Europe’s Virtues Will Be Its Undoing
"We often forget that contemporary Europe was not born, as the United States was, in the euphoria of new beginnings, but in a sinking sense of its own abjection. The crimes of the Nazis affected the entire Old World, like a cancer that had long been growing inside it. Thus, the European victors over the Third Reich were contaminated by the enemy they had helped defeat, in contrast to the Americans and Soviets, who emerged from the conflict crowned in glory. Ever since, all of Europe—the East as well as the West—has carried the burden of Nazi guilt, as others would have us bear the guilt of North American slavery and Jim Crow. It has left us sullied to the very depths of our culture. Isn’t this what the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire contends when he de-Germanizes Hitler and makes him the very metaphor of the white man in general?...
The amazing thing is not that such masochistic theories should flourish, but that they are applauded by so many elites. For a few decades, the Cold War delayed the West’s self-examination, but since 1989 and the inclusion of ex-Soviet bloc countries into a widening European Union, the crisis of conscience has only deepened, and has partially, if not completely, guided political thought. Having scaled unprecedented peaks of barbarity, the Europe of Brussels has decided to redeem itself by privileging moral values over realpolitik... Western Europeans dislike themselves. They are unable to overcome their self-disgust and feel the pride in their heritage and the self-respect that is so strikingly evident in the United States. Modern Europe is instead mired in shame shrouded in moralizing discourse. It has convinced itself that, since all the evils of the twentieth century arose from its feverish bellicosity, it’s about time it redeemed itself and sought something like a reawakened sense of the sacred in its guilty conscience.
What better example of this proclivity exists than Angela Merkel’s embrace of about a million refugees fleeing war-torn Syria in 2015?... Already pre-eminent in Europe, Berlin would call the shots, whether exercising toughness or kindness. Merciless with the Greeks in July, when the Chancellery wanted to eject them from the eurozone, but beneficent with the Syrians in September, it could demonstrate severity or an ever so imperial charity...
Europe sees itself as a sacrificial offering, through which the entire world can expiate its sins. It offers to assume the shame for every misfortune that befalls the planet: famine in Africa, drowning in the Mediterranean, terrorism, natural disasters, they are all directly or indirectly our handiwork. And when we are attacked—by terrorists, for example—it’s still our fault; we had it coming and are undeserving of compassion... Two areas in particular reveal this delusion of sanctity—immigration and ecology.
When it comes to mass migrations, no one seems surprised that “migrants”—a vague all-purpose term—choose to journey exclusively to Western Europe rather than to the Maghreb, the Mashriq, the Gulf States, or Russia. That is because, like everyone else, they know that only in Europe will they find a sense of exacerbated culpability; it’s pretty much assured that they will be able to arrive on its shores, preferably under the gaze of the media, confident of being taken in, or at least listened to...
At a practical level, hospitality cannot be granted as a simple offering to the detriment of national sovereignty. The fear, not of the foreigner, but of the stranger in one’s home, of not being protected by the state, the fear of cultural insecurity and expropriation—these are not reactionary fantasies. How can the welfare state, already overstretched, cope with the costs of retirement benefits and medical care if it must also cater to the needs of new arrivals? In former times, such an influx would have been called an invasion, an occupation, colonization. Today, such pejoratives are forbidden. From now on, it is simply a matter of love and listening and radiant outwardness instead of ugly inwardness. But we are forgetting a simple truism: were it a matter of just a few thousand people, one’s duty to help would be clear. But when we talk about tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions, priorities necessarily shift—where there are overwhelming numbers, morale collapses...
Nobel laureate Jean Marie le Clézio denounced the French Republic’s president’s “unbearable lack of human decency” for wanting to distinguish between economic migrants and political refugees. When we know that a majority of those seeking asylum come from Georgia and Albania, however, this is hardly a trivial distinction... Immigration, he writes, strengthens us and enriches us. But this trope of enrichment is peculiar. It suggests that, if left to our own devices, we would be poor indeed, lacking the necessary ingredients for prosperity.
Let us remember that, since 2015, Europe has rescued 730,000 migrants from the Mediterranean. But this fact meets the immediate objection that thousands of others drowned there. In this way, our generosity is turned against us. For having accepted the challenge of migration we have become accountable for every individual who has died at sea. In a strange twist, those who rescue people from the waves have become the executioners...
Today, the migrant has replaced the proletarian and the guerrilla warrior as the new hero of contemporary victimology. He is both the epitome of oppression and the source of our salvation. Every other consideration must fall before him. One isn’t allowed to have one’s own thoughts or entertain any doubts about him, because his wretched condition demands only charity. In the same way that a “racialized” person can never be a racist, the idea that someone wanting to leave his own country to come to Europe could be duplicitous, or lie about his identity or intentions, amounts to a thought crime. Deprecating the European goes hand in hand with idealizing the foreigner, who embodies all virtue. He is at once the persecuted and the redeemer who’s come to shock us out of our comfort and complacency.
