Night thoughts on Europe.

• Author: Laqueur, Walter
• Position: Viewpoint essay

In 1849, the year of the "spring of nations," a peace congress took place in Paris. The main address given by Victor Hugo, the most famous author of the time, announced that

A day will come when you, France--you, Russia--you, Italy--you, England--you, Germany--all of you, nations of the Continent, will, without losing your distinctive qualities and your glorious individuality, be blended into a superior unity, and constitute an European fraternity .... A day will come when bullets and bombshells will be replaced by votes, by the universal suffrage of nations, by the venerable arbitration of a great Sovereign Senate, which will be to Europe what the Parliament is to England, what the Diet is to Germany, what the Legislative Assembly is to France. One hundred sixty years have passed since this noble vision was enounced; a European parliament of sorts has come into being, but not exactly a European brotherhood, and one suspects that Victor Hugo would still not be too happy with the present state of the Continent.

My memories of Europe go back to a childhood in Weimar Germany and growing up in the Nazi Third Reich. I left the country shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. I have returned for many short visits and some long stays since, been to most European countries and made the Continent one of my fields of study. My children went to school on both sides of the Atlantic. European culture has been the formative influence in my life (that of the past admittedly more than the present). Thus I had the good fortune to benefit from a variety of global perspectives. When I look out of our windows in Washington, Dc, I can see the raccoons and squirrels in the trees of Rock Creek Park; when I look out of our apartment in Highgate, London, I see the squirrels of Waterlow Park and, in winter when the leaves are down, the grave of Karl Marx.

Having seen Europe and the Europeans in good times and bad, the day may have come for a summing-up. I learned long ago that a crisis is merely the period between two others, but the present one is considerably deeper and could be fateful. Five years ago, in a book entitled The Last Days of Europe, I referred to the passing of a Europe I had known. The reception was skeptical in part; the views I expressed were unfashionable, and the book certainly came too early. According to a wide consensus, the twentyfirst century belonged to the Continent, the civilian superpower that would be envied and emulated by all others.

Europe, and especially the European Union, was not doing badly at all. Had it not progressed to a common currency? The reviewer in the Economist (my bible among the weeklies) blamed my book for "unduly apocalyptic conclusions." And now I see that a recent editorial in the same magazine about the very same issue is headlined "staring into the abyss."

But I was not staring into the abyss at the time, and I am not now; I was merely considering the possibility of Europe turning into a museum or cultural theme park for well-to-do tourists from East Asia. Not a heroic or deeply tragic future, but not my idea of an apocalypse either. Certainly, at the time I was dealing more with the long-term challenges facing the Continent, such as the demographic trends. More recently, as a result of the global recession and especially the European debt crisis, the immediate dangers resonate. This is only natural, for the collapse of banks, the instituting of austerity budgets and rising unemployment are clear and present dangers. Long-term threats can be pushed aside; there is always a chance that they may not happen. Five years on--no more than a minute in history--can also seem like an eternity.

Pondering the future of Europe, one is reminded of Frenchman Raymond Aron's In Defense of Decadent Europe, published in the 1970s, and the debate it triggered. Despite his native pessimism, Aron did not believe that decadent Europe would fall victim to the superior ideological attraction of Communism and the economic, military and political power of the Soviet Union.

With all his sympathy for liberal Europe, Aron was aware of the process of decadence (or decline, to use a more value-free term), which set in with the First World War and accelerated with the Second. The reasons are known: the devastation from the conflicts, the great bloodletting and the deeply destructive ideologies they bore...