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NYTimes.com Article: America's Restive Partners by swsystem 28 April 2002 13:38 UTC |
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This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by swsystem@aol.com. Intelligent commentary today by Tony Judt. "Europeans today are being forced to weigh the social costs of abandoning the postwar welfare state. The far right offers one solution — close the borders against change and newcomers and confine state-provided social and welfare services to the "native" community. The left would retain the ideal of the social democratic state, at the expense of profit and efficiency if need be. And both sides juxtapose their European understanding of the good society, the cohesive community, to the American market-driven variant. This widely debated contrast is the common, binding thread at the heart of European anti-Americanism, and it is set to grow, not diminish." swsystem@aol.com /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Enjoy new investment freedom! Get the tools you need to successfully manage your portfolio from Harrisdirect. Start with award-winning research. Then add access to round-the-clock customer service from Series-7 trained representatives. Open an account today and receive a $100 credit! http://www.nytimes.com/ads/Harrisdirect.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ America's Restive Partners April 28, 2002 By TONY JUDT The news from Europe sounds grim. Synagogues have been fire-bombed; Jews have been assaulted; one in five French voters chose the far right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in the first round of the country's elections. American observers have wondered whether these events presage a return to the murderous hatreds and anti-Semitism of Europe's dark past. Are things really that bad? Maybe not. Above all, they are not that simple. The ultranationalist, xenophobic right is manifestly on the rise, and not just in France. In the most recent national elections in Austria and Switzerland, anti-immigrant parties got 27 percent and 23 percent of the vote, respectively. In Antwerp, the hypernationalist Vlaams Blok won nearly 40 percent at the last local elections, in 2000. Last month one in three of the prosperous burghers of Rotterdam gave Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant gay populist, their backing: half of all Dutch voters under 30 support his proposal to ban Muslim immigration and say they'll vote for him and his party in the country's national elections next month. The antiforeigner Danish People's Party won 12 percent of the national vote last November. Even in Britain, there is similar sentiment. The anti-immigrant, ultranationalist British National Party scored an unprecedented 14 percent of the vote in some decaying industrial towns with large Asian populations. These groups have in common three interlocking obsessions: crime, immigration and the loss of national "identity." The first issue is real: violent street crime is on the increase in Europe, and mainstream politicians who ignore it will be punished by voters. Everywhere the far right blames immigrants for crime. In France there are some five million Muslims, and they are Mr. Le Pen's primary target. In the Netherlands there are only 800,000 Muslims (5 percent of the population), but that is enough for Mr. Fortuyn to write a book called "Against the Islamization of Our Culture" and declare that his country is "full." In her best-known campaign poster, Pia Kjaersgaard, the leader of Denmark's People's Party, showed a pretty little blond child with the caption: "By the time you retire, Denmark will be a majority-Muslim nation." Yet in Denmark just 1 person in 15 is of foreign origin and most of these are thoroughly assimilated. The extreme right abhors dark people and other newcomers; it always has. But the common thread in right-wing populism today is something new, what Mr. Le Pen astutely captures when he appeals to the "little people ruined by Euro-globalization." Many Europeans today, especially the citizens of small, unimportant states (the French are an exception here), feel bewildered and lost. Their countries and their institutions have lost their place in a globalizing world economy - and above all in an institutionally homogenized European Union. Just as Americans would be wrong to project Europe's morbid past onto its troubled present, so they perhaps take too seriously the rhetoric of European unity, writing of "the European project," "European attitudes," or even "European anti-Semitism." Tip O'Neill used to insist that in the United States all politics is local. In Europe today, all politics is national. Jean-Marie Le Pen is a French dilemma. There is no such thing as the "European" far right; there are only the French, Dutch, Danish, Austrian, Italian and other variants. They share certain dislikes, one of which is the idea of "Europe" itself. "France" or "Denmark" is a concept with which men and women can identify, for good and ill, and on whose behalf prejudices and fears may be mobilized. "Europe" is not. The emphasis has changed, and the new sources of violence and xenophobia are not primarily rooted in traditional European anti-Semitism or the dark European past. Jews have been beaten in recent weeks, and synagogues attacked. But the perpetrators have often been those same young Muslims - in France and elsewhere - whom the far right itself excoriates. And though Europeans are typically more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, to suggest, as some American commentators have done, that European guilt over the Holocaust is eased by the sight of Israeli violence - and that Israel's behavior has released Europe's innate anti-Semitism - is to simplify a complex situation. It is also a slander on people in countries like Sweden or Portugal who quite properly feel no such guilt. The extreme right in Europe is nowhere on the verge of power. Mr. Le Pen has no hope of winning 30 percent of the electorate, much less becoming France's next president. But the European social crisis of which the far right is a pathological portent will not disappear, and on this score Americans have grounds for anxiety. It has for some time now been clear that Europe and America are drifting apart. On free trade, Iraq, the Middle East, international courts and many other post-cold war international issues, the Western allies are at odds. Yet the most important difference of all frequently passes unmentioned. Europeans today are being forced to weigh the social costs of abandoning the postwar welfare state. The far right offers one solution - close the borders against change and newcomers and confine state-provided social and welfare services to the "native" community. The left would retain the ideal of the social democratic state, at the expense of profit and efficiency if need be. And both sides juxtapose their European understanding of the good society, the cohesive community, to the American market-driven variant. This widely debated contrast is the common, binding thread at the heart of European anti-Americanism, and it is set to grow, not diminish. In these circumstances it is reasonable to be anxious about the future of the Western alliance. In the arrogance of power, officials in Washington have taken to describing the Europeans as "our fair-weather friends," whose sensibilities can safely be ignored. The assumption is that the Europeans are bound to follow the American lead - how else could it be? But this is imprudent. Fair-weather or not, the Europeans are our closest friends. But many Europeans see the world very differently, and it is a dangerous illusion to suppose that the logic of globalization must needs bring us together. Recent events in Europe suggest that the opposite may be happening. And that would be grim news indeed. Tony Judt is director of the Re marque Institute at New York Uni versity. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/28/opinion/28JUDT.html?ex=1021000929&ei=1&en=9ca5178ed48f1f65 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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