The Passing of the European Dream

Reading Adam Tooze's Crashed, which treats the 2008 crisis as the trans-Atlantic (rather than American) phenomenon it most assuredly was, I found myself thinking again of that "European Dream" long since ended. Back when social critics thought that perhaps Europe would present a more egalitarian, more sustainable socioeconomic model than the United States, no astute observer imagined, for example, that the continent's power elite has become confirmed socialists, or even social democrats. One took them for conservative bourgeois capitalists like any others, who would always rather have more than less, and like nothing better than a tax-free, union-free, unregulated business environment.

Yet, there was the hope that in a less atomized culture which had a longer and more turbulent history that included substantive experience of challenges from below, a more long-term, enlightened version of self-interest, somewhat less simple-minded "libertarianism," a touch more paternalism, would leave them inhibited about pushing too far; and that a more conscious, cohesive and organized labor movement and left, behind a more elaborately developed state, would similarly moderate their expectations.

Anyone who hoped that has been disappointed, Europe's elite having proven as myopic, greedy and ideological; as stupid and rapacious and vicious; as their counterparts anywhere else. Thus did they create their own banking crisis and tie themselves into the American crisis to boot; thus did they strive to impose yet more of the neoliberalism that had already proven such a disaster in the aftermath of the calamities they wrought for themselves and the world. As might be guessed given that all this had come to pass, Europe's working people also proved far less successful in standing up to those elites than their sympathizers hoped. The CEOs and oligarchs may not have remade their continent's institutions and laws and social understandings in the image of the reddest of American red states, but they had long had the momentum on their side before the crisis, and only continued to make headway after it, as the social democratic parties proved complicit, and right-wing populists and other fraudsters the principal beneficiaries of the electoral shakeups rather than new parties of the left or center.

Indeed, remembering my comment on the death of the European dream back in 2012, I remark my mention of Neo-Nazis in the streets of Greece, with the tolerance of the police. This year Neo-Nazis went on the rampage not in Europe's southeastern fringe, but in its supposedly chastened center, Germany, and not merely with the tolerance of the police, but the Interior Minister's publicly expressed sympathy--Horst Seehofer disgustingly declaring that he would have been with the "protestors" were it not for his position, while in mealy-mouthed fashion downplaying their politics. In that I am reminded yet again of how fast and how far the situation has deteriorated, the end of the European Dream hinting at a European Nightmare that might not be so different from previous European Nightmares in which an American speculative bust and global economic downturn empowered fascists across the continent.