When I re-read this, I thought perhaps it sounded too critical. It wasn't meant to be; I meant to give the book a good review. My criticisms are mostly a matter of detail and emphasis. Clearly, I found the book thought-provoking, and I do recommend it.
-------------------------------------------
James
Kirchick
Yale
University Press, March 2017, $17.78
Journalist
James Kirchick’s first book is about Europe, not America, but throughout the
reader will sense that it rests upon unvoiced axioms about America and its role
in the world. These are axioms upon which no argument can rest confidently in
the age of Donald Trump. As a consequence, although the book contains no
obvious anachronisms, it feels as if it was written in another era, for a
reader who no longer exists.
Kirchick was based in Prague and
Berlin for much of the past decade, sending dispatches back to America about
Europe and the former Soviet Union. During most of those years I did the same
thing from Istanbul and Paris. Every writer imagines his readers; Kirchick’s
imaginary readers seem to be much like mine. Call them Postwar Americans. Americans
who feel it important to take a lively interest in the rest of the world, ones
who are familiar, roughly, with the history of the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World
War, ones who instinctively feel the lessons of these catastrophes. Americans
who elected such presidents as Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush; who understood that
the relative global order in which Americans flourished for some seventy years did
not emerge in sua sponte but was created,
deliberately, by great postwar statesmen and maintained by American power, hard
and soft.
The United States was at the center of
a system designed to promote peaceful trade among reasonably decent and
democratic people, and for the most part, it did. Those readers knew this system to be
imperfect, but better than the alternatives. And they believed – wrongly, as it
happened – that their country was sufficiently exceptional that such things as
happened in Europe could not happen to them.
To the extent spectral qualities may be
assigned to Donald Trump, there is a specter haunting this book, making a
mockery of Kirchick and his imaginary readers. Trump is mentioned only four
times, each time in passing. Clearly, Kirchick underestimated his significance
and dismissed the prospect of his election. This is not a reproach. I didn’t see it coming, either.
Kirchick
was, however, fully aware that the old order was dangerously frayed, and that
something was wrong with America. This is reflected in his exasperation with
the Obama Administration’s passivity in the face of Russian aggression and its unwillingness
to reprise America’s traditional, deeply involved role in Europe.
But
he was unable or unwilling to see how frayed it truly was: His tone suggests
that he considered Obama’s detachment in foreign policy an aberration, rather
than the warning it was that Postwar Americans had become too few in number, or
had ceased to believe in their ideals, and the Pax
Americana itself was on the verge of
collapse. Had he known, presumably, he would have written another book: not The End of Europe, but The End.
That he missed the big picture doesn’t vitiate his warnings of the dangers
Europe confronts; he is right to say they are profound. But under the
circumstances, the book seems fraught with unintended irony. He explains, for
example, that it emerged in part from his six years of writing for Radio Free
Liberty/Radio Europe in Prague. “I was familiar,” he writes, “with RFE/RL’s gallant
past of ‘broadcasting freedom’ behind the Iron Curtain. But like most of the
people I later told about my new employer, I was unaware that the institution
still existed.” In retrospect, isn’t that pregnant with menace? No one in the
West even knows that RFE/RL, one of our most successful Cold War policy
instruments, still exists. But everyone sure knows its competitor:
Wildly popular on the Internet, particularly
among young people, [Russia Today] can be viewed in English, French, German,
Spanish and Arabic. It “informs” its viewers that Ukrainians are neo-Nazi
fascists and also, paradoxically, gay-loving degenerates; that the CIA shot down
Malaysian Airlines Flight 17; and that Germany is a “failed state.” … Russian
disinformation has found a receptive audience on the web, which, unable to
control, the Kremlin has tried to render a cesspool.
A host of assumptions went into the
creation of RFE/RL: that émigrés and refugees were a vast pool of talent who could be mobilized to serve the American cause, that the Cold War was a war of
ideas, that we could win it by broadcasting truthful news reports into captive
lands. No one assumes these things now.
“Traveling extensively across Europe
and throughout the former Soviet Union,” Kirchick reports,
I came to understand that history had not
ended, that Europe was not in a ‘post-ideological’ age, and that optimistic
assumptions about the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy, regulated market
capitalism, peaceful coexistence, and political pluralism were premature even
on the very continent that so prided itself in having founded and exported
these values to the world.
