EUROPE'S IDENTITY CRISIS: BETWEEN THE
PAST AND AMERICA

Europe today is prosperous and disunited. What it will be like tomorrow remains a mystery - both because disunity results from conflicting assumptions about Europe's future, and because prosperity tends to become an end in itself. Europe today has no clear identity, no profile other than that which a process of industrialization and a process of economic integration have given it. Europe today has no sense of direction and purpose; this essay laments its absence, and (1) calls for its rebirth.

But one cannot ask anyone to choose his future if one does not establish first that freedom of choice exists. The point of this essay is to show that Europe's freedom of choice has been obliterated neither by the advent of industrial society nor by the evolution of world affairs. There is no "determination" of the economic and social system. Nor has a new "European identity" been fully shaped by the European communities. And yet, many Europeans behave as if the future course of Europe had been set, and many Americans believe it too. Whereas the former are divided between happy resignation and bitter protest, the latter show pride and some complacency. There is no justification for any of their attitudes.

There is one factor involved in the two processes which many see as inhibiting Europe's freedom: Europe's relationship with the United States. This essay tries to explore this relationship. Since 1945 it has been one of double dependence, internal and external. The internal dimension of dependence has been called "Americanization". European societies have been transformed by the eruption of the age of mass consumption. Of course, other terms, such as modernization or industrializa-

2

[LQ]

tion could be used; but "Americanization" for several reasons applies. It was the U. S. which preached the gospel of prosperity and goaded the Europeans into creating the institutions that would usher in the new age. It is the U. S. which serves as the model for the "new European" - the businessmen back from productivity tours, or the shrewd fabricators of mass culture, or the party propagandist who looks for inspiration in Madison Avenue, or the scientists and social scientists who envy, learn and use American theories and techniques. It is in the context of liberal policies, rather than in a framework of totalitarianism and public property, that the economic and social revolution has taken place. The external dimension shows dependence in a less intellectual and far more classical sense. For the first time in modern history Western Europe has become a stake in the international competition, and its role in the world has been reduced to that of a protectorate of an extra-European power. To be sure, the protector has been benevolent, often self-denying and inordinately generous; but this changes only the edge, not the essence, of the relationship. Thus, were it not for America's presence, one could hardly speak of Western Europe as an entity: to the extent to which Europe has a face, it is a borrowed one.

It is therefore not surprising that a mirage should have bloomed in the vision many Americans and Europeans have of Europe's future. It is the picture of a European society increativity similar in its institutions, behavior, and values to the "American model" of industrial society; of a European entity gradually growing into a Federation, speaking in world affairs with a single voice, which, because of the very identity of Europe's outlook and interests with America's would use orthodox "Atlantic" language. This essay, in discussing

XERO
COPY

XERO
COPY

XERO
COPY

XERO
COPY

that puts as much weight on "adjustment" and happiness as on learn-
ing. Richard Hofstadter has shown the anti-intellectual basis of
much American thinking about education but in Europe it is still
the intellectuals who try to shape the new order, and they do not
endorse the creed from overseas, although they like some of its
results Moreover, the American system is linked to the notion of
the melting pot - indeed it is the melting pot nation that tries
to make of so many one and that has made of mobility a way of life.
Competition has to place adjustment at the center of its concerns,
but there is no pan-European school system yet.

Thus, there is no clear vision either of the social or
of the civic ends of the enterprise. Contrary to Comte's maxim,
what is being destroyed is not always being replaced. The
"honnête homine" recedes in the distance and is (rightly) accused
of having been merely a rationalization for the harsh old fact of
aristocratic and bourgeois leisure and luxury. But all that we find
in leadership, his place is the democratic question mark. The new
teachers have lost the convictions of their predecessors as to the
values that a society needs in order to preserve itself and a nation
needs to keep its place in the world. They have few convictions of
their own, for the new society that emerges is born in confusion.
They are not familiar enough with it to know what they want it to be,
and both in their social and in their national ideals they literally
hover between a world already dead and one that is born too recently,
too tumultuously, and (above all) too undeliberately.

