Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (181 page)
The economic recession of the early Nineties also helped, contributing to a widespread view in Sweden especially that the country’s exporters could not survive without unrestricted access to the European market.
See Chapter 21. The pain was real enough. East European countries lost between 30 and 40 percent of their national income in the years after 1989. The first to recover its 1989 level was Poland, in 1997; others took until 2000 or beyond.
A highly optimistic assumption. In the years following their accession to the EC in 1986, the economies of Spain and Portugal grew on average between 1 percent and 1.5 percent faster than the rest of the Community.
On January 1st 2002 a total of 600,000,000,000 euros in cash was seamlessly distributed and introduced across the euro-zone countries, a remarkable technical achievement.
If they still worked as smoothly as they did it was at least in part because the federal machinery was so very well oiled, not least by money: in the 1990s Switzerland was still by most measures the world’s wealthiest country.
Quoted in Kenneth Harris,
Attlee
(London, 1984), p. 63.
The decline in the Dutch vote may be especially ominous. Once the kernel of European enthusiasm and a generous contributor to EC and EU funds, the Netherlands in recent years has been retreating into itself—a development both illuminated and accelerated by the rise of Pim Fortuyn and his subsequent assassination.
It is perhaps worth adding that in January 2004 only one French adult in fifty could name the ten new EU member states.
Not everywhere, however: in the UK—as in the US—the income spread between the wealthy and the rest grew steadily wider from the late 1970s.
The ECJ should not be confused with the European Court of Human Rights, set up under the auspices of the Council of Europe to enforce the 1953 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
In Giscard’s ‘Constitution for Europe’, Article 3(I) defines the Union’s aims as being ‘to promote peace, its values, and the well-being of its peoples’.
Quoted by Andrew Moravscik in
The Choice for Europe
(New York, 1998),. p. 265.
Mordantly predicted at the time by the US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who foresaw that the Europeans ‘will screw up and this will teach them a lesson’.
The EU was not alone in subsidizing its own farmers to the detriment of others. It was not even the worst offender: Norway, Switzerland, Japan and the US all pay out more in per capita terms. But the EU appeared somehow more hypocritical. While Brussels preaches virtue to the world at large, its own practice is often quite selective. East Europeans, instructed to incorporate and adopt a veritable library of European Union regulations, could hardly fail to notice the frequency with which West European governments exempted themselves from those same rules.
In 1995, according to a UNICEF study, one British child in five lived in poverty, compared with one in ten in Germany and one in twenty in Denmark.
Invoking slightly different criteria to make a similar point, the Cambridge political theorist John Dunn divides the workforces of wealthy countries into ‘those who can individually take very good care of themselves on the market . . . , those who can hold their own only because they belong to surviving units of collective action with a threat advantage out of all proportion to the value of individual members’ labour, and those who are already going under, because no one would chose to pay much for their labour’. Dunn,
The Cunning of Unreason. Making Sense of Politics
(London, 2000), p. 333.
Gorz, as befitted a man of his time and politics, assumed that this new class would in turn fuel a new generation of radical social movements. To date there is little evidence of this.
In 1992 alone, the Federal Republic opened its doors to nearly a quarter of a million Yugoslav refugees. Britain admitted 4,000; France just 1,000.
At the end of the twentieth century there were an estimated 5 million Gypsies in Europe: some 50,000 in Poland, 60,000 in Albania, half a million in Hungary, perhaps 600,000 each in Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic and at least 2 million in Romania. The prejudice and abuse to which they were exposed was common to every country in which the Gypsies lived (not to mention places like Britain to which they were forbidden entry).
The Dansk Folkeparti originated in a breakaway from the Danish Progress Party, itself a product of the anti-tax movements of the early 1970s (see Chapter 14) but considered by a new generation of radicals to be too ‘soft’ on the EU and insufficiently anti-immigrant.
In Switzerland, where anti-immigrant prejudice was especially widespread in the German-speaking cantons, the racism was not always buried: one election poster showed an array of dark-skinned faces over the caption ‘The Swiss are becoming Negroes’.
With one exception: Edith Cresson—a former French Socialist Prime Minister turned EU Commissioner—contributed to the discrediting of the whole Commission when it was revealed in 1999 that she had used her power in Brussels to invent a well-paid consultancy for her former dentist.
Even taking into account the Yugoslav wars of the Nineties, the number of war-related deaths in Europe in the second half of the century was less than one million.
Raymond Aron (born in 1905) shared some of Zweig’s wistful memories, if not his despair: ‘Ever since, under a July sun, bourgeois Europe entered the century of wars, men have lost control of their history’.
Many Poles, it should be noted, also insist upon their country’s place at the
centre
of Europe—a revealing confusion.
Much the same is true of Albanian Kosovars. Liberated by NATO from Serbian oppression, they aspire to independent statehood less from nationalistic ambition than as a surety against the risk of being left
in
Serbia—and
out
of Europe.
Anna Reid,
Borderland. A Journey through the history of Ukraine
(2000), p. 20. Hence the place of ‘Europe’ in the language and hopes of the Ukrainian revolution of December 2004.
See Tony Judt, ‘Romania: Bottom of the Heap’,
New York Review
, November 1st 2001.
As the common language of many tens of millions of people in the Americas, from Santiago to San Francisco, the international standing of Spanish was nevertheless secure. The same was true of Portuguese, at least in its quite distinctive Brazilian form.
With the exception of Romania, where the situation was reversed and French had by far the broader constituency.