All
of this is true, but it suggests a question Kirchick doesn’t ask: How
did we ever convince ourselves history had ended? Variants on these beliefs were
indeed widespread, and often completely unexamined, throughout America in the
wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. What kind of widespread intellectual weakness allowed
us to believe something so implausible in the first place?
But let us take The End of Europe on its own terms, its intended terms – as a book for
people concerned about the future of liberal democracy in Europe. As Kirchick reports,
Europe is imperiled again by Russian imperialism. Converging vectors of
chaos are on the verge of leaving the Continent in “precisely the enervated
state that Vladimir Putin seeks.”
Kirchick recounts the now-familiar
story of Europe’s economic torpor, its alienated immigrants, and its demographically
unsustainable welfare states. Europe is reeling, too, from the effects of the
greatest wave of human migration since the Second World War, a series of deadly
attacks by ISIS, Britain’s abandonment of the European Union, and eight years
of neglect by the Obama Administration.
His description of this is in places
excellent. His chapter about Brexit is
well-written, fair-minded, and painful with the same unintended irony that
pervades the rest of the book. He is scathing about UK Independence Party head
Nigel Farage and the type of American conservative to whom he for some
reason appeals. He recounts with dismay watching Farage address “a half-empty
lecture hall at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC” in
2015:
At the end of his speech, I rose to ask the uncrowned king of
British Euroskepticism what he made of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Although
I was prepared for something unconventional, I did not expect what came out of
Farage’s mouth.
War in Ukraine, he said, was the result of a “democratically
elected leader brought down by a street-staged coup d’état by people waving EU
flags.” Russian president Vladimir Putin could hardly be blamed for thinking
that the “message” behind the Maidan protests was “we want Ukraine to join
NATO.” Invading and annexing Crimea were perfectly understandable reactions to
European imperialism. Ukraine’s dismemberment, the thousands of deaths in its
eastern provinces, more than a million displaced people, and heightened
tensions between Russia and the West—all of it, Farage told me, was “something
we have provoked.” A Kremlin spokesperson could not have scripted the response
better himself.
Farage and those
like him, Kirchick carefully argues, live in a morally inverted world where the
bumbling and bureaucratic (but benign) EU is likened to the Soviet Union and Vladimir
Putin is respected as the Moral Custodian of the West, even as Russia – relying
on largely unreconstructed Soviet organs of statecraft – literally invades
Europe.
“If Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea
was the first external assault on the post–Cold War European political order,” Kirchick
writes, “Britain’s rash decision to depart the EU was the first self-inflicted
wound.” He marvels at this spectacle of self-destruction. “It is incredible to
behold Great Britain, which once occupied more than 20 percent of the earth’s
landmass, moving ever closer to the brink of its own disintegration.” The sentiment is right but its expression is a bit garbled; it was not Great Britain but the British Empire that spanned
the globe; at its height, it occupied a full quarter of the world’s land
mass. Here one wonders if Kirchick is holding at bay, perhaps at the cost of
some mental energy, a premonition of the truly incredible spectacle of
imperial self-destruction ahead.
Kirchick is contemptuous of American
conservatives who through naiveté or malice cheer Europe’s disintegration. He
is absolutely right to say there is nothing in Europe’s past to support the idea
that the EU, if destroyed, would be replaced by a democratic and cooperative collection
of sovereign nation-states. The view is historically illiterate. The long
postwar peace is unique and fragile. “Those who claim that the EU has failed,”
Kirchick writes, “must answer the following question: In comparison to what?
The Europe of the Thirty Years War? The Napoleonic Empire? Hitlerite Europe?”
He is also right to warn that
Europe’s social cohesion is at risk from its “failure to devise a common
approach to asylum and migration, its propensity to adopt nationalist solutions
in response to this shared problem, and its sorry record in assimilating Muslim
residents.” This is obviously true. In places, though, he overstates the case
or gets the details wrong, even to the point of echoing the populists and
Russian propagandists he rightly deplores. “The rude facts of demography also matter,”
he insists before asserting that eight percent of France is Muslim and a
quarter of teenagers identify as Muslims. But these are not facts, let alone rude
ones. We don’t know how much of France is Muslim because the French government
is forbidden from asking, by law. A recent and credible private survey found
that self-identified Muslims
constitute only 5.6 percent of the metropolitan population in France. Kirchick also seems to have
confused an article about a survey of teenagers in Bouches-du-Rhône (which
would presumably be heavily skewed by the immigrant-heavy population of Marseille)
with a national survey.
