After Europe
By Ivan Krastev
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About this ebook
Ivan Krastev
Ivan Krastev is a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, a contributing writer for the international New York Times, and, most recently, the author of the acclaimed After Europe.
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Book preview
After Europe - Ivan Krastev
After Europe
Ivan Krastev
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress
Cover design by John Hubbard
ISBN 978-0-8122-4943-9 hardcover
ISBN 978-0-8122-9426-2 ebook
Contents
Introduction: The Déjà Vu Mind-Set
Chapter 1: We the Europeans
Chapter 2: They the People
Conclusion: Perhapsburg—Reflections on the Fragility and Resilience of Europe
Notes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Déjà Vu Mind-Set
On one of the last days of June 1914, a telegram arrived in a remote garrison town on the border of the Habsburg Empire. The telegram consisted of a single sentence printed in capital letters: HEIR TO THE THRONE RUMORED ASSASSINATED IN SARAJEVO.
In a moment of disbelief, one of the emperor’s officers, Count Battyanyi, began inexplicably speaking in his native Hungarian to his compatriots about the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a man who had been perceived as partial to the Slavs. Lieutenant Jelacich, a Slovene who felt uneasy about Hungarians—especially because of their suspected disloyalty to the throne—insisted that the conversation be held in the more customary German. Then I will say it in German,
Count Battyanyi assented. We are in agreement, my countrymen and I: We can be glad the bastard is gone.
This was the end of the multiethnic Habsburg Empire—at least the way Joseph Roth captured it in his magisterial novel The Radetzky March.¹ The empire’s final demise was partly fate, partly murder, partly suicide, and partly just sheer bad luck. While historians disagree whether the empire’s collapse was a natural death caused by institutional exhaustion or a violent murder at the hands of World War I, the ghost of the failed Habsburg experiment continues to haunt European minds. Oscar Jaszi—witness to (and historian of) the end of the monarchy—was spot-on in 1929 when he wrote that if the Austro-Hungarian state experiment had been really successful, the Habsburg monarchy would have solved on its territory the most fundamental problem of present Europe. . . . How it is possible to unite national individualities of divergent ideals and traditions in such a way that each of them can continue its own particular life, while at the same time limiting its national sovereignty enough to make peaceful and effective international cooperation possible?
²
As we know, the experiment never came to a definitive conclusion, because Europe failed to resolve its thorniest problem. Roth’s story is a powerful testament that when man-made worlds of political and cultural artifice disappear, they do so quickly. The end is both a natural outcome of structural deficiencies and the equivalent of a traffic accident—an unintended consequence, say, or an act of sleepwalking, a particular moment that has a dynamic all of its own. It is both inevitable and inadvertent.
Are we experiencing a similar disintegration moment
in Europe today? Do both Britain’s democratic decision to leave the union (in economic terms, it is the equivalent of the egress of twenty smaller EU member countries) and the rise of Euroskeptic parties on the continent signal the unraveling of our latter-day experiment in resolving Europe’s most fundamental problem? Is the European Union doomed to fall apart in the fashion of the Habsburg Empire? Is 2017—marked by critical elections in the Netherlands, France, and Germany—fated to be as momentous a year as 1917?
Jan Zielonka has aptly observed that we have many theories of European integration, but practically none of European disintegration.
³ This is not accidental. The architects of the European project have fooled themselves into believing that avoiding mentioning the D
word is a surefire way to prevent it from happening. For them, European integration was like a speed train—never stop and never look back. Making the European Union’s disintegration unthinkable was the preferred strategy over making integration irreversible. But there are two other reasons for the dearth of theories on disintegration. First is the problem of definition: How can disintegration be distinguished from reform or reconfiguration of the union? Would the departure of a group of countries from the eurozone, or from the union itself, amount to disintegration? Or would the decline of the EU’s global influence and the reversal of some major achievements of European integration (such as the free movement of people or the abolition of institutions like the Court of Justice of the European Union) be evidence of disintegration? Does the emergence of a two-tier EU amount to disintegration, or is it just a step toward a closer and more perfect union? Might it be possible for a union populated by illiberal democracies to continue the same political project?
Then there’s the irony that at the very moment when political leaders and the general public are paralyzed by a fear of disintegration, Europe is more integrated than ever before. The financial crisis made the idea of a banking union a reality. The need for an effective response to the rise in terrorist threats has compelled Europeans to cooperate—more than ever before—in the field of security. And what is most paradoxical, the multiple crises currently faced by the union make ordinary Germans unusually interested in the problems of the Greek and Italian economies and press Poles and Hungarians to be attentive to Germany’s asylum policies. Europeans live in fear of disintegration while the union looks more than ever like a community of fate.
Imagining European disintegration has hardly been in vogue with fiction writers either. There are scores of novels that ask what would have happened if Nazi Germany had triumphed in World War II. We likewise have fantasies of what could have transpired if the Soviets had won the Cold War—or, for that matter, if the communist revolution had taken place in New York instead of Petrograd. But almost nobody has been particularly inspired to narrate the fictional story of the European Union’s disintegration. The sole exception is, perhaps, José Saramago. In his novel, The Stone Raft, a river that flows from France to Spain disappears into the ground and the entire Iberian Peninsula breaks off from Europe and heads west across the Atlantic.⁴
George Orwell was certainly right to suggest that to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
On January 1, 1992, the world woke up to learn that the Soviet Union was no longer on the map. One of the world’s two superpowers had collapsed without a war, an alien invasion, or any other catastrophe, with the exception of one farcical, unsuccessful coup. The collapse happened contrary to every expectation that the Soviet empire was too big to fail, too stable to collapse, and too nuked-up to be defeated and had survived too much turbulence to simply implode. As late as 1990, a group of leading American experts insisted that sensationalist scenarios make for exciting reading but . . . in the real world various stabilizers and retarding factors exist; societies frequently undergo crises, even grave and dangerous ones, but they seldom commit suicide.
⁵ But in reality, societies sometimes do commit suicide, and they do it with a certain élan as well.
As it was a century ago, Europeans today are living at a moment when paralyzing uncertainty captures a society’s imagination. It is a moment when political leaders and ordinary citizens alike are torn between hectic activity and fatalistic passivity, a moment when what was until now unthinkable—the disintegration of the union—begins to be perceived as inevitable. And it is a moment when the narratives and assumptions that only yesterday guided our actions begin to seem not only outdated but nearly unintelligible. As we know from history, the fact that something appears absurd and irrational hardly means it can’t happen. And the ever-present Central European nostalgia for the liberal Habsburgs is the best proof that sometimes we are able to appreciate something only after it is gone.
The European Union has always been an idea in search of a reality. But there is a growing worry that what once kept the union together no longer holds. Shared memories of the Second World War, for example, have faded from view: half of all fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds in German high schools don’t even know that Hitler was a dictator, while a third believe that he protected human rights. As Timur Vermes’s 2011 satirical novel Look Who’s Back suggests, the question is no longer whether it’s possible for Hitler to come back; it’s whether we’d even be able to recognize him. The novel sold more than a million copies in Germany. The end of history
that Francis Fukuyama promised us in 1989 may well have arrived, but in the perverse sense that historical experience no longer matters and few are really interested in it.⁶
The geopolitical rationale for European unity vanished with the Soviet Union’s collapse. And Putin’s Russia, threatening as it may be, cannot fill this existential void. Europeans today are more insecure than in the waning days of the Cold War. Surveys indicate that the majority of Britons, Germans, and French believe that the world is heading to a major war, but