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February 13, 2003
Feature
Anti-Europeanism in America
By Timothy Garton Ash
This year, especially if the United States goes to war against Iraq, you will doubtless see more articles in the American press on "Anti-Americanism in Europe." But what about anti-Europeanism in the United States? Consider this:
To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, we must add the European Union and France's Fifth Republic. The only question is how messy their disintegration will be.
(Mark Steyn, Jewish World Review, May 1, 2002)
And:
Even the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is used [to describe the French] as often as the French say "screw the Jews." Oops, sorry, that's a different popular French expression.
(Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, July 16, 2002)
Or, from a rather different corner:
"You want to know what I really think of the Europeans?" asked the senior State Department Official. "I think they have been wrong on just about every major international issue for the past 20 years."
(Quoted by Martin Walker, UPI, November 13, 2002)
Statements such as these recently brought me to the United States—to Boston, New York, Washington, and the Bible-belt states of Kansas and Missouri—to look at changing American attitudes toward Europe in the shadow of a possible second Gulf war. Virtually everyone I spoke to on the East Coast agreed that there is a level of irritation with Europe and Europeans higher even than at the last memorable peak, in the early 1980s.
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Pens are dipped in acid and lips curled to pillory "the Europeans," also known as "the Euros," "the Euroids," "the 'peens," or "the Euroweenies." Richard Perle, now chairman of the Defense Policy Board, says Europe has lost its "moral compass" and France its "moral fiber."[1] This irritation extends to the highest levels of the Bush administration. In conversations with senior administration officials I found that the phrase "our friends in Europe" was rather closely followed by "a pain in the butt."
The current stereotype of Europeans is easily summarized. Europeans are wimps. They are weak, petulant, hypocritical, disunited, duplicitous, sometimes anti-Semitic and often anti-American appeasers. In a word: "Euroweenies."[2] Their values and their spines have dissolved in a lukewarm bath of multilateral, transnational, secular, and postmodern fudge. They spend their euros on wine, holidays, and bloated welfare states instead of on defense. Then they jeer from the sidelines while the United States does the hard and dirty business of keeping the world safe for Europeans. Americans, by contrast, are strong, principled defenders of freedom, standing tall in the patriotic service of the world's last truly sovereign nation-state.
A study should be written on the sexual imagery of these stereotypes. If anti-American Europeans see "the Americans" as bullying cowboys, anti-European Americans see "the Europeans" as limp-wristed pansies. The American is a virile, heterosexual male; the European is female, impotent, or castrated. Militarily, Europeans can't get it up. (After all, they have fewer than twenty "heavy lift" transport planes, compared with the United States' more than two hundred.) Following a lecture I gave in Boston an aged American tottered to the microphone to inquire why Europe "lacks animal vigor." The word "eunuchs" is, I discovered, used in the form "EU-nuchs." The sexual imagery even creeps into a more sophisticated account of American–European differences, in an already influential Policy Review article by Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace entitled "Power and Weakness."[3] "Americans are from Mars," writes Kagan approvingly, "and Europeans are from Venus"—echoing that famous book about relations between men and women, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
Not all Europeans are equally bad. The British tend to be regarded as somewhat different and sometimes better. American conservatives often spare the British the opprobrium of being "Europeans" at all—a view with which most British conservatives, still mentally led by Margaret Thatcher, would heartily agree. And Tony Blair, like Thatcher before him, and Churchill before her, is cited in Washington as a shining exception to the European rule.
The worst abuse is reserved for the French—who, of course, give at least as good as they get. I had not realized how widespread in American popular culture is the old English pastime of French-bashing. "You know, France, we've saved their butt twice and they never do anything for us," Verlin "Bud" Atkinson, a World War II veteran, informed me at the Ameristar casino in Kansas City. Talking to high school and college students in Missouri and Kansas, I encountered a strange folk prejudice: the French, it seems, don't wash. "I felt very dirty a lot," said one college student, recalling her trip to France. "But you were still cleaner than French guys," added another.