The chapter on France, generally, which
is meant to stand for the problem of European anti-Semitism, is misconceived
and shallow. For example, he
gives no source for his assertion that “[t]he number of anti-Semitic attacks in
France doubled to more than 850 in 2014,” but I would guess from the year and
the number that the figures come from the
2014 report on anti-Semitism in France compiled by the Service
de Protection de la Communauté Juive.
This in turn is based on data from the Interior Ministry. They don't support the
idea that Jews are leaving France in response to anti-Semitic crime; or at
least, if they are, they are very bad at appraising risk. The number comprises
a range of crimes from homicide to “insults.” The latter would not be counted
as a crime at all in the United States. (By these standards, to judge from
Kirchick’s Twitter account and mine, we have both been the victims of at least
850 anti-Semitic attacks each in the past year alone, most, unfortunately,
coming from Americans.)
Homicide
rates tend to be robust -- and significant. So it is more meaningful to track
the number of homicides in France judged by the Interior Ministry to have been
committed with specifically anti-Semitic intent. In the year in question, this figure
rose from 0 to 1. This is not statistically significant, and moreover suggests
that France is a safer place to be a Jew than the places to which Jews are
emigrating.
I
point this out not to trivialize the problem of anti-Semitism in France, which
is real, but to note that that there has been a great deal of exaggeration in
reports of it, and something less than academic rigor in the studying of it. In
2015, the ADL found a dramatic decline in anti-Semitic attitudes in France. Both sets of statistics tell us something less than they
purport.
It is true that many Jews have left France in recent years, but they
are not the only ones to leave France, in record numbers, since the beginning
of the Eurozone crisis. According to the chair of a 2014 French Parliamentary commission
on emigration, the French are leaving because of “an anti-work mentality,
absurd fiscal pressure, a lack of promotion prospects, and the burden of debt hanging
over future generations.” None of this augurs well for Europe's future, either, but had
the chapter focused on this, it would have yielded a more insightful account of
the problem with France.
Nor does it seem to me quite accurate to
write of Germany, as he does, that “Historical guilt for the crimes of Nazism
inspired an open-door refugee policy as ill considered as it was well intentioned,
the negative consequences of which will be felt for generations.” I couldn’t
know the extent to which Germany’s policy was inspired by guilt for the crimes
of Nazism – no one could – but the authors of the policy say they were inspired
by the Geneva Convention on Refugees, to which Germany is a signatory. It is
probably also true that the decision was made easier because Germany has a large,
ageing workforce and a low birth rate; without immigration, its population will
decline, with disastrous economic effects.
Kirchick is right to say that “German industry’s want for skilled young labor could far more easily be
met by hiring some of the millions of unemployed Spanish, French, and Italians
than importing untold numbers of difficult-to-assimilate and poorly skilled.”
But this misses the point: These difficult-to-assimilate and poorly skilled men
and women have hiked overland to Germany from Afghanistan with all their
possessions on their backs, sailed the Mediterranean on rubber dinghies, fled war
and forced conscription into armies such as Assad’s (where they would have been
pressed into committing war crimes), ISIS, the Taliban, and other horrors
that not only entitle them to protection under the terms of an international
covenant to which Germany was a signatory, but entitle them to the compassion
of decent and civilized people. Unemployed Spaniards, French, and Italians, by
contrast, live in safe countries and are not refugees. Germany did not open
its doors simply to see what would happen if it admitted a million migrants; it
did so in the context of the greatest humanitarian challenge of this century,
a series of crises that have displaced more desperate refugees than at any other
time in recorded history, 60 million in all, on the march in numbers not seen
since World War II.
As Kirchick says, they are a rebuke
to the West’s failure to stabilize these failed states, unending wars, and
intractable conflicts. And if we could do it over and stop these conflicts from
breaking out and these states from failing, one hopes that we would. But it’s now
too late: They’re here. Short of tossing them back into the Mediterranean in
dinghies again, what does he suggest?
Kirchick writes that the
prolongation of the crisis “is a damning verdict against Europe’s lack of a
coherent foreign policy.”
