Austin Bay Blog

Gerard Baker of the London Times and Victor Davis Hanson in the Washington Times join the post-election Franco-Dutch fracas.

Baker begins with a discussion about Turkey and Europe’s challenge from Asia, past and present. (In fact, he says he’s visiting Istanbul.) Here’s the key quote about European decline:

Instead of focusing on what was needed – American and British-style labour reforms, tax cuts and deregulation — Europe embarked on a quix- otic exercise. It sought to weld a dozen or more disparate countries into an unbreakable economic union, all settled snug and warm under the fraying comfort blanket of expensive welfare systems.

In the political field too, even at its zenith, Europe had been surrendering the tools that had given it peace and harmony. It owed its years of peace not to some solemn intra-European comity but to the hard steel of US firepower, primed to defend Europe from the Soviet Union. But by the early 1990s, having shed its bloody past, Europe had lost the moral will as well as the capacity to face down new threats at home and abroad to the freedoms it cherished. European governments cut defence budgets and embraced peace as a strategy. This malaise was clearly evident in the Balkans in the early 1990s, where murderous inter-ethnic strife was cheerfully tolerated for years.

When its American ally was attacked in September 2001, Europe gamely offered to reciprocate for US protection in the Cold War, but most European nations lacked the military resources to turn that promise into anything more than tokens.

Then in Iraq in 2003, confronted with a tyrant who had repeatedly thumbed his nose at the international system that Europe supposedly revered, it instinctively recoiled, and a softened-up intellectual elite turned on the Americans instead.

This is the dismal moral history of Chirac and Schroeder, and the elites who played the Anti-Cowboy Card.

If you recall the exchange Mark Styen and I had about Euro-decline, I said that I’d seen Dutchmen, Italians, Danes, and Poles as well as Brits in the field in Iraq. Societies in crises rely on their soldiers; leaders who successfully navigate great crises have to combine pragmatism and perseverence, the qualities the battlefield requires. It’s why I’m optimistic about on a Euro-turn-around– but a turn after great internal political strife and bitter debate. The Double No is certainly a mark of strife and debate.

Baker says L’Age D’Or — whoops, L’Age Dupe– of elitist moral relativism is now an Age Decayed and Desperate:

At home, the same moral relativism, bred by years of pampered prosperity, was creating its own destructive forces. Again, egged on by intellectual elites, Europeans were encouraged to despise the civilisation that had nurtured them. The nation state was pronounced a hateful anachronism that had to be replaced by a pan-European superstate. The West’s defining values of enlightened tolerance and freedom were not superior to anyone else’s. Crime was the fault of its own unfair societies.

Victor Davis Hanson see death throes– not just of the EU constitution, but the death throes of dictatorships:

The French and Dutch rebuffs of the European Union constitution will soon be followed by other rejections. Millions of proud, educated Europeans are tired of being told by unelected grandees that the mess they see is abstract art.
The EU constitution — and its promise of a new Europe — supposedly offered a corrective to the Anglo-American strain of Western civilization. More government, higher taxes, richer entitlements, pacifism, statism and atheism would make a more humane and powerful new Continent of more than 400 million to outpace a retrograde United States.
Instead, Europe faces a declining population, unassimilated minorities, low growth, high unemployment and an inability to defend itself, militarily or morally. Somehow the directorate of the European Union has figured out how to have too few citizens while having too many of them out of work.
The only question that remains is just how low will the 100,000 bureaucrats of the European Union go in shrieking to their defiant electorates as they stampede for the exits.
In fact, 2005 is a culmination of dying ideas. Despite the boasts and threats, almost every political alternative to Western liberalism over the last quarter-century is crashing or already in flames…

This is a choice paragraph:

Oil, terror, anti-Semitism and hating America gave the fundamentalists some resonance, but there were never any ideas. The Islamicists offered nothing to galvanize the Arab masses other than nihilism. That doctrine feeds and employs no one. Instead, we witness the creepy threats and the pyrotechnics of a lunatic ideology going the way of bushido and the kamikazes.

Yup–all the elements that appeal to L’Age Dupe relativist elites: anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, nihilistic violence as long as it’s someplace else.

Hanson’s wind-up:

Why all these upheavals?
Global communications now reveal hourly to people abroad how much better life is in Europe than in the Middle East and Asia — and how in America, Australia and Britain the standard of living is even better than in most of Europe.
The removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and their replacement with democracies proved the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was neither weak nor cynical. In fact, it was the utopian United Nations, with its oil-for-food, snoozing in Darfur and scandals about peacekeepers, that proved corrupt and unreliable.
The mass mourning of the pope’s death revealed a renewed desire for spirituality. Two billion in India and China quietly keep copying the West. Car bombs, fist-shaking mobs and beheadings dispel all the old romance about the Third-World postcolonial “other.”
What are we left with then?
Democracy, open markets, personal freedom, individual rights, pride in national traditions, worry about big government — which is what we see in the United States, Britain, Australia and their allies in Japan and the breakaway countries in Europe. Elections in Ethiopia, France, Iraq, Lebanon and Ukraine all point to a desire for more freedom from central state control.

It is damned hard to get there from here– to more freedom. At one point in the article Hanson says “The caudillos are gone from Latin America.” Hugo Chavez says otherwise. But the trend toward freedom, a trend pushed by technology, is very real.