Two prominent American journalists, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and Joe Klein of The New Yorker, back from extensive book tours around the United States, separately told me that wherever they went they found anti-French sentiment— you would always get a laugh if you made a dig at the French. The Na-tional Review Online editor and self-proclaimed conservative "frog-basher" Jonah Goldberg, who also can be seen on television, has popularized the epithet quoted above, "cheese-eating sur- render monkeys," which first appeared in an episode of The Simpsons. Goldberg told me that when he started writing anti-French pieces for National Review in 1998 he found "there was a market for it." French-bashing became, he said, "a shtick."
1.
Clearly it will not do to throw together neoconservative polemics, Kansas City high school students' prejudices against French bathroom behavior, remarks of a senior State Department official and senior administration officials, and then label the whole bag "anti-Europeanism." As a European writer, I would not want to treat American "anti-Europeanism" in the way American writers often treat European "anti-Americanism."
We have to distinguish between legitimate, informed criticism of the EU or current European attitudes and some deeper, more settled hostility to Europe and Europeans as such. Just as American writers should, but often don't, distinguish between legitimate, informed European criticism of the Bush administration and anti-Americanism, or between legitimate, informed European criticism of the Sharon government and anti-Semitism. The difficult question in each case, one on which knowledgeable people may reasonably disagree, is: Where's the dividing line?
We also need to keep a sense of humor. One reason Europeans like to laugh at President George W. Bush is that some of the things he has said— or is alleged to have said—are funny. For example: "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur."[4] One reason Americans like to laugh at the French is that there is a long Anglo-Saxon tradition—going back at least to Shakespeare—of laughing at the French. But there's also a trap here. Conservative writ-ers such as Jonah Goldberg and Mark Steyn make outrageous statements, some of them obviously humorous, some semi-serious, some quite serious. If you object to one of the serious ones, they can always reply "but of course I was only joking!" Humor works by exaggeration and playing with stereotypes. But if a European writer were to describe "the Jews" as "matzo-eating surrender monkeys" would that be understood as humorous banter? Of course the context is very different: there has been no genocide of the French in the United States. Yet the thought experiment might give our humorists pause.
Anti-Europeanism is not symmetrical with anti-Americanism. The emotional leitmotifs of anti-Americanism are resentment mingled with envy; those of anti-Europeanism are irritation mixed with contempt. Anti-Americanism is a real obsession for entire countries—notably for France, as Jean-François Revel has recently argued.[5] Anti-Europeanism is very far from being an American obsession. In fact, the predominant American popular attitude toward Europe is probably mildly benign indifference, mixed with impressive ignorance. I traveled around Kansas for two days asking people I met: "If I say 'Europe' what do you think of?" Many reacted with a long, stunned silence, sometimes punctuated by giggles. Then they said things like "Well, I guess they don't have much huntin' down there" (Vernon Masqua, a carpenter in McLouth); "Well, it's a long way from home" (Richard Souza, whose parents came from France and Portugal); or, after a very long pause for thought, "Well, it's quite a ways across the pond" (Jack Weishaar, an elderly farmer of German descent). If you said "America" to a farmer or carpenter in even the remotest village of Andalusia or Ruthenia, he would, you may be sure, have a whole lot more to say on the subject.
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In Boston, New York, and Washington—"the Bos-Wash corridor"—I was repeatedly told that even people who know the Continent well have become increasingly indifferent toward Europe since the end of the cold war. Europe is seen neither as a potent ally nor as a serious potential rival, like China. "It's an old people's home!" said an American friend who attended both school and university in England. As the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson remarked in an exchange on CNN's Crossfire:
Who cares what the Europeans think. The EU spends all of its time making sure that British bologna is sold in kilos not pounds. The whole continent is increasingly irrelevant to American interests.[6]
When I asked a senior administration official what would happen if Europeans went on criticizing the US from a position of military weakness, the gist of his response was: "Well, does it matter?"
