Europe’s Coming of Age
ABOVE IMAGE: FRENCH MUSLIMS, DEEPLY RESENTED IN MANY QUARTERS, CONSTITUTE TODAY AN UNAVOIDABLE PRESENCE IN METROPOLITAN FRANCE, THE PRODUCT OF A COLONIALIST PAST AND THE NATION’S SUBSERVIENCE TO NEOLIBERAL POLICIES EMANATING FROM WASHINGTON.
OPEDS | DEENA STRYKER
(To appreciate the extent of the Times’ misleading account, see my essay, Post-Modernism and ‘Alt’ and “New’ Rights in the Appendix below.)
As someone who lived in both Eastern and Western Europe for half a lifetime, I’d long ago given up hope that Europe would ever grow up. In a book published in the nineteen eighties, I urged France to take the lead in weaning Europe away from the US and its Cold War that, had it turned hot, would have been fought on European soil. Francois Mitterand, President at the time, didn’t even want to see Germany reunited, much less welcome the countries of Eastern Europe into the EU (at that time still the European Economic Community). It pains me to say that regarding these countries that had never managed to be part of the ‘West’, Mitterand was right – although for the wrong reasons. Since becoming part of the EU, Eastern Europe has led the rejection of Muslim immigrants, partly, perhaps, because it had been occupied by the Ottoman Turks for several centuries — proud to have been a bulwark between Islam and Western Europe.
The situation to which the Times article merely alludes, is now is the following: Hungary, a country whose origins hark back to vaguely defined areas of Asia, has led the erection of new walls against Muslims, initiating the turn of the entire ‘continent’ (actually the Eurasian peninsula), toward Russia, which under Vladimir Putin, is inventing a new type of nationalism that is more left than right. (http://www.opednews.com/articles/Post-Modernism-and-the-Al-by-Deena-Stryker-Alternative_America_Anti-semitic_Conformity-160916-717.html
A few months ago, after the US had twisted the EU’s arm to enact sanctions against Russia for ‘annexing Crimea’ and ‘invading Ukraine’, its monolithic adherence to ‘Atlanticism’ began to crack for the first time since World War II. French and Italian parliamentary delegations actually dared to visit Crimea, ascertaining that reattachment to Russia was indeed the will of the overwhelming majority, as expressed in a hastily organized referendum; but at the time, Europe’s ingrained obedience still dictated official policies, however much the sanctions hurt.
As Russia showed that it was a force to be reckoned with in Syria – and an ally that could be trusted by its legally elected president, Bashar al Assad, some rumblings could be heard off-the European stage: Europe should have its own army, and not be dependent on NATO (even as its military was obediently getting into formation for the drive up to Russia’s western borders). Finally, as 2016 draws to a close, the President of the European Commission, the highest body in the complicated EU edifice, Jean-Claude Junker (a former head of the tiny country of Luxembourg, where both French and German are spoken) has dared to say that Europe cannot survive without a strong relationship with Russia. As if on cue, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, has been making ever louder objections to Washington’s heavy handed policies in Europe, proclaiming loudly that the EU is no longer dependent on American foreign policy and should defend its own interests, moving ahead with its own army. (BTW, the Times article neglects to link President-elect Trump’s attitude toward NATO to the movement developing in Europe.)
The days when France stood up to Washington, a postwar epoch bracketed by fiercely anglophobic Charles de Gaulle and old-fashioned socialist François Mitterand, is no more. Europe today is ruled by a coterie of Washington lackeys. The rise of a new complexioned right is partly derived from such betrayals, much as is the case on the American side of the Atlantic.
The days when France stood up to Washington, a postwar epoch bracketed by fiercely anglophobic Charles de Gaulle and old-fashioned socialist François Mitterand, is no more. Europe today is ruled by a coterie of Washington lackeys typified by Hollande and Merkel. The rise of a new complexioned right is partly derived from such betrayals, much as is the case on the American side of the Atlantic.
