More Hanson

Sometimes Victor Hanson's weekly output just astonishes me; other times it leaves me envious as a writer. Yesterday the most important writer in America showed up on the Wall Street Journal's web page analyzing our troubled relations with Europe.

Hanson's conclusion is quoted below, and I think it is too optimistic. The idea that we have to wait and see what happens in Europe is a way of avoiding simply accepting that Europe is done. Europe no longer has an identity through which it can judge what is or is not in its own interests, nor does it have an identity that would allow it to defend itself against its own internal disintegration. The formation of the European Union is not a positive sign, it is the worst possible negative sign. It destroys Europe's dynamic diversity of national cultures and substitutes bloodless German socialist technocracy guided by a self-absorbed French ideology as the continental orthodoxy. The European Union is the deadly universal state that Arnold Toynbee describes as the harbinger of a collapsing civilization. Hanson writes:
The United States should ignore all this ankle-biting, praise the EU to the skies, but not take very seriously their views on the world until we learn exactly what is going on inside Europe during these years of its uncertainty. America is watching enormous historical forces being unleashed on the continent from its own depopulation, new anti-Semitism, and rising Islamicism to Turkish demands for EU membership and further expansion of the EU into the backwaters of Eastern Europe that will bring it to the doorstep of Russia. Whether its politics and economy will evolve to embrace more personal freedom, its popular culture will integrate its minorities, and its military will step up to protect Western values and visions is unclear. But what is certain is that the U.S. cannot remain a true ally of a militarily weak but shrill Europe should its politics grow even more resentful and neutralist, always nursing old wounds and new conspiracies, amoral in its inability to act, quite ready to preach to those who do.

We keep assuming that Europeans are like Britain and Japan when in fact long ago they devolved more into a Switzerland and Sweden--friendly neutrals but no longer real allies. In the meantime, let us Americans keep much more quiet, wait, and watch--even as we carry a far bigger stick.

Comments

K2ENF said…
Perhaps you should be reading Mark Steyn's thoughts on the matter. Steyn (And now, Hanson) seem comforted thinking that an Islamic Europe will be easier to deal with than the current one. Apparently, they both have forgotten all about the last forty years, and particularly the last four.

It is true that an Islamic Europe would be no comeptition in terms of economics...(A visit to Beruit should prove that point)... imagine with me if you will Islam with the Nukes and other heavy firepower etc., that the EU currently has.

That concept, to my mind trumps all other considerations.
Well, I don't think that Steyn really believes that an Islamic Europe would be easier to deal with. He acknowledges that the whole thing is a catastrophe in the making, and he's attempting to have a laugh in the face of it. Islam itself is a fully disintegrated civilization. It wouldn't be enjoying an internal "conquest" of Europe so much as a scavenging of Europe's remains.

The truly troubling aspect of Europe, and Bush should take note of it, is that it also represents a collapse of liberal democracy. As Bush sells liberal democracy as the cure-all for the world's ills, he should be aware that human nature is the inherent quality of all great societies. And human nature is not just about freedom. Europe had long balanced itself between the U.S. and the Soviets, carping at its forgiving ally and making nice with its enemy. With the enemy gone, Europe is poised to become a new Soviet Union. The surprise will be that it's going to have less than half the life span that the Soviets had.

But an Islamic Europe wouldn't be easier to deal with. It would be like dealing with Dante's Inferno.
K2ENF said…
I've wondered in the past if that isn't part of what drives Mr. Bush's efforts in the middle east. He sees, likely more clearly than we, given his better informational sources, the Islamic Takeover of Europe pretty much a given... and so the promotion of a liberal democracy in the middle east would thereby be a prevetitive to having to re-fight that battle on the fields of Europe, once that Islamic takeover is complete.

Hmmm.
The Middle East is an immediate problem without factoring in the future of Europe. And the disintegration of a post-Christian Europe into a democratically obtained Islamic empire will be a catastrophe that someone other than Bush will face as president.

Bush has a vision of universal liberal democracy. Yet in Europe you can see the other side of that vision, the end of the road for liberal democracy. So, we could wind up with a reformed Islamic heartland in the Middle East, while Europe becomes a post-Western empire of radical Islamists who see the conquest and subjugation of the old confines of Christendom as their duty.

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