Our only duty toward the refugee is to play the solicitous host, the zealous concierge, so that he may save us from ourselves and our shrinking demographics. Without him we’d be vegetating in a retirement home, or like the paralyzed old man pushed about in his wheelchair by a congenial black man in the 2011 hit movie Les Intouchables. Thus, the great nations of Europe have no other purpose than to serve as welcome centers and public lobbies for the world’s unfortunate. Take a look at the 10, 20, and 50 euro bank notes; they all feature arches, bridges, and empty public spaces waiting to be populated by citizens of the world. As Paul Yonnet pointed out in 2006, we want to make immigration the vector of our regeneration; France must become a collaborator in its own transformation...
This movement, we are told, is irreversible. Migrations cannot be stopped. They are written into humanity’s DNA, as stipulated in the Marrakesh Pact, a worldwide agreement on safe migrations signed by 160 countries on December 10, 2018. This document considers migration to be inevitable and beneficial....
According to Novosellof, walls only exist in our imagination, and the states that want to protect themselves behind them will be left more isolated than the people kept outside. What an odd idea: closing the door to one’s home means incarcerating oneself in it!
This is Otherness taken to an extreme. In this way, newcomers are able to dictate European behavior... The more religious practice recedes, the more we abandon ourselves to a kind of goodwill that is as ardent as it is wrong-headed. Chesterton was right: “This modern world is full of old Christian ideas gone mad.” And here we are, since 2013, having adopted the notion of the migrant as Christ figure. We might call this strange mix of passivity and piety altruistic fatalism. Since we can’t stop the influx of migrants, we must enthusiastically embrace them...
To welcome foreigners must we become foreigners in our own home? According to the novelist Marie Darieussecq, yes, we must...
One’s home no longer exists, my home is your home. Just like during the colonial period, the new global individual belongs on no particular soil. We have to dismantle and rebuild our society as if it were a Lego set. The old white European’s hegemony must give way to the richness of diversity. Migrant and minority identity is always positive, and that of the old nations always regressive. It’s not surprising that the people of Europe are unenthused by the reformers’ plans and fairy tales. They have forgotten the basic fact that an offer creates demand. The porousness of our borders, the constant stream of people traffickers, the haste of some rescuers to become service providers and create, via phone signals bouncing off satellites, an “uber-migration” (Stephen Smith)—all of these factors incentivize migration more than poverty or war...
Pulling on heart strings before the cameras is the celebrity’s favorite pastime. What happens to those saved from the sea receives less attention as they grapple with the substantial challenges of assimilating into strange societies, vulnerable to the predatory attention of smugglers, organized crime, and the exploiters of cheap labour. The zenith of goodness risks being transformed into a nadir of indifference when no thought is given to what will become of the survivors.
Let’s not confuse hospitality with world weariness, even when it is dressed up in cheap lyricism. The immigrant, the refugee, is now merely a stick with which we beat ourselves...
In 2018, for example, the human rights defender Jacques Toubon vituperated in Le Monde against the desire of the government to “control migratory movements.” According to him, we’d do better to “create pathways for migrants,” even though there are already legal procedures in place that grant French citizenship to between 100,000 and 200,000 people a year...
To every problem we encounter, we feel a need to offer the most unyielding solution, and then we torment ourselves when we don’t succeed. Another example of this moral maximalism is what we now call the climate emergency...
Ecology, in the sense of legitimate concern about animal suffering and the waste products of progress, has mutated into a doctrine of the Apocalypse. In concrete terms this means that the generations to come have only two options: either widespread death in the near future or the halting of economic growth through some outbreak of unforeseen frugality. This cataclysmic discourse is, however, based on a paradox: the claim that enterprise is in vain, only helps to discourage it. What good does it do to mobilize, to clean our rivers and oceans and lakes, to plant trees and decarbonize the economy, if we are doomed? This doctrine of despair does less to mobilize our conscience than to thoroughly demoralize us.
Those who speak in the name of the planet seek to oppress... Hans Jonas, the spiritual father of German ecologists, explained in his 1979 book, The Imperative of Responsibility, that for industry the party was now over. He called for a hermeneutics of fear, as the only means of jolting us into an acknowledgement of the dangers involved. His advice has been widely heeded. There isn’t a single green movement leader today who isn’t noisily beating the panic drum. We must doubt everything but the worst; we must sweep away all our immediate concerns and face the abominable future ahead of us.
We know the solutions proposed by these prophets of doom... With a straight face, the former green deputy Yves Cochet even proposed bringing back the horse-drawn coaches & ploughs of yesteryear, reducing travel distances, and putting an immediate stop to procreating so as to reduce humanity’s interference with the natural environment. And it goes without saying that we must abandon all fossil fuels—gas, coal, petrol—as well as nuclear energy in favor of renewables. We must voluntarily become poorer, divide our standard of living by 10, and choose a life-saving asceticism over the comfortable indecency of our present lifestyles. Cleverly, the doomsayers locate the end of the world between 2020 and 2030. It’s close enough to terrify us but still far enough away to escape verification. The high priests of disaster don’t want to save the human race as much as they want to punish it. They are calling for the destruction they pretend to fear: humankind—and the European, in particular—is guilty and must pay.