Interestingly, Junker’s latest words about Russia, claiming that it is not a ‘regional power’ as President Obama has called it condescendingly, contradict Vladimir Putin’s calls for a ‘multi-polar world whose poles would be the US, Russia, China and India, ending US hegemony. In today’s world, fraught with the danger of the second cold war turning hot, labels are no minor detail. In my 1989 book Une autre Europe, un autre Monde , which only a small academic house would publish, I pointed out, as the US was installing Pershing missiles in West Germany against the wishes of the European peace movement, that any war with the then Soviet Union would be fought on European — not American — soil.
Twenty-five years later, although Europe is whole, that war could happen: not because Soviet tanks threaten to come rumbling across the European central plain, but because the US has positioned thousands of soldiers, tanks, and the latest smart weapons, precisely among Eastern European countries that have repeatedly served as the invasion corridor to Russia. NATO encourages the three tiny Baltic nations — about whom I will write in an upcoming post – to clamor relentlessly that they are in danger of being taken over again by their immense neighbor, while Russia, in reality, is busy strengthening its relations across the Eurasian ‘continent of giants’. My book made the point that Europe had nothing to fear from the Soviet Union because it too, was among those several giants that constitute Eurasia, rather than the potential victim of one of them.
It has taken three decades for the Europeans to realize that their partnership with a giant across the ocean makes no sense, and start thinking about their role among equals. (A quick look at book titles about Russia and its president on amazon.fr shows that most of the titles appear to be pro-Russian, while such books are almost non-existent in the US. Nor are any of President Putin’s speeches published by US media. ]
His end of year address to the Russian Federal Assembly can be found here in English: http://en.kremlin.ru
APPENDIX
Post-Modernism and the ‘Alt’ and ‘New’ Rights
By Deena Stryker
About a week ago, Hillary Clinton referred to the “Alt’ right, as part of a screed against Donald Trump’s right-wing supporters such as David Duke. But America’s ‘Alt’ right is not the only new right currently occupying people’s minds. Europe’s ‘New’ right has taken over many left-wing attitudes.
::::::::
At one point during World War II, Josef Stalin famously asked his then allies, Churchill and Roosevelt, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”, underlining the crucial role of brute force in world affairs. Military might has still not taken a back seat to negotiation, however, there is a growing conviction across the world and across political lines, that morality must play a role in public life.
Notwithstanding Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent posturing in front of the Hiroshima monument to the atomic victims of World World II, nuclear stockpiling continues unabated, while climate change competes as the ultimate threat of annihilation. Any hope of maintaining a human presence on earth can only come from a psychological turnaround.
The nineteen-sixties call by the American counter-culture for a spiritual transformation was not heard, but since Donald Trump entered the presidential fray, and refugees from US wars in the Middle East stormed Europe, progressive warnings about the rise of fascism are. In Europe, everybody knows what fascism is so they don’t use the innocent sounding word Alt or ‘alternative’ to designate the militant far right.
In addition, Europe has a New Right, that backs the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, who has tried hard to shed her father’s anti-Semitic rhetoric. (The nationalist part of her platform also finds favor with the Russian President, who is more of a social democrat than either a cowboy capitalist or a communist, and about whom more later.)
The US’s ‘alt right’ is not easy to define. It’s nationalist, but so are most religious groups. On the other hand, to say it’s misogynous barely scratches the surface of its attitude toward women, which tends toward disparage-ment, as opposed to the religious right’s ‘respect’. Ultimately, it’s the alt right’s demonization of ‘the Other’ that separates it from the new right. For Hitler’s Nazis, the main ‘Others’ were Jews, but their xenophobia included Slavs, Communists and brown people across the board. The Alt right is against everyone who opposes its gun-toting, flag waving ‘patriotism’, putting it at odds with the New Right.
While both the European and the American left are reduced to desperate cries for ‘equality’, the new right has appropriated the left’s major memes, from individual flourishing to decentralization, anti-globalization and anti-consumerism, while abandoning the old right’s militarism and racism.
