European Wake-Up
By Peter Ross Range
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There are cracks in the façade of European leftism that should give us all some hope. They come in the form of editorialists, academics, activists, and bloggers who've pretty much had it with the reflexive anti-globalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-interventionism of the 1968 generation in Europe. Some of the new voices are youngish journalists in rebellion against the dogmatism of their elders, who often exercise iron control -- and sometimes enforce ideological unanimity -- over certain key media like Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the BBC.
Perhaps the most noticeable fissure in the masonry of group-think is a new initiative promoted by old British leftist Norman Geras, who supports the war in Iraq and democratization in the Middle East. Together with a young columnist named Nick Cohen, Geras is leading a new movement dubbed the Euston Manifesto -- because it was conceived during several meetings in a pub near London's Euston Station. The manifesto is posted on the Internet and is open for anyone to sign. Within a month of going up in early spring, it had attracted hundreds of signatures, quickly becoming an intellectual and ideological home for many disillusioned European leftists who are looking for a sensible progressive movement to join. That has to warm an American progressive's heart.
At the core of the Euston Manifesto is an unequivocal anti-totalitarianism. Under the heading, "No apology for tyranny," the signers expressly "decline to make excuses for, to indulgently 'understand,' reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy." The document's other big message is a ringing rejection of the anti-Americanism so much in vogue on the European left. The manifesto even disputes any moral equivalency between the horrific depredations of a Saddam Hussein and the sins of the Bush administration in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. "It is vitally important [to] speak clearly against those for whom the entire progressive agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic 'anti-imperialism,'" write Geras and Cohen in New Statesman.
The manifesto includes a number of American signers, such as Paul Berman, Michael Walzer, Andrei Markovits, and Fred Siegel, a professor at The Cooper Union and the culture editor of BLUEPRINT. "I'm signing this Manifesto because it represents the only plausible path forward for Western liberalism in all its incarnations," Siegel wrote on the website. "If Jihadism is to be contained, or even, in the long run, defeated, success will depend on a broad coalition stretching from the center-left to the center- right that understands that this will be a protracted conflict that requires patience as well as power."
The sudden success of the British initiative suggests that there is an untapped vein of rational progressivism in Europe. It is looking for a way to throw off the stifling blanket of doctrinaire thinking that always labels Israel and America the enemy, forgives oppressive and even murderous behavior in minority communities under the relativistic guise of multiculturalism, and excuses terrorism as the only weapon of "resistance" available to the oppressed.
Beyond the British effort, one sees signs of new thinking in places like Germany. Ulrich Speck -- who writes a respected foreign policy blog for Die Zeit -- belongs to a segment of the German intelligentsia that is breaking with entrenched anti- Americanism and looking to the United States for practical guidance on economic restructuring, social integration of minorities, and effective responses to international crises. Another rebel is Clemens Wergin, an editorialist at Berlin's left-liberal Der Tagesspiegel. "The left is lost, and not only in America," he writes. "Since Bush and the neocons are pushing worldwide democratization, the left's reactionary impulse is to renounce its traditional internationalist agenda of democracy-promotion and human rights."
It is, of course, an article of faith among Europe's lefties that America is a cultural and intellectual wasteland. But this, too, is beginning to change. A stream of Europeans passing through Washington this spring expressed surprise at the quality and variety of the debate in the city's dynamic think tanks. Whereas there's basically one opinion about the Iraq war in Paris and Berlin -- "Everybody already knows it's bad, so they don't discuss it," grouses Der Spiegel's Claus Christian Malzahn -- Washington is a hotbed of disagreement and discussion. Even London's Economist noted the thriving battles of ideas: "Look at the world of public policy today and it is America that is the land of the intellectuals and Europe that is the intellect-free zone." Words I never thought I would read in a European publication.
Europe hasn't yet drunk all the progressive Kool-Aid and turned itself into one big Third Way. But, with a rising generation willing to wake up and rethink some of the received rigidities, there's reason for hope.
Peter Ross Range is editor of Blueprint.