Yet I felt this claim of indifference was also overstated. Certainly, my interlocutors took a lot of time and passion to tell me how little they cared. And the point about the outspoken American critics of Europe is that they are generally not ignorant of or indifferent to Europe. They know Europe —half of them seem to have studied at Oxford or in Paris—and are quick to mention their European friends. Just as most European critics of the United States fiercely deny that they are anti-American ("don't get me wrong, I love the country and the people"), so they will almost invariably insist that they are not anti-European.[7]
Anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism are at opposite ends of the political scale. European anti-Americanism is mainly to be found on the left, American anti-Europeanism on the right. The most outspoken American Euro-bashers are neoconservatives using the same sort of combative rhetoric they have habitually deployed against American liberals. In fact, as Jonah Goldberg himself acknowledged to me, "the Europeans" are also a stalking-horse for liberals. So, I asked him, was Bill Clinton a European? "Yes," said Goldberg, "or at least, Clinton thinks like a European."
There is some evidence that the left–right divide characterizes popular attitudes as well. In early December 2002, the Ipsos-Reid polling group included in their regular survey of US opinion a few questions formulated for the purposes of this article.[8] Asked to choose one of four statements about American versus European approaches to diplomacy and war, 30 percent of Democratic voters but only 6 percent of Republican voters chose "The Europeans seem to prefer diplomatic solutions over war and that is a positive value Americans could learn from." By contrast only 13 percent of Democrats but 35 percent of Republicans (the largest single group) chose "The Europeans are too willing to seek compromise rather than to stand up for freedom even if it means war, and that is a negative thing."
The divide was even clearer when respondents were asked to pick between two statements about "the way in which the war on Iraq should be conducted." Fifty-nine percent of Republicans as opposed to just 33 percent of Democrats chose "The US must remain in control of all operations and prevent its European allies from limiting the States' room to maneuver." By contrast, 55 percent of Democrats and just 34 percent of Republicans chose "It is imperative that the United States allies itself with European countries, even if it limits its ability to make its own decisions."
It seems a hypothesis worth investigating that actually it's Republicans who are from Mars and Democrats who are from Venus.
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For some conservatives, the State Department is also an outpost of Venus. William Kristol, one of America's hereditary neoconservatives, writes of "an axis of appeasement—stretching from Riyadh to Brussels to Foggy Bottom."[9] Down the Bos-Wash corridor, I was several times told of two groups competing for President Bush's ear over Iraq: the "Cheney-Rumsfeld group" and the "Powell-Blair group." It is rather curious for a British citizen to discover that our prime minister has become a senior member of the State Department.
Atlanticist Europeans should not take too much comfort here, for even among lifelong liberal State Department Europeanists there is an acerbic edge of disillusionment with the Europeans. A key episode in their disillusionment was Europe's appalling failure to prevent the genocide of a quarter of a million Bosnian Muslims in Europe's own backyard.[10] Since then, there has been Europe's continued inability to "get its act together" in foreign and security policy, so that even a dispute between Spain and Morocco over a tiny, uninhabited island off the Moroccan coast has to be resolved by Colin Powell.
"They are not serious" was the lapidary verdict on "the Europeans" delivered to me by George F. Will over a stately breakfast in a Washington hotel. Though Mr. Will is very far from being a State Department liberal, many in the department would agree. Historically, the tables are turned. For what was Charles de Gaulle's verdict on the Americans? "Ils ne sont pas sérieux."
2.
So there is, in significant quarters of American life, a disillusionment and irritation with Europe, a growing contempt for and even hostility toward "the Europeans," which, at the extreme, merits the label "anti-Europeanism." Why has this come about?
Some possible explanations have emerged already; to explore them all would take a book. Here I can only indicate a few more places to look. For a start, there has always been a strong strain of anti-Europeanism in the United States. "America was created as an antidote to Europe," Michael Kelly, the former editor of The Atlantic Monthly, has observed. "Why," asked George Washington, in his Farewell Address, "by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?" For millions of Americans, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Europe was the place you escaped from.