Had Europe (as well as the United States)
decided to act as something other than a passive bystander in Syria—by
assisting the moderate opposition, creating safe zones, and destroying
President Bashar al- Assad’s air force in the early months of the rebellion,
years before Iranian and Russian troops hit the ground—there was a chance that
the conflict might not have dragged on for so long. Reflexively citing the Iraq
experience as a counter argument to any and all methods of military
intervention is not sufficient, because in both Libya and Syria—unlike Iraq—war
against civilian populations was ongoing and the prospect of impending genocide
was apparent.
But so allergic are Europeans to the use of military force, and so
anemic are their resources, that the thought of picking a side and seeing it
through to victory was unimaginable. .... Maybe Europeans are more comfortable
playing the role of altruistic humanitarians, caring for refugees after they’ve
fled, than that of global power players ready to intervene overseas in pursuit
of national (and supranational) interests. If that is the case, then they will
be dealing with an unending wave of migrants and instability on their borders
for years to come as the Middle Eastern political order continues to
disintegrate.
Quite possible. But not necessarily more ignoble and irrational than the
American approach to these problems, which does not seem to have brought stability
to Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya – to the contrary. If the United States, overwhelmingly
the world’s strongest and most experienced military power, operating under a
single and unified command, was unable to produce a result that protected
civilians in these lands, even at the cost of some five trillion dollars, how
realistic is it that fractured Europe, with its unintegrated command structure
and inexperienced militaries, could have succeeded? And what difference does this reproach make to these refugees now?
It is also an exaggeration to write,
as he does, that “Of the 1.5 million asylum seekers who came to Europe in 2015,
73 percent were male.” His source is The Economist, but that is not quite what the Economist wrote:
currently there are 106 male 14- to
17-year-olds for every 100 women. If all
asylum applications are granted [my emphasis], this will change to 116 men
to 100 women, while for those aged between 18 and 34 the male-to-female ratio
will go from 105:100 to 107:100. … But the example of Sweden does not reflect
what will happen across the whole of Europe. … The countries that will be most
affected are small, with populations under 10m. Sweden, Hungary, Austria and
Norway would see the biggest sex-ratio changes (and only if they accepted all
the asylum-seekers who applied). Germany has less to worry about. If it
accepted all the young males who sought asylum in the year to October 2015, its
sex ratios would go from 106:100 to 107:100 for 14- to 17-year-olds and from
105:100 to 106:100 for 18- to 34-year-olds. Europe does not have a man problem.
Sweden may have.
It may be problem, in other words, but hardly so much of one as alarmists represent it
to be, particularly because there is no chance all asylum applications will be granted. In 2016, for example, Hungary granted asylum to only 425 out of 29,432 applicants.
Nor is it true, as he says, that
Germany practices an “open-door immigration policy.” In fact, it is not easy to
establish one’s status as a refugee in Germany at all. Following the initial
influx of 2015, incoming migrant numbers were swiftly and drastically reduced.
The Balkan countries, Morocco, and Tunisia were declared safe states; their
citizens are no longer eligible for asylum. Merkel brokered a deal
with Turkey to prevent onward migration into the EU, almost entirely shutting
down the refugee influx from Greece. Austria shut its borders, cutting off the
so-called Balkan route. Last October, the EU and Afghanistan signed a deal that
permits member states to deport an unlimited number of Afghan migrants. In
December alone, some 11,900 were sent back. So almost as soon as the numbers of
asylum-seekers in Germany reached record highs, deportations, too, soared to match. If 2015 was the year Germany opened its doors to refugees, 2016 was the year it slammed them shut. Almost 300,000 of the 700,000 asylum requests it received that year were denied, and 80,000 asylum-seekers deported.
