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Posted on 05/30/2002 12:24:22 AM PDT by ThePythonicCow
Americans are increasingly mystified by the European Union--and no wonder. It purports to be an alternative center of economic and political authority to the United States, to challenge the U.S.' title as sole superpower, and certainly there is an undertone of anti-Americanism in many of its pronouncements. Yet most of the EU's actions tend to promote European weakness rather than strength.
EU regulations insist that workers, with their 35-hour workweek, do less and less, yet the cost of employing them rises steadily. Welfare provisions paid by corporations now exceed nominal wages. As a result unemployment is high throughout the EU (Britain being an exception), growth tiny or nonexistent, and investment low. On the military side, EU forces (with Britain again a notable exception) are small, badly equipped, ill-trained and poorly motivated. Plans for a "European force" capable of operating by land or sea anywhere in the world are political hot air. They do not exist--even on paper.
Declining Morale
Behind this poor performance lies the declining morale of the two main components of the putative European superpower: Germany and France. Germany, though still running the world's third-largest economy, seems incapable of recovering the entrepreneurial spirit that produced the postwar German Miracle. It has well over 4 million unemployed. The ruling Social Democrats are plainly on their way out, and the Christian Democrats, likely to take over this autumn, are sliding to the right. But there is no sign of a major political leader of the stature of Adenauer, or even Helmut Kohl, to give the Germans a sense of purpose. They are a puzzled and discontented people, waiting to be led. To put it crudely, they miss the bark of command.
The French are, if anything, even more depressed. Their economy is stagnant. Their politics are in a mess. Recently, for fear of xenophobic presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, they felt themselves obliged to give a resounding vote in favor of Jacques Chirac, a president in whom they have no confidence and whom many believe to be on the take. No doubt Chirac will take the vote as an invitation to do as he pleases, but for the French, who pride themselves on their logic, the next five years promise a descent into an abyss of cynicism, corruption and despair.
Indeed, as a student of France's troubled history and an observer of its politics for over half a century, I suspect France is entering a prerevolutionary phase and that a major convulsion is just over the horizon. For the malaise from which France is suffering is not just political but cultural. The nation's most acute intellectual observer, Marc Fumaroli, has just published an important book: Quand l'Europe parlait français. In it he reminds us that, between the mid-17th century and World War I, French was the universal language of diplomacy, culture and fashion and that an ability to read and speak it was essential to anyone claiming to be educated. But today, says Fumaroli, all that has gone with the wind. The government's attempts to protect the French language have failed miserably, as have the vast sums it has spent on the arts, which Fumaroli explained in an earlier book, L'Etat culturel. Indeed, these efforts have made things worse.
Fumaroli admits: "Today, it is in English, in publications faithful to the tradition of the ?Republic of Letters' produced in London and New York, that the last word in the global value of books is printed and established." That is an awesome admission for a French savant, a member of the Académie Française, to make. Yet it is scarcely less defeatist than the recent decision of Le Monde, France's most influential newspaper, to publish a regular 20-page supplement in English. This was accompanied by a proprietorial admission that French has decisively lost the battle for status as the world language and that English is now the established global means of communication, for practical matters and for a growing range of cultural ones. In France the young use an increasing number of English words, including main verbs, and say it is "cool" to accept the triumph of "franglais" (as their elders call it). This cultural capitulation by the young seems intolerable to traditional-minded Frenchmen, who regard French culture, as symbolized by their beautiful and precise language, to be the very soul of the nation.
In Brussels, the bureaucratic heart of the EU, French--at the insistence of the French government--is still the lingua franca. Many EU documents are published only in French; memos circulate in French; and important figures hold press conferences in French, without simultaneous translation, though the world's press does its business in English, as everyone knows. Logically, the main language of the EU ought to be English, a fact admitted by a growing number of corporations in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden that hold board meetings in English for purely practical reasons. How can the EU claim to be a political model for the 21st-century superstate when it remains so backward-looking on this key point? But this is merely one of the unanswered questions about the EU that imperils its future--if it has one--and makes it such an unpredictable ally--if it is one.
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author, Lee Kuan Yew, senior minister of Singapore, and Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico, in addition to Forbes Chairman Caspar W. Weinberger, are now periodically writing this column.
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Paul Johnson does have a way with words.
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