Europe’s present situation is best understood by looking at the sharp contrast between the bright official picture and the seriousness of the gathering threats. The official picture shows a brand-new Europe evolving naturally—that is, progressively—out of sturdy but nonetheless antiquated nations. Shedding the burden of the past, our dear old nations from north, south, east, and west stride gallantly into the future by means of an unprecedented human association, one that reconciles the particularity of roots with the universality of purpose. Thus, while the substance of each nation is gently whittled down, the substance of Europe as a whole is proportionately enriched. At the end of the day, then, we all will be good Europeans, and our old nations will be within Europe what regions today are within each nation.

If ever there was a pie in the sky, this is surely it: With the demotion of the nation as a political form, particularity and universality lose their oldest and most effective link, and the components of political man come unhinged. We cannot know where we are headed once the attempted national synthesis has come undone.

The assessment I intend to make here may appear unduly, perhaps even extravagantly, bleak. Like every other human being endowed with a modicum of good sense, I prefer peace to war, comfort to misery, pleasure to pain, and even virtue to vice when the former is not too demanding. Certainly I do not positively enjoy the drums of doom. The reality, however, is that nearly every development in these last few year—including all those momentous steps taken to improve our lot—has contributed to my belief that the future of Europe is quite grim indeed. From the Maastricht Treaty to the launching of the euro to the indefinite expansion of the European Union, governments have relentlessly upped the ante and made the wager even more risky; the cost of any serious glitch has dramatically shot up. We have been so prematurely tied together by a common currency that any run-of-the-mill crisis could plausibly lead to the utter collapse of the noble European enterprise that for half a century now has carried our best hopes.

To be sure, friends of liberty do not wish to speak badly of what has developed in Europe these last few years, since the fall of Communism. We are grateful to all those who contributed to the victory of liberty and decency in Central and Eastern Europe, and who brought the two parts of our continent together again. Nevertheless, the return of liberty to half of Europe was by no means a properly European victory. A victory in Europe and for Europe, certainly, but not a European victory. What we have witnessed is the collapse of Communism, rather than the victory of democracy. To be truly victorious, you see, you ought to desire victory. To crave it. And as far as it was a victory—a political victory—it was a nearly exclusively American victory, though as a European, I regret to say this. Let us consider briefly the demise of Communism, one of the strangest phenomena in human history.

Whatever contempt or disgust we may harbor toward the Communist enterprise, we must admit that it managed to pull off a hugely successful death: Drowning under the applause of the entire Western world. My intention here is not to remind us that an average Communist bully like Gorbachev was everywhere lionized and in some places canonized, however distasteful the whole thing was. My point is rather that the incredibly corrupt and criminal enterprise of Communism was not condemned. Nor was it even judged by ordinary politicians and the citizenry at large. On this score, both Eastern and Western Europe, those who suffered under Communism and those who were supposed to guard against it, share in the same moral laziness. As far as I know, only in East Germany and the Czech Republic were the instruments of tyranny called to account, and only some of them, however mildly, punished. In general, people simply recoil from thinking about Communism further than to agree that “it does not work.” So Communism is just one of many things that admittedly don’t work, somewhat like attempts to square the circle. But because man is a moral and political animal, a thinking being who cannot live too far from truth, there is, as a result of this failure to confront the nature of Communism, the ugliness of the Communist lie, a festering sore at the root of our claims to victory. And so Europe will not reap the moral and political fruits to which it is not entitled.

The United States, on the other hand, has already gathered those sweet fruits, because it was, after all, an American victory. The bulk of the weaponry and strategy was American, as was the unity of resolve within the politically decisive class, and the president with the courage to say loud and clear that the Communist empire was evil and crumbling, and then to act according to that judgment. It was not a European victory because European countries—I can speak here only about Western Europe—did not really want it, with the notable but ambiguous exception of Germany, whose political class wanted it only as a means by which to reunify the fatherland. As far as European countries wanted anything, they wanted the preservation and continuation of the status quo, or at most its improvement through the construction of a united Western Europe.

This failure of Europe to bring about, and then to confront and pass judgment on, the demise of Communism will haunt our continent for many years to come. I will limit myself to considering the political consequences of this fact, leaving the moral analysis to citizens of formerly Communist countries, who may resent my efforts as reflecting the self-righteousness of a pampered Westerner.

 

There is no doubt that, as a result of her apparent victory, the European Union enjoys a surge of seeming vitality and strength. Indeed, candidates are queuing up at her door. Yet there is both a morality and a responsibility inherent in any true victory, for it is proof that you have been able to gather your material and moral forces and to apply them with a continuity of purpose. Real victory gives you a new perspective: You look at the world from a higher vantage point, and the world looks up to you with heightened expectations. True, everything can quickly come to naught—and you may even feel too good—but there is nevertheless a promise and a fecundity in true victory. The present American triumph is proof enough of that. In contrast, there is always a dangerous hollowness in a victory that is only apparent, in which we reap where we have not sown. In an apparent victory, the world of which we take advantage is still better than we are, however good we may feel. We cannot even acknowledge this serendipity: Since we Europeans no longer believe in God, we are unable to thank him for his gifts.

Thus the present state of Europe is characterized by a dangerous and widening gap between appearance and reality. The advantages that, however unequally, we enjoy together are not matched by a proportionate European contribution. This gnawing hollowness is as much a part of the European reality as any industrial or financial accomplishment. It is merely obscured by noisy announcements of, and feverish preparations for, an enormous European enterprise. While we regularly fail the test forced upon us by events—first Communism, and more recently, Bosnia and Kosovo—we continue to impose on ourselves tests of a growing arbitrariness, indeed of a comic arbitrariness. Like pious or other “superstitious” people, we burden ourselves with more and more superfluous works, all the while evading our plain duty. This contrast between an ever-growing European pretension and extension, and a brazen dereliction of duty—alas, if we only had the nerve to be brazen, so unaware are we of any political duty devolving upon us—has come more and more to characterize European mores. While what was once Yugoslavia was burning—and it is still smoldering—we Europeans were busy burnishing fine new coins. And we are still at it.

I am well aware that thoughtful partisans of the new Europe would accept a large part of this indictment, adding only that these all-too-real failures prove precisely the urgent necessity of this enterprise. We will gladly shoulder our responsibilities, they say, when we are able to, that is, after Europe has been built. Thus every critique of the present Europe is an argument for looking up to the sky (to Europe as it could be) or beyond the horizon (to Europe as it will be). This argument is as irrefutable as an argument can be, and they will be reading from the same score even after Rome has burned to the ground. But my quarrel with this argument is not that it falls short of the Popperian criterion. It is rather that it rests on a political assumption that is momentously brittle: The European nations, or Europe as a plurality of nations, are now and forever unable to take unified political action. Let us then be satisfied to bide our time and fine-tune our sophisticated common institutions. For example, since we live in a political interregnum, the new body politic must be elaborated from non- or sub-political elements, the decisive one being a common currency. Underlining this assumption is, of course, the belief that the nation as a political form is now obsolete, and utterly unable to advance the political destinies of the European peoples.