We must be permanently mobilized in the manner of a totalitarian regime to resist this scourge... For the adherents of this way of doing things, there are no actual material stumbling blocks, only enemies and the malevolence of shadowy lobbyists. This blackmail by countdown is furiously topsy-turvy: no achievement is ever enough, the only important thing is what remains undone because time is running out before the punishment of cataclysm befalls us all. We must change our way of life overnight and tolerate no exceptions.
Colonel Louis Rivet was the head of French military intelligence, who tried in vain to alert the military brass to the Germans’ plan to launch a springtime attack in the Ardennes. In a June 1940 letter to his wife, he wrote: “We weren’t defeated, we commit suicide.”...
The European elites, bunkered down in their visions of utopia, have convinced themselves that we must abandon our history... By choosing conscience over power, the Old World risks losing both. It will not only suffer denunciation, it will also succumb to fragility. It will continue to fall short of its moral ideals, but it will be too weak to achieve its lofty ambitions...
Elites wanted to strip Europe’s nations of their particularity and transform the continent into a merely legal entity. But a nation is more than just a contract that haphazardly brings together interchangeable entities. Peoples have strong memories, solid traditions, and they are rising up against Europe in the name of their flouted sovereignty...
It is an inviolable rule that moralists don’t practice what they preach. Open-handed promises are broken as soon as they are made. Tartuffe reigns supreme in this domain. Chaste believers trample on their faith, the friends of the indigent cry crocodile tears, the court disobeys the law it enforces. History is full of preachers and zealots who are caught redhanded after they’ve sworn to live according to their pure principles. As for the celebrities, those paragons of virtue who call upon the people to tighten their ecological belt—they jet themselves around the globe increasing carbon emissions thousands of times more than the average citizen. But, of course, they make up for this by their posturing of living the simple life, like Prince Harry delivering a climate-change speech barefoot, or Greta Thunberg crossing the Atlantic on a luxury sailboat, a journey that will produce four times the emissions of an ordinary flight.
In the same way, the theatrical confrontation between Matteo Salvini and Emmanuel Macron showed that, except for perhaps a slight difference in tone, there is very little to distinguish between the former’s migration policy and the latter’s, for which Macron was vigorously criticized by the NGOs. When a moral imperative takes precedence over any political solution it is even more difficult for a nation or a continent to deal with than for an individual. Without compromise, virtue quickly becomes a nasty behavioral tick, a self-abnegating exhibitionism. The more a democratic entity shows itself to be open and tolerant, the more its enemies refer to it as fascistic and dictatorial. If Europe refuses to countenance the use of force in any of its forms—the military, a common foreign policy—it renounces its own existence. Unless it wants to sink into insignificance, it must stop extending itself ad infinitum; it must live with clear borders. It must become a credible “sheriff,” that can inspire fear when it needs to.
It should be pointed out that since Europe was rebuilt in 1945, it has been the receptacle of all the chimeras of modernity: the late Roman Catholic priest Raymond Pannikar called upon Europe to do its part, for example, to de-occidentalize the world. George Steiner demanded it rediscover the poverty and austerity from which its culture was created. For Jeremy Rifkin, it must favor being over having, unlike the United States. It must create the reign of the spirit (Gianni Vatimo) and become the world’s hostage (Pope Francis). But this bombast and misty-eyed lyricism, as generalized as it is generous, requires us to sacrifice political practicality. We float in an ether of marvels when we lose a sense of the possible. We prefer to dwell in that paradise instead of admitting that democracy is made up of cacophony and tension, as Raymond Aron observed. Democratic governance is conducted in prose, not in poetry. Europe cannot turn itself into a charity. Unless it wants to disappear once and for all, it cannot, like the Catholic Church, seek political guidance from the gospels (which not even Rome itself can manage to follow). Either it becomes a convincing world player alongside the others (USA, China, India, Russia, Brazil), and forges a new balance between power and human rights, or it will be dismembered by hungry predators waiting to devour it piece by piece...
America may one day succumb to its vices of violence, inequality, and segregation. But it is sustained by religion and patriotism, which bolster it despite its divisions. Unless Europe changes course, it will die of its virtues. Its discourse of guilt has metastasized into one of self-annihilation. When a section of the ruling class abandons its responsibilities, the commonweal itself is attacked, and moral perfectionism becomes another name for abdication. Only mortally wounded civilizations can be destroyed. How can the Old World be resuscitated if it wants to disappear? Perhaps we must await a new generation to emerge to staunch our desire for self-destruction and save us from sleepwalking into oblivion as mystical penitents."
