Chapter 31 Section 3 Guided Reading Fascism Rises in Europe
Equally Nationalism Rises, Europe Dies
What is the Quondam Globe? What is the New World? Until recently, the answer to both questions has been obvious. The United States is the New Globe, the "land of the gratuitous," settled and founded by people who left a Europe full of political repression, economic backwardness and cultural decadence. In comparison, Europe is the Old Globe — an entire continent that divided and destroyed itself during two earth wars.
Initially, the relationship between the two provided fodder for a few jokes. Henry James, the American literary giant who relocated to Europe, wrote in his 1878 novel "The Europeans" about an run into between dynamic, nouveau riche Americans and culturally wealthy, ossified Europeans, which leads to some amusing situations. In the novel, James didn't but portray the differences between the Old and the New, he also predictable the trans-Atlantic alliance.
Since then, notwithstanding, the world has turned. The New has grown onetime and the Sometime has reinvented itself.
The idea of the European unification project, which led to the European union of today, is the New — the politically sui generis. Information technology is a logical yet radical conclusion drawn from historical experience, and information technology makes possible (or would brand possible) a future of freedom and peace instead of cyclical suffering. The rooting of this idea in the soil of Europe more than threescore years agone has proved to exist a greater leap for flesh than the moon landing.
What made the European project revolutionary was that for the first time Europe wasn't seeking to Europeanize the world, but rather itself. In then doing, it could become — as an experimental project with a foundation of enlightenment — the avant-garde for a peaceful world. The "could," though, is the problem. The difference between idea and implementation in Europe has go just as large as the gap between the beauty of the U.s.a. Constitution and the all-encompassing hardship and suffering of the American reality under President Trump.
To understand the "self-Europeanization of Europe," it helps to compare today's European project to the quondam European projection: the United States, which has in many means non moved beyond the Onetime World ideals that contributed to its founding and formative years.
Dorsum then, European colonialists used violence to capture the territory that would get the United states of america. Their successors kept that territory united by waging a encarmine civil state of war, helping to create and sustain a nation that would eventually go along to enforce the interests of its elites around the world, with military means if necessary.
Today, the new European project, the European Union, takes the opposite arroyo: It enlarges its territory by mode of voluntary accession, unites it through treaties aimed at the establishment of shared legal standards, seeks to overcome nationalism and, being a project for peace, is unwilling to enforce its interests with armed services means.
The founders of the European Wedlock wanted to put a stop to the unending violence and aggression that had scarred Europe'due south long history. And after 1945, information technology was clear where the greatest danger lay: nationalism. Contest among so-called national interests for markets, resources and spheres of influence e'er leads to national conflict, whether in the class of trade wars or direct military confrontation.
Equally these wars accept persisted, peace agreements have proved useless, equally take international organizations such equally the League of Nations and the United Nations. That was the painful lesson of the generation that, from the end of the 19th century to 1945, lived through nationalism, the German language wars of unification and the two world wars, the last of which nigh destroyed civilisation and gave rise to the worst crimes against humanity the world has ever seen, including the horrors of Auschwitz.
All that was to exist made obsolete, a hope that gave ascent to the idea of trying something completely new, namely the introduction of a postnational lodge, which, in practice, would evolve without the political presuppositions of the Old World, to which the United States at present belongs.
Every thinking person in Western Europe is grateful for the enormous contribution of the U.s. to the liberation of Europe from fascism. But was America's involvement in the war actually just about liberating nations from fascism? The United states of america, after all, didn't have much of a problem with Castilian or Portuguese fascism. Francisco Franco in Spain and the Portuguese strongman António de Oliveira Salazar were American allies right up until their deaths in the 1970s. (These countries were eventually liberated and democratized past the European union.) In Republic of chile, the democratically elected president of a sovereign nation was overthrown by the C.I.A. and replaced by a fascist dictatorship. The proud and wealthy country of Argentina was plunged into defalcation and misery past a fascist regime supported by the United States.
Those policies and the dozens of other military interventions initiated by the United States in the years since 1945 made clear to Europeans that such an aggressive, self-interested arroyo was outmoded and could never pb to sustainable peace, only to more generations robbed of their futures.
Every bit a result, the Eu they created is decidedly and unequivocally antifascist, and not only in instances in which fascism lies in contradiction to the bloc'south economical interests, but likewise in situations where fascism could perhaps exist expedient for the pursuit of the matrimony'south own political interests.
The formerly Stalinist states of Eastern Europe profited enormously from joining the European Wedlock post-obit the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Their membership ensured that their regained freedom would result non in chaos, but in growing prosperity and a transition to the rule of law — even as the United States repeatedly sought to play Eastern and Western European countries confronting each other.
The United States has never ratified the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights — a very Old World stance. In Europe, meanwhile, the European Marriage's Charter of Fundamental Rights is a legally binding addendum to the Treaty of Lisbon, which functions similar a constitution for the bloc. On this point, I tin can imagine every enlightened American proverb: I want to exist European, a citizen of the New Globe.
The idea pursued by the founders of the European peace projection was every bit simple as it was vivid: to interlink the economies of European nation-states and submit them to joint rules and controls to such an extent that no member could pursue selfish interests against another without harmful consequences. The aim was to subsume nationalism to practiced mutuality, with the resulting customs of nations making Europe's smaller countries more than powerful than they would be on their own.
As mentioned, this thought was born as a consequence of historical experience, merely it shortly became clear that in the face of new and approaching challenges it was the most sensible concept for a free earth. Certainly ane of these challenges is steering the dynamic of globalization. And ultimately, globalization ways aught more than the sabotage of national borders and the annulment of national sovereignty.
In this context, the European idea of a postnational political organization is the merely ane that has kept up with the times. In comparison, the national superpower approach practiced by the Us looks old-fashioned. That's why it would be completely nonsensical to construct a newly unified Europe as a neo-imperial superpower in faux of the U.s..
The thought of the European project's founding generation has — small step by small step — fabricated astonishing progress: a shared market, a shared currency, shared laws, a shared administration and a shared bureaucracy. And it has led to what for Europe is an unusually long period of peace.
Withal the European project hasn't yet led to a truly shared republic. We have a supranational European Parliament, but we can vote only for national parties. And our Parliament has no right to initiate legislation. We also have a supranational executive in the form of the European Commission, only within the framework of European institutions, the Lisbon Treaty has transformed it into a sorrowful secretariat of the national heads of country and government.
Our almost powerful institution is the European Quango, where the national heads of state and government and the national ministers of certain portfolios make decisions that are sold as compromises among the fellow member states, but which are, in reality, hurdles to a joint European policy.
The European political project, whose founding thought remains far ahead of global politics, is essentially trapped in an unproductive contradiction between postnational development and a re-emergent nationalism, between shared politics and the national selfishness of the member states.
There tin be no compromise, just as there can be no middle ground betwixt being pregnant and not existence pregnant. For a long time, I thought that Europe was pregnant with the time to come. But the symptoms take become increasingly obvious: Europe is infected with a disease of history. The disease of nationalism.
This volition pb to the death of the union. The The states continues to wrestle for global dominance with other world powers, and will do so militarily if required. Meanwhile, progressive Europe, which turned its back on imperialism and redefined itself as a project for peace, risks condign a continent of helpless countries, a collection of staff of life crumbs on the table of global power. In that location will be significant misery and dismay in Europe — so much, in fact, that even "never again" could happen once more. And everything would have to get-go over from the beginning.
We won't be able to relieve the planet if we can't salvage the New Globe. And I have now begun to suffer from my beloved for the New World. For Europe.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/opinion/nationalism-rise-europe.html
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