Yet there was also an enduring fascination with Europe, famously exemplified by Henry James; a desire in many respects to emulate, and then outdo, two European countries above all, England and France. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. quoted to me the old line "when Americans die, they go to Paris." "Every man has two countries," said Thomas Jefferson, "his own and France." When was it that American attitudes toward England and France diverged so sharply? Was it 1940, the year of France's "strange defeat" and England's "finest hour"? Thereafter De Gaulle recovered French self-esteem in opposition to the Americans while Churchill conjured a "special relationship" between his parents' two nations. (To understand the approaches of Chirac and Blair to the US today the key names are still De Gaulle and Churchill.)
For fifty years, from 1941 to 1991, the United States and a growing fellowship of Europeans were engaged in a joint war against a common enemy: first Nazism, then Soviet communism. This was the heyday of the geopolitical "West." There were, of course, repeated transatlantic strains throughout the cold war. Some of today's stereotypes can be found fully formed in the controversies of the early 1980s about the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles, and American foreign policy toward Central America and Israel.[11] They were formed in the minds of some of the same people: Richard Perle, for example, then widely known for his hard-line views as "the prince of darkness." These transatlantic arguments were often about how to deal with the Soviet Union, but they were also finally constrained by that clear and common enemy.
Now no longer. So perhaps we are witnessing what the Australian writer Owen Harries foresaw in an article nearly ten years ago in Foreign Affairs: the decline of "the West" as a solid geopolitical axis, owing to the disappearance of that clear and common enemy.[12] Europe was the main theater of the Second World War and the cold war; it is not the center of the "war against terrorism." The gap in relative power has grown wider. The United States is not just the world's only superpower; it is a hyperpower, whose military expenditure will soon equal that of the next fifteen most powerful states combined. The EU has not translated its comparable economic strength—fast approaching the US $10 trillion economy—into comparable military power or diplomatic influence. But the differences are also about the uses of power.
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Robert Kagan argues that Europe has moved into a Kantian world of "laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation," while the United States remains in a Hobbesian world where military power is still the key to achieving international goals (even liberal ones). The first and obvious question must be: Is this true? I think that Kagan, in what he admits is a "caricature," is actually too kind to Europe, in the sense that he elevates to a deliberate, coherent approach what is, in fact, a story of muddled seeking and national differences. But a second, less obvious question is: Do Europeans and Americans wish this to be true? The answer seems to be yes. Quite a lot of American policymakers like the idea that they are from Mars—on the understanding that this makes them martial rather than Martian—while quite a lot of European policymakers like to think they are, indeed, programmatic Venutians. So the reception of Kagan's thesis is a part of its own story.
As a soon-to-be-enlarged European Union searches for a clearer identity, there is a strong temptation for Europe to define itself against the United States. Europe clarifies its self-image by listing the ways in which it differs from America. In the dread jargon of identity studies, America becomes the Other. Americans don't like being Othered. (Who does?) The impact of the September 11 terrorist attacks increases their own readiness to accept a martial and missionary account of America's role in the world.
Stanley Hoffmann has observed that France and the United States are both nations that see themselves as having a universalizing, civilizing mission. Now there is a European, rather than a merely French, version of the mission civilisatrice, a "EU-topia" of transnational, law-based integration, and it clashes most acutely with the latest, conservative version of an American mission.[13] Thus, for example, Jonah Goldberg quotes with irritation the claim by the veteran German Atlanticist Karl Kaiser that "Europeans have done something that no one has ever done before: create a zone of peace where war is ruled out, absolutely out. Europeans are convinced that this model is valid for other parts of the world."