Kirchick is quite right to say, though,
that Europe’s inability to develop “a coherent and robust foreign policy that
would tackle the migrant crisis at its source” has left it at the mercy of the
autocrats on Europe’s periphery:
Europe finds itself in hock to
autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — the
former offering himself as a “partner” against ISIS while bombing
Western-backed opponents of Russia’s client Assad (whom the vast majority of
refugees are fleeing), and the latter demanding political concessions in
exchange for reducing the outflow of migrants languishing in Turkish refugee
camps. By entertaining Putin’s cynical proposal of an “anti-ISIS coalition,”
Western leaders willfully ignore how Moscow’s Syrian intervention is fueling
the very migrant wave they supplicate him to help plug. Russia’s interest is
very clear: In exchange for its supposed help in fighting ISIS, the West would
lift sanctions on Moscow and effectively give a green light to its ongoing
subversion of Ukraine. Astonishingly, many in the West apparently support this
idea. A late 2015 survey of seventy-six diplomats, elected leaders, and
advisors from across Europe and the United States found 53 percent supporting cooperation
with Russia in Syria, while listing migration, Islamist terrorism, and the rise
of populist parties as the most critical threats to Europe—three problems
Moscow is actively aggravating by its intervention in Syria. Maintaining Bashar
al-Assad in power will only prolong Syria’s misery by driving the Sunni
majority that detests him even more into the arms of ISIS, therefore prolonging
the conflict as well as the stream of refugees whose presence in Europe is
driving up support for the far-right politicians Russia abets in numerous other
ways. While the Russians have repeatedly demonstrated their overreliance on
hard power to achieve their aims, Europe’s overconfidence on soft power, far
from keeping the world’s problems at bay, has imported them into Elysium.
This is precisely the right diagnosis, alas. Once, recently, Americans would have suggested that the cure for this strategic
confusion was “American leadership.” But now our hopes are more modest. We just pray our leadership stops tweeting.
As Kirchick notes, Russia has exploited the refugee crisis to serve its
disinformation objectives. The impression many Americans have of a Europe simply
overrun by migrant hordes has its origins in Russian agitprop, which is full of
thrilling but often fictional stories of migrant rapes and rampages. It offers a
platform and legitimization to Europe’s most extreme nationalist and
anti-immigrant figures, all with the transparent goal of furthering European
division.
Kirchick is too exculpatory of Europe's far right. It isn't true, as he writes, that decent people with reasonable concerns have been forced into the arms of the far-right by taboos against the rational discussion of Islam and immigration. "One accepts unrestricted immigration, the nostrums of multiculturalism, and the claim that Muslims integrate just as well as any other group, or one risks being branded an incorrigible bigot," he writes, but this isn't so; there is no mainstream European politician who advocates unrestricted immigration from the Islamic world, and if there is a taboo against discussing the failure of Muslims to integrate, it doesn't impede politicians -- of both the mainstream right and the left -- from doing it. Europe's far right is shunned because it is, in fact, incorrigibly bigoted. There have been 1,200 attacks on refugee shelters in Germany since the beginning of 2015, including some 100 arsons. More than 2,500 refugees there have been violently assaulted, beaten, or firebombed. Some have been clubbed with bats by Nazis chanting "Sieg Hail." Asylum-seekers in Hungary have been herded into concentration camps. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has said that "ethnic homogeneity" is key to economic success and "too much mixing" causes trouble. The lure of Europe's far-right is, truly, incorrigible bigotry.
It
is true, as Kirchick writes, that German police were stunningly unprepared on New
Year’s Eve 2015 for the mass assault on women by North African assailants, and
also true that the media failed to report this for fear of ginning up hatred
toward immigrants. But it is also true that this story has now been reported so
many times, in such hysterical detail, that a good many Americans believe this
happens every night in Germany. It
doesn’t. The long-term effects of the migrant influx are still unclear, but a recent Centre for European Research study found “no association between
the number of refugees and the number of street crimes in Germany” beyond small
increases in drug offenses and fare-dodging.
The
End of Europe is strongest when it treats the self-defeating Brexit vote,
the contagious authoritarianism of Hungary, and, especially, Russia’s
revanchists, who are clenching Europe in a vice. While Americans have been encouraged to expect “great deals” and “getting along” with Putin, Russians are being readied
for something quite different. The Russian playwright and former delegate to
the Congress of People’s Deputies, Aleksander Gelman, tells Kirchick that Russian
society “is being prepared for the idea that we might have to fight” a world
war.
Putin has superintended over a
campaign of historic revisionism in Russia; Stalin’s reputation has been
rehabilitated, and the liberation of central and Eastern Europe from the Soviet
Union have been recast as an amputation. Russia has been building and upgrading underground nuclear bunkers around Moscow, which officials claim are big enough to house the whole city's population. “In reality there are no real reasons
for a world war at present, except for our own insane ideas,” Gelman tells Kirchick.
“But we have to remember that insane ideas can be made real.”
