Europe as Utopia
Europe came to play a central role in the new Christian-Socialist configuration. Until 1993, an integrated Europe was understood in terms of economic cooperation: the original Treaty of Rome of 1957, which focused on a customs union, and the modified Single European Act of 1986, which provided for a free-market regime. However, the peaceful but far-reaching changes of 1989–91—the end of the Cold War and of Soviet control in Eastern Europe in 1989, the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991—evoked a new vision, one that reignited the utopianism of the left.
Germany’s neighbors were unsettled by her sudden return as Europe’s largest power. All Europeans, Germans included, were troubled by the emergence of America as the single global superpower—the “hyperpower,” as France’s socialist foreign minister Hubert Védrine used to say. These concerns led to the project, co-authored by Mitterrand and the German Christian Democratic Chancellor Helmut Kohl, of supplementing the economic treaties binding Europe together with political ones. The ambition was to turn Europe into a federal superstate that would tame Germany and counterbalance American power.
Had the new entity been based on sound democratic practices, a fair distribution of power, and strong mechanism to hold accountable those in charge, this plan might have been viable. Instead, the promoters of the European superstate were keen to retain the governing structure of the old system of economic cooperation—nonelected European commissioners, a host of technocratic assistants—checked only symbolically by a gigantic and largely powerless European Parliament.
The new Europe-wide policies that resulted were both intrusive and inconsistent. In the name of Europe, many national and local institutions and public services were dismantled, and a single currency, to be governed under strict deflationist principles, was introduced. National legal traditions were streamlined, superseded by a Byzantine “European law,” and undermined by the European Court’s judicial activism. The Schengen Agreement dispensed with border controls, an important tool for continental and domestic security. For all that, Europe has been unable to adopt unified policies on issues that matter. None of the main European powers have been willing to relinquish their sovereignty in foreign or military affairs—an attitude that ironically reinforces American “hyperpower.” The United States still controls NATO and European defense.
From the outset, the public has been disillusioned with the whole process of creating a “political” Europe, and with the political class that endorsed it. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which formally established the European Union (E.U.), was ratified in most countries by their national parliaments. In those countries where a referendum was held, it either passed by a very thin margin (50.8 percent of the vote in France) or was defeated (by 50.7 percent in Denmark). In spite of these warning signs, the Christian Democrat–Social Democrat, pro-E.U. political elite pressed on. In 2004, a Constitutional Treaty was devised and submitted to ratification in the member countries. This time, in those countries where a referendum took place, voters flatly rejected it: 55 percent of the French and 61.5 percent of the Dutch voted against the proposal. The elites’ reaction was patronizing. The Constitution was dropped, all right, but most of its content was incorporated into the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, which was ratified by parliaments only. The Christian Democracy that was instrumental in stabilizing postwar Europe had become part of a top-down social bureaucracy.
The drafting of the European Constitutional Treaty was a particularly sorry affair for the legacy of Christian Democracy. The Convention on the Future of the European Union met in Brussels from February 2002 to July 2003. It was a hodgepodge of nonelected delegates. Some were designated by the E.U. Commission and Parliament, and the rest were handpicked by national governments. The Christian Democrats insisted on a subsidiarity principle that would protect the local and national democratic powers against interference from the superstate. They also demanded recognition of Europe’s cultural identity in the Constitutional Treaty, including its Judeo-Christian roots. They won on the first count (though in practice, the principle of subsidiary has been largely ignored). They were overruled on the second count by the majority, led by Social Democrats, who wanted Europe to be a purely Rawlsian-Habermasian project, a regime based on the twenty-first century’s claim to have distilled the universal dictates of reason into abstract and secular “human rights.”
Eager to find some way to acknowledge that Europe did not begin with the Enlightenment, the Christian Democrats submitted a compromise paragraph to the Convention. The following words were to be inserted into the Constitution’s preamble: “Drawing its inspiration from the cultural, religious, and humanistic heritages of Europe, which, initially nourished by the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations, and later traversed by a spiritual thrust still present in its patrimony and by the Enlightenment’s philosophical streams, anchored in social life a special vision of the central role of human persons. . . .” Pagan Greece, pagan Rome, and the neo-pagan Enlightenment were called by name, but the Jewish and Christian traditions, which have played and still play a decisive cultural and ethical role, merited only a tortuous circumlocution: “a spiritual thrust still present.” It was like the Victorians who wouldn’t dare explain what “unmentionables” might be. But even that was too much for the Convention, which deleted mention of “a spiritual thrust” from the final version.