Its program is spelled out in a Manifesto published in 2000 by GRECE, a French think tank founded by the philosopher Alain de Benoist. http://www.arktos.com/alain-de-benoist-and-charles-champetier-manifesto-for-a-european-renaissance.html This 14,000 word text could have been written by a leftist were it not for its opposition to multiculturalism, which by the way dovetails with Vladimir Putin’s opposition to the immigration of non-Europeans into ‘Caucasian’ societies. In response to what has hitherto been considered the most progressive view of human relations, the manifesto states:
The French New Right upholds the cause of peoples, because one is only justified in defending one’s difference from others if one is also able to defend the difference of others. This means that the right to difference cannot be used to exclude others who are different. The French New Right respects ethnic groups, languages, and regional cultures, as well as native religions. It supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism. The diversity of the human species is a treasure, and ‘universal’, does not oppose difference, but recognizes it. For the New Right, the struggle against racism is not won by negating the concept of race, nor by blending all races into an undifferentiated whole, but by refusing both exclusion and assimilation: neither apartheid nor the melting pot, but acceptance of the other as Other in a perspective of mutual enrichment.”
Many leftists will agree that this argument makes sense.But they will wonder what a right-wing party could have against Western Imperialism. It’s that imperialism is the flip side of modernity, that generates alienation: While the contemporary left in the developed world has endorsed imperialism in a laudable commitment to equality, for the new right:
“Modernity designates the political and philosophical movement of the last three centuries of Western history”characterized by individualization, or the destruction of old forms of communal life; massification, or the adoption of standardized behavior and lifestyles; desacralization, which replaces the great religious narratives by a scientific interpretation of the world; rationalization, the domination of instrumental reason, the free market, technical efficiency and universalization, the extension of a model of society postulated implicitly as the only rational possibility and thus as superior, to the entire planet.A couple of decades ago, that was a typical left-wing argument, but Neo-liberalism has traded ideals for efficiency, thought to guarantee the greatest good for the greatest number: “The ‘free’ market is an exacerbation of rationalization in which standardization is confused with superiority and equality implies conforming to a host country’s customs and standards of behavior.”
[dropcap]F[/dropcap]rance has recently revealed the degree to which conformity can become absurd: freedom to dress as one pleases, which enabled western women to abandon stays and long skirts for shorts, is now an obligation to uncover one’s body, turning so-called freedom into conformity. Progressives may argue that this is a convenient excuse for maintaining the bulk of humanity in an inferior condition, yet the abandonment of traditional social memes in the competition for ‘more’, seen as an intrinsic good, also leads to crime, drugs and alienation.
Referring to Russia, Vladimir Putin affirms that “It is clearly impossible to identify oneself only through one’s ethnicity or religion in such a large nation with a multi-ethnic population. ” People must develop a civic identity on the basis of shared values, a patriotic consciousness, civic responsibility and solidarity, respect for the law and a sense of responsibility for their homeland’s fate, without losing touch with their ethnic or religious roots.”
According to the Arab website Al Monitor, file:///Users/deen/Documents/PUTIN/Putin’s Muslim family values.webarchive when Putin emphasizes Russians’ shared moral values, he connects them to the “traditional” values of Middle Eastern, Asian and other non-Western societies. “We can see how many Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization ” People are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens the door to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis, so we consider it natural and right to defend these values.” While clearly identifying Russia as a largely Christian country, Putin draws a line between religious values and those of a decadent, secular West.
I witnessed the American cultural takeover of Europe, starting in the fifties, with the introduction of coca cola that gradually replaced the typical Frenchman’s glass of wine, as jazz flourished in the ‘caves’ of Paris and Berlin. Little did American expats realize at the time just how far the transformation of a world we loved would go, as together with the multifarious French left, we demonstrated against the Vietnam and Algerian wars. Never in a million years would we have imagined the cost that Europe would ultimately pay for what at the time was called ‘Americanization’ and is now called ‘globalization’ – or that a new right would most eloquently oppose this race to the bottom.
—Deena Stryker
Deena Stryker was born in Philadelphia, but spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe. She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Cuban revolutionaries were Communists before they made the revolution. After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union ("Une autre Europe, un autre Monde'). Her memoir, 'Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel', tells it all. 'A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’ examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and 'America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World" is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill'. She is currently a senior editor at Opednews.com.
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