Each side thinks its model is better. This applies not only to the rival models of international behavior, but also to those of democratic capitalism: the different mix of free market and welfare state, of individual freedom and social solidarity, and so on.[14] For the political scientist Charles A. Kupchan, the author of the recent book The End of the American Era, this presages nothing less than a coming "clash of civilizations" between Europe and America. Where Kagan thinks Europe is characterized by enduring weakness, Kupchan sees it, not China, as the United States' next great rival.[15] Many Europeans would love to believe this, but in the United States I found Kupchan almost alone in his view.
There is, I think, one other, deeper trend in the US. I've mentioned already that for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries American suspicion of things European was mixed with admiration and fascination. There was, to put it bluntly, an American cultural inferiority complex. This has gradually faded. Its fading has been accelerated, in ways that are not easy to pin down, by the end of the cold war and the United States' consequent rise to a unique preeminence. The new Rome no longer feels in awe of the old Greeks. "When I first went to Europe in the 1940s and 1950s, Europe was superior to us," a retired American diplomat with long European experience wrote to me recently. "The superiority was not personal—I never felt demeaned even by condescending people—but civilizational." Not any more. America, he wrote, "is no longer abashed."[16]
3.
All these trends were somewhat obscured for eight years after the end of the cold war by the presence in the White House of an honorary European, Bill Clinton. In 2001, George W. Bush, a walking gift to every European anti-American caricaturist, arrived in the White House with a unilateralist agenda, ready to jettison several international agreements. After September 11, he defined his new presidency as a war presidency. I found that the post–September 11 sense that America is at war persists more strongly in Washington than anywhere else in America, including New York.[17] It persists, above all, in the heart of the Bush administration. The "war against terrorism" strengthened an existing tendency among the Republican elite to believe in what Robert Kaplan has called "Warrior Politics," with a strong seasoning of fundamentalist Christianity—something conspicuously absent in highly secularized Europe. As Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations put it in his book Special Providence, it brought back the "Jacksonian" tendency in American foreign policy.[18] Al-Qaeda terrorists were the new Creek Indians.
The American question to Europeans then became, as the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer put it to me: "Are you in the trenches with us or not?" At first, the answer was a resounding yes. Everyone quotes the Le Monde headline "Nous sommes tous des Américains." But a year and a half later, the only European leader who most Americans think is in the trenches with them is Tony Blair.[19] Many in Washington feel that the French have reverted to their old anti-American attitudes, and that the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, won his reelection last September by cynically exploiting anti-Americanism.
When and where did European and American sentiment start diverging again? In early 2002, with the escalation of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. The Middle East is both a source and a catalyst of what threatens to become a downward spiral of burgeoning European anti-Americanism and nascent American anti-Europeanism, each reinforcing the other. Anti-Semitism in Europe, and its alleged connection to European criticism of the Sharon government, has been the subject of the most acid anti-European commentaries from conservative American columnists and politicians. Some of these critics are themselves not just strongly pro-Israel but also "natural Likudites," one liberal Jewish commentator explained to me. In a recent article Stanley Hoffmann writes that they seem to believe in an "identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States."[20] Pro-Palestinian Europeans, infuriated by the way criticism of Sharon is labeled anti-Semitism, talk about the power of a "Jewish lobby" in the US, which then confirms American Likudites' worst suspicions of European anti-Semitism, and so it goes on, and on.
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Beside this hopeless tangle of mutually reinforcing prejudice—difficult for a non-Jewish European to write about without contributing to the malaise one is trying to analyze—there are, of course, real European– American differences in approaches to the Middle East. For example, European policymakers tend to think that a negotiated settlement of the Israeli– Palestinian conflict would be a bigger contribution to the long-term success of the "war against terrorism" than a war on Iraq. The larger point, for our purposes, is that where the cold war against communism in Middle Europe brought America and Europe together, the "war against terrorism" in the Middle East is pulling them apart. The Soviet Union united the West, the Middle East divides it.
