudition--a veritable Rimbaud to Bush's Rambo. So, in his first big speech in the gig, Monsieur Sophisticate was at pains to reassure French voters that the internal tensions of a pampered lethargic overregulated welfare society could all be resolved through "Gallic genius": "In a modern democracy, the debate is not between the liberal and the social, it is between immobilism and action. Solidarity and initiative, protection and daring: that is the French genius." Ooh-Ia-Ia! C'est magnifique! C'est formidable, n'est-ce pas? All those elegant nouns just waiting for a stylishly coiffed French genius to steer the appropriate course between the Scylla of solidarity and the Charybdis of initiative, between protection and daring, immobilism and action, inertia and panic, stylish insouciance and meaningless gestures, abstract nouns and street riots, etc, etc. The French electorate has relatively down-to-earth concerns: crime, jobs, immigration. But for a man of letters that's all too dreary and prosaic compared with an open-ended debate between solidarity and initiative stretching lazily into the future.
Across half a century, Continental politics evolved to the point where almost any issue worth talking about was ruled beyond the bounds of polite society. Austria was the classic example: year in, year out, whether you voted for the center-left party or the center-right party, you wound up with the same center-left/center-right coalition presiding over what was in essence a two-party one-party state. In France, M. Chirac isn't really "center-right" so much as ever so slightly left-of-right-of-left-of center---and even that distinction only applies when he's standing next to his former prime minister, the right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of center Lionel Jospin. Though supposedly from opposite ends of the political spectrum, in the 2002 presidential election they wound up running against each other on identical platforms, both passionately committed to high taxes, high unemployment, and high crime. Americans often make the same criticism of their own system--the "Republicrats," etc.-but the United States still has a more genuinely responsive politics with more ideological diversity than anywhere in Western Europe. On the Continent, the Eurodee and Eurodum mainstream parties are boxed into a consensus politics that's no longer viable. The people are weary of certain aspects of this postwar settlement--permanent double-digit
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unemployment and the Islamization of their cities--but they're not yet ready to give up the social programs, the short work weeks, long vacations, and jobs for life. Europe's structural problems would require immense cultural change to correct. Is it likely that Europe will muster the will for "painful economic reforms"? It was always a political project masquerading as an economic one, and thus the ruling class's investment in it is largely emotive and ideological. Hence the Guardian's attack on the British prime minister for demanding reform of the Common Agricultural Policy:
It is unreasonable of Mr. Blair to repeatedly flourish, as if self-evidently outrageous the simple arithmetic of 40 percent of spending on 4 percent of the European workforce, when rural life is of such social, psychological and aesthetic importance to a vastly larger proportion of the continent's population.
I think "aesthetic importance" means "we have to drive past a lot of French farms to get to our holiday homes." Rural life was central to France's sense of itself. But so was the Catholic Church, and it's empty now. And so were Catholic-size families, and they're down to one designer kid. So the character of those quaint villages is utterly changed. Why should the British taxpayer subsidize an ersatz French heritage park about as authentic as Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame? If Pierre's given up the church and the family, what's the big deal about giving up the farm?
Ah, well, it won't be a problem much longer. Under its present economic arrangements, it's Europe that's bought the farm.
WAR
According to its Office du Tourisme, the big event in Évreux the first weekend of November 2005 was supposed to be the annual féte de la pomme, du cidre et du fromage at the Place de la Mairie. Instead, in this charmingly smoldering cathedral town in Normandy, a shopping mall, a post office, two schools, upwards of fifty vehicles and, oh yes, the police station were destroyed by--what's that word again?--"youths." Over at the Place de la Mairie, M. le Maire himself, Jean-Louis Debré, seemed affronted by the very idea that un soupçon de carnage should be allowed to distract from the cheesetasting. "A hundred people have smashed everything and strewn desolation," he told reporters. "Well, they don't form part of our universe." Maybe not, but, unfortunately, you form part of theirs.
M. Debré, a close pal of President Chirac's, was a little off on the numbers. There were an estimated two hundred "youths" rampaging through Évreux. With baseball bats. They injured, among others, a dozen firemen. "To those responsible for the violence, I want to say: Be serious!" M. Debre told France Info radio. "If you want to live in a fairer, more fraternal society, this is not how to go about it."