A Reckoning For Europe

Ben Wildsmith

Sat outside in the garden with my late pal Brian some years back, the sunshine didn’t fit his news.

‘It’s spread,’ he told me. ‘A couple of months to go at best.’

He smiled in a knowing, stoic way as the birds tweeted around us.

‘It’s weird,’ he explained. ‘I know this is like “it” but it doesn’t feel like it. It seems like there should be some kind of importance to it all, but I can’t find it.’

‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Well, this is the end of my life but it’s just mundane, there’s nothing climactic about it. I mean, I feel like I should have learned some big thing, but I can’t put my finger on it.’

He looked around him, taking in the beauty of summer before smiling again.

‘I mean, it’s all wonderful, I get that, but what do we do, really, except eat, sleep, fight, and fuck? The rest is just bullshit we invent to make those things seem noble.’

That exchange has been on my mind this week as I’ve observed European leaders reacting to the world tilting on its geopolitical axis. Wearing a thousand years of philosophy, art, music, history, and religion to the club, they have come up short on oil and guns. You’re not coming in like that…

American products

Congressional transcripts from the late 1940s show American business leaders persuading their government to spend money rebuilding West Germany instead of Britain. The potential market for American products proved more persuasive than any moral or sentimental attachment to wartime alliances. That’s life, Bucko, move on.

Since then, the British attitude to America has been an unattractive splice of sycophancy and superiority. We are special, so, so, so special. Doesn’t the new president always invite us round for tea first? Aren’t we always there to defend whichever bellicose outrage suits our bestest friend in the whole world, no matter how misguided or plain wicked it is?

But also, aren’t we just plain better than them? Isn’t our savoir faire exactly what every American dreams of? They will pay for us and defend us because, even in our destitution, we offer them the grandeur of our experience.

Well, not anymore, and that goes for the French, Germans, and all other Old-World freeloaders, it seems.

Realpolitik

Donald Trump has drawn back the veil on world affairs to reveal the ugly, realpolitik workings behind courtly niceties that have soothed us for as long as we can remember. Because, for all the fine rhetoric that politicians offer about abstracts like human rights, self-determination, democracy, and international law, they exist only in relation to the raw power that guarantees them.

The Ukrainians understand that, of course. No appeal to fair play was ever going to save them.

Continuing as an uncompromised nation required Ukraine to make a case that western security is epitomised by its existence. That case is dependent on the USA viewing Europe as vital to its strategic interests and the arrival of a president who doesn’t value cultural baubles or historical mores put paid to that.

The panic projected at this week’s hastily arranged summit of European leaders in Paris did nothing to persuade the wider world that Europe’s ouster from the top table of global affairs is without cause.

Amidst rumours of irreconcilable differences between the Anglo-French faction and the rest of Europe, including Germany, the meeting broke up without issuing a joint statement. The impression given was of collective disbelief that the USA could exclude Europe from negotiations.

Uncomfortable as it is, the European worldview seems to be in retreat from reality.

D-day 

Last year, celebrations were held to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Germany stood alongside the UK, USA, Ukraine, and the rest of the world in a show of historical forgiveness and demonstration of supposed shared values.

Russia, which lost 26 million people in World War II, and whose forces were responsible for 80% of Nazi casualties, was initially invited before having that invitation publicly rescinded.

The actions of Ukraine in that war were too complicated to be captured by headline casualty figures such as those suffered by Russia, but the trend for making comparisons between the current Russian regime and the Nazis are as unhelpful to the cause of peace as they are insulting to the facts of history.

If, in this corner of the world, we want our voices to be relevant, our leaders need to reckon with the physics of world affairs, not their rituals and precedents.

What’s coming is to do with resources, military strength, and governmental will. You will win no prizes for shouting loudest about how Putin and Trump offend your sensibilities.

If Europe is to prosper, or even survive as a collection of distinct entities, it needs to face the music.

American protection

Relying on American protection for the last 80 years has been an abrogation of responsibility that was bound to end at some point. Over the years it has led us, especially in the UK, to back American projects that most people here did not support.

We have been dragged around the globe as a mascot of respectability whilst the USA enriched itself at the expense of our relations with the wider world.

The future for Europe will almost certainly be poorer and involve a demotion in world affairs as resource-wealthy nations come to the fore. We should remember, though, that the defining achievements of Athens came after it ceded political leadership to Rome.

It may well be that European greatness is renewed by tending our own gardens for a while.

Brian went out of this world without resorting to religion or false hope. That phlegmatic smile was there ’til the end, representing the peace he found in self-reliance. The forces upon him were malign but those within saw him through.