Coolly examined, such a division is extremely stupid. Europe, just next door and with a large and growing Islamic population, has an even more direct vital interest in a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic Middle East than the United States does. Moreover, I found two senior administration officials in Washington quite receptive to the argument—which is beginning to be made by some American commentators—that the democratization of the greater Middle East should be the big new transatlantic project for a revitalized West.[21] But that's not how it looks at the moment.
At the moment it seems that a second Gulf war will only widen the gulf between Europe and America. Even if there is not a war on Iraq, the Middle East can still provide the vortex in which real or alleged European anti-Americanism fuels real or alleged American anti-Europeanism, which in turn fuels more anti-Americanism, both being aggravated by sweeping charges of European anti-Semitism. A change might come through a major conscious effort on both sides of the Atlantic, or with a new administration arriving in Washington in 2005 or 2009. Yet a lot of damage can be done in the meantime, and the current transatlantic estrangement is also an expression of the deeper historical trends I have mentioned.
You might say that to highlight "American anti-Europeanism," as I have done in this essay, will itself contribute to the downward spiral of mutual distrust. But writers are not diplomats. American anti-Europeanism exists; and its carriers may be the first swallows of a long, bad summer.
—January 15, 2003
Notes
[1] The Guardian, November 13, 2002.
[2] Jonah Goldberg believes he coined this term, and relates it etymologically to a wiener sausage—as a metaphor for the European spine. However, an earlier coinage seems to be P.J. O'Rourke's Rolling Stone essay "Terror of the Euroweenies."
[3] Policy Review, No. 113 (June/July 2002). A book-length version will shortly be published as Of Paradise and Power (Knopf).
[4] Attributed to him by the London Times, July 9, 2002, quoting what someone told the Times journalist that Shirley Williams said that Tony Blair said that President Bush said to him. Blair's spokesman, Alastair Campbell, denied that Bush said anything of the sort.
[5] Jean-François Revel, L'Obsession Anti-Américaine (Paris: Plon, 2002).
[6] June 12, 2001. For an Englishman this does raise an urgent question: What on earth is "British bologna"?
[7] Jonah Goldberg was the only person I met who was prepared to accept that he was "anti-European," so long, he explained, as one means by "European" a certain kind of know-it-all, bureaucratic, liberal internationalist in Paris or Brussels.
[8] IPSOS US-Express, December 3–5, 2002. I am most grateful to Michael Petrou for arranging this.
[9] Weekly Standard, August 26, 2002.
[10] See my "Bosnia in Our Future," The New York Review, December 21, 1995. In this case the British government was very much among the Europeans.
[11] The Economist ran a cover drawing in 1984 entitled "How to Recognise a European Through American Eyes." Distinguishing characteristics of the European were "An Angry Eye on Reagan. A Blind Eye on Russia. Limp-wristed. Weak-kneed. No Guts. Cold Feet. Snooty. Too Big for his Boots. But in Need of US Support."
[12] "The Collapse of 'The West,'" Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 4 (September/October 1993).
[13] See Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Robert Howse, "'This is my EUtopia...': Narrative as Power," Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4 (November 2002).
[14] See, for example, Will Hutton, The World We're In (London: Little, Brown, 2002), and my debate with him in Prospect, May 2002.
[15] See his "The End of the West" in The Atlantic Monthly, November 2002, and his The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century (Knopf, 2002).
[16] E-mail to the author from Ambassador Thomas W. Simons, May 16, 2002, quoted with his kind permission. Michael Ledeen puts it less kindly: "Conversation is much better in America," he writes, and "Europeans have gone brain dead." This in the journal of the American Enterprise Institute, The American Enterprise, December 2002. The issue, entitled "Continental Drift: Europe and the US Part Company," is a veritable anthology of American right-wing views of Europe, including Mark Steyn's remarkable comment, "I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark."
[17] See my "The Capital Makes Up Its Mind," The New York Times, December 12, 2002. This impression is confirmed by an August 2002 opinion poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
[18] Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Routledge, 2002).