Instead of rebelling against this hypocrisy and nonsense on such an essential issue, the Christian Democratic political class caved. Perhaps some imagined that Christian values could be introduced at a later stage. Perhaps the members of the CDU/CSU—a powerful force in European matters—calculated that they would be the real leaders of the E.U., anyway. It seems, however, that the main reason lay elsewhere. By the first decade of the twenty-first century (and probably sooner), nominally Christian politicians were not Christian anymore, or at least not Christian enough to challenge the rest of the political class, as their forefathers had.
Utopia without Christian Ballast
The fracas over the E.U. Constitution may seem minor. But the erosion of the churchgoing base of Christian Democratic parties and the apparent decline in Christian conviction among Christian Democratic leaders has had important consequences. Without a Christian Democratic movement with a strong religious anchor, how can Europe respond to an unprecedented demographic and ethnic transformation?
In 1950, there were about two million Muslims in Europe (U.S.S.R. not included): 0.2 percent of 350 million inhabitants. In 1990, according to conservative estimates, there were at least thirty million Muslims: 6 percent of 500 million. In 2010, forty-five million out of 530 million: 8.49 percent. The figures for 2019 were assumed to be well beyond fifty million: 9.26 percent of 540 million. All in all, the yearly rate of Muslim demographic growth in Europe, which was estimated at 4 percent thirty years ago, is now estimated at 8 percent. At the same time, the native, non-Muslim population is declining.
Another factor has amplified the demographic and cultural problems Europe faces. Muslims tend to be more family-oriented than Europe’s non-Muslims, and they have more children. A 2015 investigation of the religious beliefs of French teenagers gives us a glimpse of the future. According to the study, 38.8 percent do not identify with any religion, 33.2 percent identify as Christian, 25.5 percent as Muslim, and slightly more than 1 percent as Jewish. The same study reports that only 22 percent of non-Muslims who still claimed to belong to a religion (and only 40 percent of self-described Catholics) described their religion as “something important in their life,” against 83 percent of Muslims. These results suggest that if religion becomes important again in French society, Islam stands a better chance to attract converts than Christianity.
European Liberals, Social Democrats, and the hard left have engaged for decades in what is best described as a complete denial of the dramatic increase of Islamic populations in Europe. The political establishment has refused to address its social, cultural, or political implications. They have entertained the Rawlsian-Habermasian delusion that liberal democracy and the mores of Western life will flourish in a multicultural environment. They are convinced that Islam is prepared to become another “identity” in pluralistic societies governed by “neutral” norms. Christian Democrats have not been too dreamily utopian, but they have been of two minds. And, as was the case with the European Constitution, when it comes to practical policies they eventually betray themselves and their constituencies.
In the summer of 2015, the rise of the ferocious ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq prompted a mass exodus into neighboring countries, particularly Turkey, and then toward the E.U. Most European countries realized that this migration would soon get out of control and took steps to close their borders. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, was at that time the most powerful person in Europe. She had made repeated statements about the failure of “multiculturalism.” She decided that the European public needed to be taught a lesson about the difference between legal and illegal immigration. To that end, her press office staged a meeting with schoolchildren in Rostock on July 16.
Rostock is no ordinary place. A city in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the poorest region in the former East Germany, it is marred with unemployment and high numbers of non-European “asylum seekers.” In 1992, it had been the scene of xenophobic violence. Among the youngsters Merkel met was a Palestinian teenage girl called Reem Sahwil. The young woman explained that her family, which had been in Germany for four years as “asylum seekers,” was facing imminent deportation. She asked the chancellor whether they could be allowed to stay. True to her “Empress” image, Merkel rejected the request: “You are a very nice person but you know that there are thousands and thousands of people in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and if I say ‘you can all come’ and ‘you can all come from Africa,’ we just can’t manage that.” Anybody would have predicted that the girl would burst in tears upon such words—that is to say, anybody but the chancellor and her advisers, who panicked when they realized that the whole episode looked like an epitome of German insensibility and arrogance.
Just six weeks later, Merkel reversed her stand, regarding both the Sahwil family and the “thousands and thousands” waiting for asylum and economic opportunity in Germany—more than one million people, mostly single young men, as it turned out. She issued an open welcome. And she suggested that all European Union nations should do likewise, in proportion to their populations. It didn’t matter that the young Reem Sahwil’s dream, as she explained to the press, was in fact to “return home . . . once Israel is no longer there, rather only Palestine.”
Merkel’s about-face was applauded hysterically by the ruling class and widely rejected by everybody else. It set in motion a chain of events that neither Merkel nor anybody else could control.