The exception in this case is Bulgaria, where Russia and its language had always found a more sympathetic reception.
Respectively the French, German and Italian flagship expresses.
In June 2004 the present author received the following greeting from a correspondent in the foreign ministry in Zagreb: ‘Things here good. Croatia got EU membership invitation. This will change many mental maps’.
Hungarians in twenty-first-century Romania, Slovakia and Serbia were another, smaller post-imperial minority: once dominant, now vulnerable. In the Vojvodina region of northern Serbia, Hungarians who had lived there for centuries were periodically assaulted and their properties vandalized by Serb youths. The response of the authorities in Belgrade, who appeared to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the catastrophe of the Nineties, was depressingly predictable: the attacks were not ‘serious’ and in any case, ‘they’ started it.
Quite the opposite. In a series of measures in the spring and summer of 2004 the authorities significantly curtailed both the rights of the press and the already restricted opportunities for public protest. Russia’s brief window of freedom—actually disarray and the absence of constraint rather than genuine constitutionally protected liberty—was fast closing. In 2004, Russian observers estimated that KGB-TRAINED officials occupied one in four of civilian administrative posts in the country.
Including the domestic political calculations of Greek politicians, who for many years used their vote in Brussels to hinder and block any movement on Turkey’s candidacy.
In addition they were wont to see as ‘European’ an idealized free-market, contrasting it with the graft and cronyism of Turkey’s own economy.
The Christian Democratic Union in Germany was officially opposed to Turkey joining the EU.
Democratic Spain did indeed develop an official ‘heritage’ industry, fostered by its
Patrimonio Nacional
, but the latter took care to emphasize the country’s distant Golden Age rather than its recent history.
In T .R. Reid,
The United States of Europe. The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy
(NY, 2004), p. 131.
Britain was not unique. In one week in September 2004 the Spanish national lottery,
El Gordo
, took in 5,920,293 euros.
Though not yet constrained by the American obligation to partner a white male (host) with a black male (sports), a white female (soft news/features) and a weather-person (colour/gender optional).
The death and morbid afterlife of Princess Diana may seem an exception to this rule. But even though many other Europeans watched her funeral on television, they lost interest soon enough. The bizarre outpouring of public grief was a strictly British affair.
The notorious exception was a tiny but very hard core of German and (especially) English fans who travelled to international games explicitly in search of a fight, to the utter mystification of everyone else.
In January 2003, at the initiative of the Spanish and British prime ministers, eight European governments (Britain, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) signed a joint declaration of pro-American solidarity. Within a few months the Hungarians and Czechs were privately expressing their regrets and expressing bitterness at having been ‘bullied’ into signing by the Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar. A year later Aznar himself was thrown out of office by Spanish voters, in large measure for having led Spain into the ‘coalition’ to invade Iraq—something to which the nation was overwhelmingly opposed.
‘Yes, Americans put up huge billboards reading “Love Thy Neighbor”, but they murder and rape their neighbors at rates that would shock any European nation’. T. R. Reid,
The United States of Europe
(NY, 2004), p. 218.
The new business class in Eastern Europe, it should be noted, ate, dressed, phoned and drove European. To be modern it was no longer necessary to imitate Americans. Quite the contrary: American consumer products were frequently disdained as ‘dowdy’ or ‘bland’.
In France in 1960 there were four workers for every pensioner. In 2000 there were two. By 2020, on present trends, there would be just one.
In 2004, health costs absorbed 8 percent of GDP in Sweden but 14 percent in the USA. Four-fifths of the cost was borne by the government in Sweden, less than 45 percent by the Federal government in the US. The rest was a direct burden on American businesses and their employees. Forty-five million Americans had no health insurance.
Under Delors’ successors the pendulum has shifted: the Commission is still as active as ever, but its efforts are directed to
de
-regulating markets.
In Europe, but not in America. In international surveys at the end of the twentieth century, the number of Americans claiming to be ‘very proud’ of their country exceeded 75 percent. In Europe only the Irish and the Poles exhibited similar patriotic verve; elsewhere the number of ‘very proud’ people ranged from 49 percent (Latvians) to 17 percent (former West Germans).
The American prosecutor Telford Taylor was struck by this in retrospect but acknowledges that he did not even notice it at the time—a revealing admission. See Telford Taylor,
The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials
(NY, 1992), p. 296.
In the town of Pithiviers, near Orléans, where Jewish children rounded up in Paris were kept until their shipment east, a monument was actually erected in 1957 bearing the inscription ‘
A nos déportés morts pour la France’
. Only in 1992 did the local municipality erect a new plaque, more accurate if less reassuring. It reads: ‘To the memory of the 2300 Jewish children interned at the Pithiviers camp from July 19th to September 6th 1942, before being deported and murdered in Auschwitz’.
Giuliana Tedeschi is quoted by Nicola Caracciolo in
Uncertain Refuge: Italy and the Jews During the Holocaust
(University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 121.
In post-war Britain, an unusually thin or sickly person might be described as looking ‘like something out of Belsen’. In France, fairground chambers of horror were labelled ‘Buchenwalds’—as an inducement to voyeuristic trade.
See
The Times Literary Supplement
for October 4th 1996. Jews were not the first people in Britain to opt for discretion where the Holocaust was concerned. The wartime government under Churchill chose not to deploy information about the death camps in its propaganda against Germany lest this incite an increase in anti-Semitic feelings—already quite high in some parts of London, as wartime intelligence reports had noted.