[19] This is borne out by the IPSOS US-Express, December 3–5, 2002, poll. Asked "out of the following six countries, which one, in your opinion, exhibits the strongest reaction of solidarity with the United States in its efforts against Iraq?" 59 percent said Britain. This was followed by Israel, 11 percent; Canada, 7 percent; France, 4 percent; Germany, 3 percent; and Russia, 3 percent.
[20] Stanley Hoffmann, "The High and the Mighty," The American Prospect, January 13, 2003.
[21] See, for example, Ronald D. Asmus and Kenneth M. Pollack, "The New Transatlantic Project," Policy Review, No. 115 (October/November 2002).------------------------------------------------------------------------Home · Your account · Current issue · Archives · Subscriptions · Calendar · Newsletters · Gallery · NYR Books
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Slipping down the Eurinal of history: France, the joke is on you
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
Last Sunday, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the alleged extreme right-wing madman, managed to place second in the first round of the French Presidential election. Since then, many Europhile commentators in the English-speaking world have been attempting to reassure us that the significance of this event has been much overplayed -- Le Pen only got a little more than he usually gets, pure fluke he came second, nothing to see here, move along.
The best response to this line of thinking was by the shrewd Internet commentatrix Megan McArdle: "They're completely missing the point, which is that it's hilarious."
Absolutely. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be weeping with laughter at the scenes of France's snot-nosed political elite huffily denouncing the result as an insult to the honour of the Republic. I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago and I well remember the retired French diplomat who assured me that "a man like George W. Bush is simply not possible in our politics. For a creature of such crude, simplistic and extreme views to be one of the two principal candidates in a presidential election would be inconceivable here. Inconceivable!"
Please, no giggling. Somehow events have so arranged themselves that French electors now face a choice, as the papers see it, between "la droite" et "l'extrême droite." The French people have taken to the streets in angry protests against ... the French people! Which must be a relief to the operators of McDonald's franchises, British lorry drivers and other more traditional targets of their ire, but is still a little weird.
Meanwhile, the only thing that stands between M. Le Pen and the Elysée Palace, President Chirac, has declared himself the representative of "the soul of the Republic." In the sense that he's a shifty dissembler with a long history of financial scandal and no political principles, he may be on to something.
While M. Chirac has cast himself as the defender of France, M. Le Pen is apparently the defender of the Jews. While I was over there, he was the only candidate who was seriously affronted by the epidemic of anti-Jew assaults by French Muslims. The Eurosnots told me this was "cynical," given that M. Le Pen is notoriously anti-Jew and not above doing oven jokes in public. But that doesn't necessarily make him cynical. Maybe he just loathes Arabs even more than Jews (which, for linguistic pedants, would make him technically a perfect anti-Semite).

Maybe he just resents the Muslims muscling in on his turf: "We strongly object to the Arab attacks on the Jews. That's our job." But, given that Chirac and Jospin brushed off the Jew-bashing epidemic like a speck of dust on their elegant suits, Le Pen's ability to co-opt it into his general tough-on-crime/tough-on-immigrants approach showed at the least a certain political savvy.
Still, despite the racism and bigotry, I resent the characterization of M. Le Pen as "extreme right." I'm an extreme right-wing madman myself, and it takes one to know one. M. Le Pen is an economic protectionist in favour of the minimum wage, lavish subsidies for France's incompetent industries and inefficient agriculture; he's anti-American and fiercely opposed to globalization. Even the antipathy toward Jews is more of a left-wing thing these days -- see the EU, UN, Svend and Mary Robinson, etc. Insofar as anyone speaks up for Jews in the West, it's only a few right-wing columnists, Newt Gingrich, Christian conservatives and Mrs. Thatcher -- or, as a reader e-mailed the other day, "all you Hebraic a--holes on the right." M. Le Pen is a nationalist and a socialist -- or, if you prefer, a nationalist socialist. Hmm. A bit long but, if you lost a syllable, you might be in business.