In such a void, only illusions bloom. There is the illu-
sion of achieving all the benefits of mass education without any of its

greater knowledge of the contemporary world, the teaching of and
the training for democracy in school, a program less centered on
the nation ought to help, but once again America, the example, can-
not be the model, for the school or university produces good citi-
zens only when there is a regime, a state, a sense of legitimacy
disputed by few. There is none yet in Europe as an entity - nor
in all of its main components. Thus, if educational reform suffers
from so many growing pains, it is because even men who have no par-
ticular fondness for the litlist past are not convinced that those
pains will lead to growth. Confusion and illusion may breed regres-
sion; it is not wise to treat a worry for value, and a nostalgia for
quality merely as the residue of feudalism or of the bourgeois age.

At this point, the tired reader may well inquire: "Granted
that today's Europe is not like America in its institutions, in its
past, and in its values, so what? The differences so laboriously
listed are mainly marks of transition: Europe is like a huge dispo-
sal that must incinerate its habits and beliefs of yesterday before
it can create new creeds and customs. Or else those differences will
be eliminated as soon as the U. S. moves in the direction already
taken by Europe (in the realm of public welfare), and as soon as Euro-
pean integration unites the European nations. At the end, there will
be two largely identical industrial societies."

This may well be the case. But my first point would be
that it is not sure at all. There comes a moment when the most
"agnostic", critical and cautious social scientist must do what
Kelsen does with his pure theory of law: he reaches a Grundnorm
which is a mere hypothesis. We are faced here with a choice of

gishly and haltingly. If it is not certain that a certain type of
social order breeds the desired values and obliterates the past
all by itself, then those Europeans who behave as if their fate was
sealed rather than selected and who flee their past instead of
facing it, would have to desist from much of what they have been
doing. For they cannot adequately analyze their affairs in American
terms (or accept American explanations of Europe in American terms).

What is in Europe has to be accounted for; the optimism
of various American theories makes sense in and for the U. S., but
no sense at all if transplanted in Europe. Elections may be the
the democratic form of the class struggle on this side of the ocean;
on the other side they remain a rather more complicated undertaking.
Leaders of private and public bureaucracies who share the values of
their subordinates and rule according to a democratic style of
authority may not be dangerous, but when the style and the elites'
values have traditionally not been democratic there is even less room
for complacency. Even if optimism were justified, the Europeans
would still have to discriminate. Otherwise the light by which one
chooses to be guided could happen to be that of a dead star. The
presidential system many Frenchmen admire is that of the Hundred Days,
not that of French and guerilla warfare of recent months; the mass
education system which impatient European reformers envy is busy try-
ing to introduce some of the very methods and institutions which
those reformers decry. Then there is a risk of the two cultures cross-
ing each other without ever really meeting or merging.

But there is another and more important implication. If,
on the one hand, nothing determines that Europe will be a replica of
the U. S., if, on the other hand, the past institutions and history

II. "Europeanization" With Diffidence

Let us turn from Europe's new social order to Europe's
role in the world - from the realm of intellectual dependence to
that of dependence in terms of power. Nowhere is the void I have de-
nounced more conspicuous. To be sure, we find an effort toward unity,
directly inspired by the example and encouraged by the policy of the
United States. Isn't it precisely here that the "American model" has
been both relevant and useful? Isn't it here that the Europeans have suc-
ceeded in turning prosperity into statecraft, in breaking with their
past without evasion, in shaping a projet for Europe?

And yet, the answer must be: no. The enterprise has not
fully succeeded, because the model was not relevant and the projet was
not drafted. Aron is right. "It is not sufficient to create a European
state. Rather, one must ask: What would be the object of a European
state? To have a sense of vocation, Europe would have to discover a
goal." It is the search for a common goal which has not yet suc-
ceeded. We must therefore examine first to what extent the progress
of the European movement has filled the void, then what factors have
prevented it from being filled yet, and finally what is the margin of
choice open to the Europeans.

Delays and Dilutions

Let us imagine some European publicist, in a coma since
1914, who suddenly wakes up and looks at the new world picture. He
finds the air buzzing with clamors about Europe's new strength and new
claims. His curiosity is aroused. What is it that the Europeans have
to say? His astonishment begins.