How to Think About Europe and the Nation Today

Here is a bit more from the article I’m working on (slowly) on the defenders of the nation (such as Scruton and Manent) in Europe today. It has something vaguely to do with our president and his Nobel Prize and even Krauthammer’s article in THE WEEKLY STANDARD about the dangers in America becoming more like Europe.

Manent, for one, criticizes the European Union for not being properly territorial, for having no borders in mind, for, for example, contemplating expansion beyond the continent into Turkey. In that respect, it might be like the expansive United States, which took well over a hundred years to find definite borders. But the American principle of expansion remained political; the intention was almost always that new territory be incorporated into the nation and that its inhabitants take on the rights and duties of American citizens. A big war and constitutional amendments settled the issue of whether the American union was merely a voluntary or federal union of independent states. There’s real evidence that the European Union is evolving in the direction of our more perfect union.

It seems Europe means to become a kind of voluntary or postmodern empire based on the emerging primacy of geoeconomics over geopolitics. Europe, the thought is, can be held together by shared values and interests that would allow for the withering away of at least much of the nation-state. Military power can be gradually replaced by soft power. The political loyalty that used to reside with particular European nations can also largely wither away; it can’t and shouldn’t be transferred to Europe as a whole.

One irony, of course, is this sort of postnational dedication to the common values of liberty and dignity erodes the political institutions required for free citizens actually to govern themselves. Another, of course, is that this postnational spirit is parasitic on the military power of a relatively quite aggressive nation—the United States. American has to remain, in Europe’s eyes, rather repulsively nationalistic for the European experiment in postpolitical personal liberty to seem realistic. (President Obama please note: We do them no good if we become like them, and there is, of course, no other nation dedicated to liberty to fill what would be the resulting military/political vacuum.)

Today’s Europe, all alone, seems ill-equipped to resist or even understand the new nationalism of the Russians who could, whenever they please, plunge them into a very cold winter (and the Europeans have rather quickly become very used to being comfortable in all seasons). Postnational Europe, of course, is reacting against the horrific 20th century excesses of nationalism and ideological History. The newly nationalistic Russians are reacting against their libertarian or excessively voluntaristic period of the 1990s; History and the nation seemed to evaporate—to be replaced by the ruthless anarchism of the Hobbesian/Mafia state of nature. History, of course, is dead, but in the Russian mind Stalin is back in favor as a really successful expansive nationalist. And Putin is his brilliant and legitimate successor as national leader.