But terms like "left" and "right" are irrelevant in French politics. In an advanced technocratic state, where almost any issue worth talking about has been ruled beyond the scope of partisan politics, you might as well throw away the compass. The presidential election was meant to be a contest between the supposedly conservative Chirac and his supposedly socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. In practice, this boils down to a candidate who's left of right of left of centre, and a candidate who's right of left of right of left of centre. Chirac and Jospin ran on identical platforms -- they're both in favour of high taxes, high unemployment and high crime. So, with no significant policy differences between them, the two candidates were relying on their personal appeal, which, given that one's a fraud and the other's a dullard, was asking rather too much of French voters. Faced with a choice between Eurodee and Eurodum, you can't blame electors for choosing to make it a real race by voting for the one guy running on an openly stated, clearly defined manifesto.
M. Le Pen wants to restrict immigration; Chirac and Jospin think this subject is beneath discussion. Le Pen thinks the euro is a "currency of occupation"; Chospin and Jirac think this subject is beneath discussion. Le Pen wants to pull out of the EU; Chipin and Josrac think this subject is beneath discussion. Le Pen wants to get tough on crime; Chispac and Jorin think this, too, is beneath discussion, and that may have been their mistake. European Union and even immigration are lofty, philosophical issues. But crime is personal. The French are undergoing a terrible wave of criminality, in which thousands of cars are routinely torched for fun and more and more immigrant suburbs are no-go areas for the police. Chirac and Jospin's unwillingness even to address this issue only confirmed their image as the arrogant co-regents of a remote, insulated elite.
Europe's ruling class has effortlessly refined Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death my right not to have to listen to you say it. You might disapprove of what Le Pen says on immigration, but to declare that the subject cannot even be raised is profoundly unhealthy for a democracy. The problem with the old one-party states of Africa and Latin America was that they criminalized dissent: You could no longer criticize the President, you could only kill him. In the two-party one-party states of Europe, a similar process is under way: If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable politicians -- as they're doing in France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere. Le Pen is not an aberration but the logical consequence.
The Eurosnots, of course, learn nothing. President Chirac, for his part, has announced that he will not deign to debate his opponent during the remaining two weeks of the campaign. M. Le Pen beat M. Chirac in nine of France's 22 districts. Unlovely he may be, but he is the legitimate standard-bearer for democratic opposition to Chirac. By refusing to engage, the President is doing a grave disservice to French democracy. Similarly, Gerhard Schroeder, facing difficult electoral prospects this fall, is now warning German conservatives that he will decline to participate in a "campaign of fear" -- i.e., on touchy issues. But the way you defeat poisonous ideas is to expose them to the bracing air of open debate. In Marseilles, they're burning synagogues. In Berlin, the police advise Jews not to leave their homes in skullcaps or other identifying marks of their faith. But Europe's political establishments insist that, on immigration and crime, there's nothing to talk about.
A century and a half ago, Tsar Nicholas I described Turkey as "the sick man of Europe." Today, the sick man of Europe is the European -- the urbane Continental princelings like Chirac and Michel, gliding from capital to capital building their Eutopia, oblivious to the popular will except on those rare occasions, such as Sunday, when the people do something so impertinent they finally catch the eye of their haughty maître d'.
I've said before that September 11th will prove to be like the Archduke's assassination in Sarajevo -- one of those events that shatters the known world. To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, we must add the European Union and France's Fifth Republic. The only question is how messy their disintegration will be.

JWR contributor Mark Steyn is Senior Contributing Editor of The National Post. Comment by clicking here.

04/23/02 It's time to snap out of Arab fantasy land
04/16/02 Mideast war exposes 'ugly Europeans'
04/09/02 Arafat has begun his countdown to oblivion. Now it's time to crush the Palestinian uprising
03/27/02 The good, the bad and the Gallic shrug
03/20/02 Grand convocation of the weird© 2002, Mark Steyn