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Joe Klein's European Listening Tour

Joe Klein is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is traveling in Europe
for the London Guardian, where a version of this article first appeared.


Subject: The End of the Journey
Posted: Wednesday, July 3, 2002, at 3:25 PM PT
Today's itinerary: London, England

 
Six weeks on the road, and Heathrow looms. Funny how travel distorts time:
I've been gone forever and arrived only yesterday. Part of the problem is
that I've done this jaunt the American way, as a mad dash rather than a
leisurely stroll. Work, work, work. No time to visit a single museum, unless
you count the city of Rome as one. No time to while away the hours in cafes.
The apogee of my continental naughtiness: I was lured into smoking several
cigarettes. I did get very drunk one night in Poland, with Adam Michnik, a
catharsis I needed and enjoyed immensely. I should have loafed more, taken
sick leave, filed a claim against the Guardian for exposing me to France,
where existential anguish is contagious. It's a miracle I survived that
hothouse of anomie. But no, I'm a tough American: My angst is limited to
guilt over the size of my wife's sport utility vehicle. 

And what have I learned? Let me tell you a story. Coffee one morning at an
outdoor cafe in Rome, with two young people, one a student and the other a
recent graduate. Both veterans of the past year's street protests, in Genoa
and in Rome. As always, I began by asking, "What's so bad about America?" 
 
"It's not just America, it's the entire West," said Pietro, the recent
graduate, now a graphic designer. "We've created a model the world can't
support. If everyone in the world used toilet paper the way we do, there'd
be no more trees." 

Maria Vittoria's problem with America was cultural. "They've given us the
model of the strong, victorious man, with an emphasis on professional
success at any cost. The moral and spiritual penetration is insidious and it
is everywhere. McDonald's, American movies ... " 

"I like American movies," Pietro interrupted, with a guilty smile. "I
particularly like the violent fantasies. Star Wars." And while he was at it,
he admitted, "I like my shoes, too," displaying a rather battered pair of
Nikes. "I know this is probably juvenile, but I'm a child inside." 

Aren't we all!? Inherent in that childishness is a need to be protected, a
need for order-not just a sense of stability in everyday life, but a larger
sense of order as well: something to believe in. The conversation took a
very interesting turn when I asked them what they believed in. "I believe
this corporate system is wrong," said Maria. 

But what replaces it, I asked: socialism? "No, no, no," said Pietro. "My
parents were members of the Communist church." 

And to which church did he belong? "That's the problem. There are two
churches now. Capitalism and Islam. Capitalism is crass and Islam is crazy.
The anti-globalist movement is not quite a church, yet. There are different
strands, things I believe and things I don't." 

About a hundred years ago, the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote a
book about the coming crassness called The Theory of the Leisure Class. It
may be that the current anomie could be called the reverse: The Leisure of
the Theory class. Europeans, it seems to me, are unmoored in the midst of
abundance. Pietro is right: They have no church. Their parents had communism
and Catholicism (All right: They had Protestantism as well, even if it isn't
alliterative). Both are pretty much gone now. Indeed, it is astonishing to
an American how secular Europe has become. During a conversation with a
woman here in England-I can't quite remember who she was-I casually uttered
the words, "Thank God for that." The woman was shocked. "Why do you say
that? Do you actually believe in God?" 

But there is a third church for Europeans, a rather powerful one: the church
of national identity. It is a great source of pride and security and
problems: A Frenchman knows exactly what being French means, the siesta
sensibility still rules in Spain, and the tendency of Brits-even cool, young
business Brits in the City-to need a pint and a gab at the end of the day
seems encoded in the national DNA. There is an undercurrent of
informed-elite concern about this: Rampant ethnicity proved a European
disaster in the 20th century; it seems anachronistic, economically
untenable, and a bit crude now. That is why politics has become so brutish
on the continent: Demagogues are doing quite well selling the past. They
exploit the threat to national sovereignty from above-from Brussels-and,
most profoundly, from below: from the rush of immigrants, particularly those
who do not share European values. As a Frenchwoman told me, "We believe
religion should be a private thing. Why must they take it into the street,
the way they dress and all?" But immigrants are necessary to keep the
national economies, and the social-services systems, afloat. And Brussels,
which can create a market with 500 million players if Eastern Europe is
included, is necessary as well if Europeans want to throw their weight in
the world. Still, there is great anxiety about how Britain, how France-how
Europe-will be defined 20 years down the road. 