These “insane ideas” comprise the
new-but-old doctrine of Russian imperialism, known as Eurasianism, explicated, Kirchick
writes, in such government documents as Foundations
of State Cultural Politics,
A 2014 Russian Culture Ministry report
outlining the “Foundations of State Cultural Politics” defines the country’s
identity only in negation to the West: “Russia is not Europe.” By that it means
that Russia is illiberal, authoritarian, nationalistic, illiberal,
authoritarian, nationalistic, Orthodox Christian, and economically autarkic,”
morally and materially opposed to what it views as a West mired in depravity, decadent
materialism, and “globalism.”
(As
far as I can tell, the use of “globalism,” as opposed to “globalization,” entered
the English language only recently and as an artefact of Russian propaganda.) Russia’s
faux-traditional values, Kirchick laments, along with its widely-publicized
campaigns against homosexuality, have proven attractive to European populists
and far-right parties such as UKIP in Britain, Jobbik
in Hungary, Golden Dawn in Greece, the Northern League in Italy and France’s
Front National Front. The Kremlin cultivates and finances these and other kooks,
far-leftists, and blood-and-soil nationalists. They in turn feed on the
Eurozone’s stagnation and the refugee crisis.
The whole crew of misfits is on
display in Greece, a country for
which Kirchick exhibits a broad contempt. He is unsympathetic to arguments that
the Eurozone and the Troika immiserated that country; his perspective is
broadly that of the German bankers: Greece had it coming; it produced nothing; it
undertook massive debts to live lavishly; and it lied. What’s more, he argues,
the Greeks exhibit a susceptibility to populist politics that derives from
their traumatic civil war. “Polarization
nurtured an emotive, resentment-based politics with little room for compromise,”
he writes. Syriza, Kirchick says,
portends the rise of a European hard left exuding the same
authoritarian populism of the extreme right. From French Poujadism, the rural
movement of farmers and shopkeepers that arose in early opposition to European
integration, to today’s National Front, Law & Justice, and Fidesz, postwar
European nationalism has typically been a reactionary right-wing phenomenon.
But in the form of Syriza, the reigning Corbynite wing of British Labor, and Spanish
PODEMOS, illiberal populism is becoming a bipartisan affair. All three of these
parties advocate greater state control over the economy, are deeply suspicious
of markets, and seek greater ties with Russia at the expense of the Atlantic
alliance.
Russia
is only too eager to provide. “Syriza has found admirers in unlikely places,”
he writes.
“It’s fantastic to see the courage of the
Greek people in the face of political and economic bullying from Brussels,”
says United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel Farage. Similarly enthused
by its effrontery toward the EU, leaders of the French National Front and the
Hungarian Jobbik have also lavished praise on Syriza, accolades one hopes the
proudly antifascist Greeks find at least slightly worrying.
Kirchick
could have spelled out the connections more clearly still. In January 2015, The Financial Times published
a detailed analysis of the links between Syriza and Putin’s circle. Titled “Alarm bells ring
over Syriza’s Russian links,” it reported the association between Nikos Kotzias, the
Syriza-appointed Greek foreign minister, and Aleksandr Dugin, the prominent
Russian ultra-nationalist, a proponent of Christian Orthodox domination over
Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The day after he was elected prime
minister, Alexis Tsipras made known his objection to sanctioning
Russia for the rising violence in Ukraine.
The book begins and ends with
Russian hybrid warfare. In the first scene, Kirchick describes the so-called Bronze
Night in Tallinn, when in 2007, the Estonian parliament irritated Moscow by
proposing to move the Bronze Soldier to the outskirts of the city. The Soviet-era
war memorial was seen by ethnic Estonians as a symbol of Soviet occupation.
Russia took fantastic umbrage. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov deplored the move
as “blasphemous.” Protests, instigated by Estonia’s ethnic-Russian minority,
turned into two nights of deadly riots and a three-week wave of DDOS attacks on
Estonia’s institutions. These were of a previously unseen sophistication. Everyone knew who was to blame, but NATO in the end claimed to be unable to
find proof of Moscow’s involvement. It was the world’s first cyber-war.
Russia next invaded Georgia. Six
months later, the newly inaugurated Obama administration declared its intention
to reset relations with Moscow. Kirchick is infuriated by what he identifies as
a “recurring feature” of the Obama Administration’s diplomacy: Eager to smooth
the path to the New START treaty, the administration averted its eyes to evidence
of Russia’s growing external aggression and internal repression. Russia, meanwhile,
undertook the military modernization upon which it would rely for its warfare
in Ukraine and Syria.
