Read Online Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century by Mark Mazower - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mark Mazower
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believe in politics. It is for this reason that we find both high levels of support for democracy in cross-national opinion polls and high rates of political apathy. In contemporary Europe, democracy allows racist parties of the Right to coexist with more active protection of human rights than ever before. It encompasses both the grass-roots politics of Switzerland and neardictatorship in post-communist Croatia.
The real victor in 1989 was not democracy but capitalism, and Europe as a whole now faces the task which western Europe has confronted since the 1930s, of establishing a workable relationship between the two. The inter-war depression revealed that democracymight not survive a major crisis of capitalism, and in fact democracy’s eventual triumph over communism would have been unimaginable without the reworked social contract which followed the Second World War. The ending of full employment and the onset of welfare retrenchment make this achievement harder than ever to sustain, especially in societies characterized by ageing populations. The globalization of financial markets makes it increasingly difficult for nation-states to preserve autonomy of action, yet markets—as a series of panics and crashes demonstrates—generate their own irrationalities and social tensions. The globalization of labour, too, challenges prevailing definitions of national citizenship, culture and tradition. Whether Europe can chart a course between the individualism of American capitalism and the authoritarianism of East Asia, preserving its own blend of social solidarity and political freedom, remains to be seen. But the end of the Cold War means that there is no longer an opponent against whom democrats can define what they stand for in pursuit of this goal. The old political signposts have been uprooted, leaving most people without a clear sense of direction.
This sense of fin de siècle disorientation is largely a European problem which reflects the specific historical experience of Europe this century, and the carnage that followed its once-fervent faith in utopias. A self-belief rooted in Christianity, capitalism, the Enlightenment and massive technological superiority encouraged Europeans to see themselves over a long period as a civilizational model for the globe. Their trust in Europe’s world mission was already evident in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and reached its apogee in the era of imperialism. Hitler was in many ways its culminating figure and through the Nazi New Order came closer to its realization than anyone else. Now that the Cold War has ended, Europe is once more undivided, and this makes its loss of belief in the pre-eminence of its civilization and values all the more obvious. Many of the newly freed states of the former Soviet empire cannot wait to join “Europe.” Yet what that “Europe” is, and where it stands in the world, seem less and less clear.
The only visionaries meeting the challenge are the Europeanists clustered in Brussels, and the only vision offered is that of an ever-closer European union. Its acolytes still talk in the old way—as if history moves in one direction, leading inexorably from free trade to monetary union and eventually to political union too. The alternative they offer to this utopia is the chaos of a continent plunged back into the national rivalries of the past, dominated by Germany and threatened by war.
Dreams of perpetual peace have a long history in European thought, and emerged naturally once more out of the bloodletting of the mid-twentieth century. The desire in particular to staunch the Franco-German conflict which generated three wars in under a century played an important part in the formation of the Common Market. In earlier formulations, perpetual peace was to be secured in Europe through its very multiplicity of states. But the rise of the nation-state and the bloodshed it has provoked led, during and after the Second World War, to the view that
The real victor in 1989 was not democracy but capitalism, and Europe as a whole now faces the task which western Europe has confronted since the 1930s, of establishing a workable relationship between the two. The inter-war depression revealed that democracymight not survive a major crisis of capitalism, and in fact democracy’s eventual triumph over communism would have been unimaginable without the reworked social contract which followed the Second World War. The ending of full employment and the onset of welfare retrenchment make this achievement harder than ever to sustain, especially in societies characterized by ageing populations. The globalization of financial markets makes it increasingly difficult for nation-states to preserve autonomy of action, yet markets—as a series of panics and crashes demonstrates—generate their own irrationalities and social tensions. The globalization of labour, too, challenges prevailing definitions of national citizenship, culture and tradition. Whether Europe can chart a course between the individualism of American capitalism and the authoritarianism of East Asia, preserving its own blend of social solidarity and political freedom, remains to be seen. But the end of the Cold War means that there is no longer an opponent against whom democrats can define what they stand for in pursuit of this goal. The old political signposts have been uprooted, leaving most people without a clear sense of direction.
This sense of fin de siècle disorientation is largely a European problem which reflects the specific historical experience of Europe this century, and the carnage that followed its once-fervent faith in utopias. A self-belief rooted in Christianity, capitalism, the Enlightenment and massive technological superiority encouraged Europeans to see themselves over a long period as a civilizational model for the globe. Their trust in Europe’s world mission was already evident in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and reached its apogee in the era of imperialism. Hitler was in many ways its culminating figure and through the Nazi New Order came closer to its realization than anyone else. Now that the Cold War has ended, Europe is once more undivided, and this makes its loss of belief in the pre-eminence of its civilization and values all the more obvious. Many of the newly freed states of the former Soviet empire cannot wait to join “Europe.” Yet what that “Europe” is, and where it stands in the world, seem less and less clear.
The only visionaries meeting the challenge are the Europeanists clustered in Brussels, and the only vision offered is that of an ever-closer European union. Its acolytes still talk in the old way—as if history moves in one direction, leading inexorably from free trade to monetary union and eventually to political union too. The alternative they offer to this utopia is the chaos of a continent plunged back into the national rivalries of the past, dominated by Germany and threatened by war.
Dreams of perpetual peace have a long history in European thought, and emerged naturally once more out of the bloodletting of the mid-twentieth century. The desire in particular to staunch the Franco-German conflict which generated three wars in under a century played an important part in the formation of the Common Market. In earlier formulations, perpetual peace was to be secured in Europe through its very multiplicity of states. But the rise of the nation-state and the bloodshed it has provoked led, during and after the Second World War, to the view that
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