This, I suspect, is a prime source of the deeper resentments toward
America-that is, those not related to the gratuitously ideological, blithely
boorish behavior of the current administration. America doesn't have an
identity problem. It has a powerful national religion: Americanness. It has
a national ideology, too: informality. It is threatened neither from above
nor below; it is threatened for the moment from the outside, by terrorists,
but that has only served to strengthen the national sense of community (and
from the inside, by a nauseating array of business scammers-although this is
less serious a problem than some Europeanists would like to think). The true
power of Americanness is that it beggars ethnicity: We luxuriate in the
mongrelization of our bloodlines-at least, a constant majority of us do; we
believe that the things we have in common are far more important than those
which divide us. The rainbow cascade of immigrants, which began in 1965
after a 40-year closed-door policy threatened to bland us to death, has
succeeded in making us even more American. The Latinos and Arabs and
Africans and south Asians and east Asians have not only proved energetic
entrepreneurs and spectacular citizens, they've also served to take the
binary edge off the vicious old black-white racial confrontation. 

The American identity can be summarized in a single polling question: We are
the only country in the world where a majority has consistently
believed-with the exception of a few years in the late 1970s-that next year
will be better. Such optimism must seem obnoxious to the rest of the world,
especially when accompanied by overwhelming military and commercial power.
The essential American credulousness-we believe in our nation, our system,
our sensibility (those who demur usually do so on the grounds that we are
not living up to our ideals), we even tend to believe in God-must seem
pretty obnoxious, too. 

I don't want to minimize Europe's "America" problem. The anger seems to have
grown during my six weeks here. I've heard about it constantly, and most
credibly from sober sorts-such as Lord (Richard) Holme of Cheltenham, who
has been deeply involved in British-American exchange programs for years and
says, with great regret, that "America has never seemed quite so far away."
Of course, one hears it from less sober sorts as well. Each week seems to
bring new outrages: most recently, George Bush's Middle East speech-in which
he guaranteed the lifetime presidency of the corrupt terrorist Yasser
Arafat-and the huge WorldCom fraud, and the mistaken bombing of an Afghan
wedding. Each day seems to bring new evidence of an increasingly careless
and thoughtless hyper-power-to use the French epithet du jour-evidence that
causes pain to America's friends and brings joy to the usual array of
juvenile, leisure-addled leftist intellectuals. 

There are real problems, real differences, between Europe and America. But I
suspect that the rift wouldn't seem quite so raw if Bush weren't president.
Last week, at a gathering of his diminished tribe in Memphis, Al Gore said
that if he had the 2000 campaign to do over again, he would ignore his
platoons of consultants, pollsters, and marketers and "let 'er rip."
Presumably this means he wouldn't have been so patently dishonest. It
suggests that he might occasionally have told the American people something
they didn't want to hear; at the very least, it implies that he would have
dislodged the flagpole from the area just south of his lower spine. 

And what if he had won? There certainly would be less of the signature
Bushian callousness toward our allies. Multilateralism-at least, the
appearance of multilateralism-would rule. Petroleum wouldn't. Kyoto, or
something like it, would be signed. There would be no American tariffs on
steel, no pornographic corporate farm subsidies; regulators would actually
be attempting to control the excesses of enterprise, if not often
succeeding. Officials of the United States government wouldn't be going
around lecturing the world about the evils of abortion and the joys of gun
ownership. My guess is that Gore would have prosecuted the Afghanistan
campaign much as Bush has-which means that civilians would, on occasion, be
mistakenly bombed. That is part of the price of war. I'd also guess that
there would be great American reluctance about joining the international
criminal court: We have very different notions about the proper use of
force-this may be the greatest philosophical difference between Europeans
and Americans. We would not want American guards at Camp X-Ray called up on
charges by foolish judges who believe that the use of masks and manacles
while transporting the most dangerous of war criminals is a crime against
humanity. But those differences would be more tolerable in a general context
of cooperation. Europeans wouldn't be so upset if the American assumption
was partnership, interrupted by occasional disputes, rather than disdain
interrupted by occasional spasms of condescension. 

But Bush is president and may remain so for the next six years. The Atlantic
does seem a bit wider these days. And there are questions now about the most
basic political propositions: Is there any alternative to the American way?
Are we doomed to the mushy, technocratic, centrist politics that seems to be
turning so many people off? Is there another European church waiting to be
born? I sense, after my six-week wander, a growing impatience among the
Theory Class, a desire for some clear-cut resolutions. But there are some
questions that just shouldn't be answered peremptorily; solutions
evolve-messily, incoherently, stumbled upon by politicians. Or they don't
evolve: The poor, for example, will always be with us, as a Jew from the
West Bank once said. 

For the past few weeks, I've had a rather grumpy traveling companion: Will
Hutton. Not Will himself, who is a charming and intelligent fellow-we had a
nice lunch on my very first day of travels. But I've been reading Will's new
book, The World We're In, which is another story entirely: It is everything
the author is not-simplistic, hasty, and vituperative. It posits a stark
alternative: There is the American way or the European way, and Britain must
choose one or the other. The American way features rapacious capitalism and
social insensitivity, undergirded by a radical intellectual conservatism
that has swept all before it. The European way is far more mellow-a slower,
more stable corporate culture; a far more generous welfare state; lots of
museums and holidays; a political philosophy that draws the best from the
two old churches, communism and Catholicism. 

Hutton has a point about the rapacious capitalism, the tendency to place
short-term profits above long-term growth. He is also right to criticize the
antisocial myopia of conservative thinkers such as Leo Strauss, who have had
an influence on some of the more extreme sorts lurking in the shadows of the
Bush administration. Hutton's right, too, that America's social safety net
is deficient, especially when it comes to health care (but he totally misses
the massive income transfer to the working poor that took place during the
Clinton administration). It is possible, though, to concede all these points
and discard Hutton's general thrust as rubbish. He simply doesn't understand
how America works, or why it is as vibrant as it is. 

He follows a long tradition of leftish pessimists who predict America's
imminent demise. He sees "an ominous echo of the 1920s" in the stock-market
frenzy of the '90s and the recent frauds, without acknowledging the lessons
learned and implemented during the Great Depression: The Keynesian
manipulation of fiscal and monetary policy has had a very successful 70-year
run of blunting inflationary and deflationary cycles in the United States.
Worse, he links America's economic fate with that of the great corporations,
such as Boeing, which seems, for the moment, to be losing its competitive
battle against Airbus. But the American economy isn't about Boeing; it's
about the small businesses and new ideas constantly being born, most
failing, some succeeding. It is about the freedom of employers to hire,
fire, start, stop, and change course. It's about the freedom of all comers
to begin a business of their own, with a minimum of fuss or paperwork. In
the early part of his administration, Bill Clinton had a wonderful statistic
that he would trot out against the naysayers concerned by the "massive" wave
of layoffs besetting the Fortune 500 companies: In the past two years, he
would say, there have been more new businesses started by women than there
have been people laid off by the Fortune 500. 

Actually, Hutton's analysis of America is somewhat more detailed than his
account of Western Europe. The latter seems a romantic fantasy at best. He
apotheosizes several large, well-run companies-Volkswagen, Nokia, and
Michelin-and extrapolates their practices to all European enterprises.
There's a problem, though: These industrial giants represent a small and
declining part of the advanced Western economies. And Hutton's beloved
Germany lags in most other economic sectors: The growth in information-age
services and technology has averaged 8.9 percent a year over the past decade
in America versus 4.9 percent in Germany. 

There are, furthermore, powerful disincentives to start new businesses and
hire new employees in most European countries. I spent a morning with
Traugott Klose of the Free University of Berlin, where 20 percent of
liberal-arts students linger on campus for 12 semesters or more before
getting a degree. Why? Because it is far easier for a company to give a
temporary job to a student-only about one-third of social taxes need be
paid, and students have no right to protest if they are let go-than to hire
a graduate permanently. There are now urban legends about German
students-Grey Panthers, they are called-who go directly from school to
pension: At the Free University, one "student" is still drifting about after
72 semesters. (In Holland, the difficulty in firing employees has led to a
rather remarkable statistic: One out of every 16 Dutch workers is on
permanent sick leave.) There are other problems with Hutton's thesis. The
first is the dog that doesn't bark: Will's World doesn't seem to include
Asia. He doesn't mention China once. He mentions the other burgeoning Asian
economies only as victims of American-led International Monetary Fund reform
(though most seem to have recovered nicely). The truth is, Europe and the
United States are not just competing against each other but also against
Asia-and if Hutton thinks the American welfare state is sketchy, he should
check out China's. There simply isn't any health insurance for most workers
in non-state enterprises. There are practically no labor rules. America is a
worker's paradise by contrast. This is The World We're Really In; it may be
the Hobbesian future we're competing against. 

In any case, why on earth must Britain choose one path or the other-the
European model or the American? Why not mix and match? Why not take the
freedom of the American labor market and combine it with an aggressive
re-employment program for those who are sacked, for example? But Hutton and
a great many others are spoiling for a fight. In fact, there are competing
intellectual street gangs on each side of the Atlantic these days, and both
are filled with a rather lunatic bloodlust. For all the salon talk in Europe
about arrogant super-duper-powers led by idiot cowboys, there is an equal
amount of bleating about anti-Semitic, Arab-loving, crypto-Trotskyite
Euro-Weenies in America. The caricatures are poison; they have consequences.
They are too easily digested, too easily passed through the public
bloodstream; they provide a sugar rush for the idle and foolish. We gave the
last century over to the vehement idealists: They gave us the Soviet Union,
Nazi Germany, and Britain's rail privatization scheme. It's time for a new
paradigm. And I have a modest proposal: 

Let Hutton captain 50 Euro-Weenies; let Norman Podhoretz, the ancient
neoconservative crustacean, captain 50 Ameri-Goths. Let us transport both
squads to a desert island and ask them to compete-not just in standard
survivor games such as worm-eating, but also in more erudite pursuits such
as hieroglyph reading and grant-proposal writing. Let them box and wrestle
and debate as well-perhaps a new sport could be invented: debate boxing. We
can televise all this, although I'm not sure there would be many viewers.
Then again, perhaps we should avoid making intellectuals into celebrities.
Perhaps we should leave them on that desert island and go about the serious
business of picking out what's best on both sides of the Atlantic and making
a nice little society for ourselves. 

I have several other modest proposals. The first is a basic principle: Going
it together is better than going it alone-diversity trumps homogeneity.
America's diversity is its greatest economic and social asset; if the
current president-who has been quite courageous in confronting the
xenophobes in his party on immigration-could extend himself just the
slightest bit intellectually, he might see that the diversity principle
applies transnationally as well. On your side of the Atlantic, it seems
obvious that the EU is Europe's only path toward relevance and the best
chance to cleanse the continent's virulently ethnocentric soul. This leads
to the real world of policy: It is a moral imperative that the EU expand to
include the former Communist countries to the east as quickly as possible.
It's probably also high time for Britain to adopt the euro. Indeed, let's
have some real fun: Merge the dollar and the euro, since they've pretty much
achieved market parity, and the euro comes-at least, it appears to
come-equipped with fiscal disciplines that the budget-busting Bush
administration badly needs. 

Finally, in order to return some much-needed religious pomp and circumstance
to our public life, I have a few ceremonial suggestions. Silvio Berlusconi
should be put in charge of all social arrangements-all future celebrations,
that is; parties, not policy-on both sides of the Atlantic. And Clinton
should be hired to deliver all major eulogies: If we have poet laureates,
why not a mourner laureate? I have a few small changes I'd like to propose
about soccer as well ... but we'll leave those until we meet again. For now,
I board the plane and return home-to search for a nice outdoor cafe that
serves espresso and sweet cakes, where I can sit and relax and turn on my
tape of the world's most ghastly accordion music and watch the pigeons
chuttle about and the girls wheel by and show all my American friends how
truly continental I have now become.