Having fed the crocodile well, Obama
was eaten next. Infamously, during the United States’ 2016 election campaign,
Russian hackers attacked the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers
and delivered their content to Wikileaks. Kirchick joins a growingly alarmed
cohort warning that Moscow may soon try to “neuter NATO with an attack on
alliance territory that will prove the worthlessness of Article 5,” and failing
that, may go “the institutional route, diluting the West’s alliance structure,
legal norms, and political cohesiveness from within through bribery, coercion, subversion,
and disinformation.” It certainly seems that way.
The chapter on Hungary and historic
memory is particularly useful. In a pattern characteristic of the far right, Hungarian
prime minister Viktor Orbán has presided over a campaign to obscure “both the
specifically anti-Jewish nature of the Holocaust and the Hungarian state’s
active collaboration in mass murder,” writes Kirchick, one that features “government-sponsored
historical institutes, publicly funded documentaries, revisions to school
curricula, bestowal of state honors to extreme right-wing figures, and
erections of public monuments and museum exhibitions,” all functioning to
obscure Jewish victimhood.
Kirchick describes a Hungary awash in
“maps, post-cards, posters, bumper stickers, and other ephemera” displaying the
Greater Hungary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, complete with Slovakia (in
whole) and parts of present-day Romania, Serbia, and Croatia. A
government-funded website describes the Treaty of Trianon as “20th-century
Hungary’s greatest tragedy, the wounds of which remain unhealed even today.” Upon
assuming power, Orbán quickly declared the anniversary of the treaty’s signing
a day for mourning “the unjust and unfair dismemberment of the Hungarian nation
by foreign powers.” No day was devoted, by contrast, to considering “the
reasons why Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory— namely, its
membership in the belligerent axes of both world wars.”
As the historian Lewis Namier
observed, there is a morphology of politics; certain forms occur and reoccur. Historical
revisionism appears to be intrinsic to the form that Kirchick terms Orbánism.
You could also call it Putinism or Erdoğanism.
Contemporary political scientists describe it as illiberal democracy, partial
democracy, low intensity
democracy, empty democracy,
and hybrid democracy. Namier
called it plebiscitary Caesarism. The cultivation of nostalgia for an
authoritarian past, Kirchick warns, tends to presage an authoritarian future: Orbán’s
government “has rewritten the constitution, centralized power in the executive,
weakened checks and balances, empowered an oligarchic class, dispensed state
awards and ceded cultural policy to extreme right-wing figures, rendered
parliament a rubber stamp, overhauled public media institutions into partisan
outlets, harassed civil society, and reoriented Hungary’s traditionally
Atlanticist and pro-European foreign policy toward Russia and other authoritarian
regimes.”
The
End of Europe concludes with a warning that Europe’s collapse would be a
catastrophe. “A Europe unmoored from the Enlightenment values it brought to the
world, ignorant of and unwilling to protect its civilizational achievements,
captive to chauvinist demagogues, indisposed to defend itself, bereft of its
Jews, estranged from America, cowed before Russia, and reverted to its traditional
state of nature with nations pursuing mercenary self-interest at the expense of
unity would not only spell the end of Europe as we know it,” he concludes. “Such
a collapse would usher in nothing less than a new dark age.”
Kirchick never confronts the
possibility that by the time this book went to print, the United States would
be led by an unstable Putinversteher
and committed trade protectionist who views the architecture of the West’s
postwar peace and freedom as obsolete, leaving an unsteady Angela Merkel the de facto leader of the Free World. He
can’t really be criticized for this; it is so incredible that even now I have
trouble believing it. But it does give the book a strange, alternate-universe aspect. It will perhaps one day enjoy pride
of place in a thick Chinese volume titled, An Anthology of Hubristic Things Americans Wrote about Europe, while Oblivious to the Disaster Awaiting
them at Home.
----------------------------------------------
Would you please consider contributing to my own book about this subject? I'm crowd-sourcing my next book, Brave Old World: Europe in the Age of Trump. I appreciate even small donations:
----------------------------------------------
Would you please consider contributing to my own book about this subject? I'm crowd-sourcing my next book, Brave Old World: Europe in the Age of Trump. I appreciate even small donations:
