The Mirage of a United Europe

Daniel Johnson’s question—“Does Europe Have a Future?”—appears increasingly to be the question of the hour. Of course, it has been asked before, and many times over. The specter of European failure has been our civilization’s constant companion for a century or more, certainly at least since the horrors of World War I. Yet in our own historical moment the question seems to have achieved a kind of ripeness in a Europe that looks too exhausted either to reproduce or to defend itself.

Still, much depends upon what one means by “Europe.” Is it the ambitious but fraught project of welding the continent into a fluid, borderless, ever more tightly unified economic, political, and cultural union, held together by an abstract invented supranational identity, a common currency adorned with generic secular symbols, and the tentacles of a vast administrative magistracy headquartered in Brussels, and intended to serve as a disinterested substitute for obsolete historical conventions or customs? That is one thing.

Or does “Europe” refer to a certain rich, complex way of life, along with the values and institutions and forms of consciousness that have made that way of life possible: free and self-governing institutions, constitutionally limited governments, prosperity-generating economies, equality before the law, protection of fundamental human rights, freedom of expression and of rational inquiry and imagination, recognition of the dignity of the individual person, a high regard for criticism and self-criticism, and a glorious and cosmopolitan heritage of ideas, stories, artifacts, sciences, languages, faiths, cuisines, literatures, historical consciousnesses, and arguments, all laid out before its heirs as if on a single vast table stretching from antiquity to tomorrow? That is something else again.