Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (154 page)

The heritage industry in England suggests an obsession with the way things
weren’t
—the cultivation, as it were, of genuine nostalgia for a fake past. In contrast, the French fascination with its spiritual
patrimoine
has a certain cultural authenticity. ‘France’ has always represented itself in allegorical ways: witness the various depictions and incarnations of ‘Marianne’, the Republic. It was thus altogether appropriate that regret for the keys to a lost Frenchness was focused upon a formal body of symbols, whether physical or intellectual. These ‘are’ France. If they are misplaced or no longer shared, France cannot be itself—in the sense Charles de Gaulle meant when he declared that ‘France cannot be France without glory’.

These assumptions were shared by politicians, intellectuals and people of all political persuasions—which is why
Les Lieux de mémoire
was so successful, encapsulating for tens of thousands of readers an evanescent Frenchness already eluding them in daily French life. And it is therefore very revealing that whereas Christianity—Christian ideas, Christian buildings, practices and symbols—occupy a prominent place in Nora’s tomes, there is but one brief chapter on ‘Jews’—mostly as objects of assimilation, exclusion or persecution—and no entry at all on ‘Muslims’.

This was not an oversight. There was no assigned corner for Islam in the French memory palace and it would have run counter to the purpose of the undertaking to create one after the fact. But the omission nevertheless illustrated the trouble that France, like its neighbours, was going to have in accommodating the millions of new Europeans in its midst. Of the 105 members of the European Convention assigned the task of writing Europe’s constitution,
none
had a non-European background. Like the rest of the continent’s political élite, from Portugal to Poland, they represented above all white, Christian Europe.

Or, more precisely, formerly Christian Europe. Although the varieties of Christianity within Europe remained many—from Ukrainian Uniates to Welsh Methodists, from Trans-Carpathian Greek Catholics to Norwegian Lutherans—the number of Christians who actually practiced their faith continued to shrink. In Spain, which still boasted 900 convents and monasteries at the end of the twentieth century—60 percent of the world’s total—active faith was on the decline, correlating all too closely with isolation, old age and rural backwardness. In France, only one adult in seven acknowledged even attending church, and then on average just once a month. In Scandinavia and Britain the figures were even lower. Christianity was on the wane even in Poland, where the citizenry was increasingly deaf to the moral exhortations of the once-powerful Catholic hierarchy. By the turn of the century well over half of all Poles (and a much larger majority of those under thirty) favoured legalized abortions.

Islam, in contrast, was expanding its appeal—particularly among the young, for whom it served increasingly as a source of communal identity and collective pride in countries where citizens of Arab or Turkish or African provenance were still widely seen and treated as ‘foreigners’. Whereas their parents and grandparents had made strenuous efforts to integrate and assimilate, young men and women in Antwerp or Marseille or Leicester now vociferously identified both with the land of their birth—Belgium or France or Britain—
and
with the religion and region of their family’s roots. Girls, especially, took to wearing traditional clothing and religious symbols—sometimes under family pressure, but often in rebellion against the compromises of an older generation.

The reaction of the public authorities, as we have seen, varied somewhat by local tradition and circumstance: only the French National Assembly, in a righteous fit of secular republicanism, opted by a vote of 494-36 to ban the wearing of
all
religious symbols in state schools. But this move, undertaken in February 2004 and targeted at the
voile
—the headgear of observant Muslim girls—must be understood in a broader and more troubling context. Racial prejudice in many places was being turned to political advantage by the far Right; and anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe, for the first time in over forty years.

Seen from across the Atlantic, where it became a staple in the speeches of Europhobic politicians and neo-conservative pundits, anti-Semitism in France or Belgium or Germany was immediately identified as a return to the continent’s dark past. Writing in the
Washington Post
in May 2002, the influential columnist George Will went so far as to describe the recrudescence of anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe as ‘the second—and final?—phase of the struggle for a “final solution to the Jewish question”.’ The American Ambassador to the EU, Rockwell Schnabel, told a special gathering in Brussels of the American Jewish Committee that anti-Semitism in Europe ‘is getting to a point where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’.

This was inflammatory rhetoric, and deeply misguided. Anti-Jewish feelings were largely unknown in contemporary Europe—
except
among Muslims and especially Europeans of Arab descent, where they were a direct outcome of the festering crisis in the Middle East. Arab television stations, now available via satellite throughout Europe, regularly broadcast reports from Gaza and the Occupied West Bank. Infuriated by what they saw and heard, and encouraged by Arab and Israeli authorities alike to identify Israel with their local Jewish neighbours, young men (mostly) in the suburbs of Paris or Lyon or Strasbourg turned on their Jewish neighbours: they scrawled graffiti on Jewish community buildings, desecrated cemeteries, bombed schools and synagogues and in a few instances attacked Jewish teenagers or families.

The attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions—concentrated in the first years of the new century—aroused concern not because of their scale, or even on account of their racist character, but because of their implicitly inter-communal nature. This was not the old European anti-Semitism: for those seeking scapegoats for their discontents, Jews were no longer the target of choice. Indeed, they ranked well down the pecking order. A French poll in January 2004 found that whereas 10 percent of those questioned admitted to disliking Jews, a far higher number—23 percent—disliked ‘North Africans’. Racially motivated attacks on Arabs—or, varying by country, on Turks, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Senegalese and other visible minorities—were far more numerous than assaults on Jews. In some cities they were endemic.

The troubling aspect of the new anti-Semitism was that while, once again, Jews were the victims, now it was Arabs (or Muslims) who were the perpetrators. The only exception to this rule appeared to be in Germany, where the renascent extreme Right did not trouble itself to distinguish between immigrants, Jews and other ‘non-Germans’. But Germany, for obvious reasons, was a special case. Elsewhere the public authorities worried more about the growing alienation of their Arab and other Muslim communities than they did about any putative revival of Fascism. They were probably right.

In contrast to the United States, which continued to treat ‘Islam’ and Muslims as a distant challenge, alien and hostile, best addressed by heightened security and ‘pre-emptive war’, Europe’s governments had good reason to see the matter very differently. In France especially, the crisis in the Middle East was no longer a matter of foreign policy: it had become a domestic problem. The transmigration of passions and frustrations from persecuted Arabs in Palestine to their angry, dispirited brethren in Paris should not have come as a surprise—it was, after all, another legacy of empire.

XXIV

Europe as a Way of Life

‘A free Health Service is a triumphant example of the superiority of
collective action and public initiative applied to a segment of society where
commercial principles are seen at their worst’.
Aneurin Bevan

‘We want the people at Nokia to feel we all are partners, not bosses and
employees. Perhaps that is a European way of working, but for us, it
works’.
Jorma Ollila (CEO, Nokia)
³⁹⁰

‘Europeans want to be sure that there is no adventure in the future. They
have had too much of that’.
Alfons Verplaetse (Governor, Belgian National Bank) 1996

‘America is the place to come when you are young and single. But if it is
time to grow up, you should return to Europe’.
(Hungarian businessman in public opinion survey, 2004)

‘Modern society . . . is a democratic society to be observed without
transports of enthusiasm or indignation’.
Raymond Aron

The burgeoning multiplicity of Europe at the end of the twentieth century: the variable geometry of its regions, countries and Union; the contrasting prospects and moods of Christianity and Islam, the continent’s two major religions; the unprecedented speed of communications and exchange within Europe’s borders and beyond them; the multiplicity of fault lines that blur what had once been clear-cut national or social divisions; uncertainties about past and future alike; all these make it harder to discern a shape to the collective experience. The end of the twentieth century in Europe lacks the homogeneity implicit in confident descriptions of the previous
fin-de-siècle
.

All the same, there
was
emerging a distinctively European identity, discernible in many walks of life. In high culture—the performing arts in particular—the state had retained its subventionary role, at least in Western Europe. Museums, art galleries, opera companies, orchestras and ballet troupes all depended heavily, in many countries exclusively, on generous annual grants from public funds. The egregious exception of post-Thatcherite Great Britain, where the national lottery had relieved the Treasury of some of the burden of cultural support, was misleading. Lotteries are merely another device for raising public revenue: they are just more socially regressive than the conventional collection agencies.
³⁹¹

The high cost of such public funding had raised doubts about the possibility of sustaining lavish grants indefinitely, particularly in Germany, where during the Nineties some of the
Länder
governments began to question the generous scale of their outlays. Public subsidies in Germany typically defrayed over 80 percent of the cost of running a theatre or opera house. But culture at this level was closely bound up with status and with regional identity. The City of Berlin, despite growing deficits and stagnant receipts, supported three full-time houses: the Deutsche Oper (the former West Berlin opera); the Staatsoper (the former East Berlin opera); and the Komische Oper, to which should be added the Berlin Chamber Orchestra and the Philharmonic. All drew on considerable public assistance. Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Freiburg, Würzburg and many other German cities continued to support first-rate international ballet or opera companies, paying annual salaries with full benefits and state pensions to performers, musicians and stage hands. By 2003 there were 615,000 people in Germany officially classified as full-time ‘artistic workers’.

In France, too, the arts (theatre especially) flourished in far-flung provincial towns—thanks in the French case to direct aid distributed from central funds by a single Culture Ministry. In addition to building his eponymous library and other monuments, President Mitterrand spent sums unprecedented since the reign of Louis XIV not just on the Louvre, the Opéra de Paris and the Comédie Française but also on regional museums, regional arts centres, provincial theatre companies, as well as a nationwide network of
cinématheques
to store and show classic and modern films.

Whereas in Germany the high arts were proudly cosmopolitan (Vladimir Derevianko, the Russian director of Dresden’s Opera-Ballet, commissioned works from William Forsythe, an American choreographer, for enthusiastic German audiences), much of the point of artistic subsidies in France was to preserve and display the riches of the nation’s own heritage—France’s
exception culturelle
. High culture in France retained a broadly acknowledged pedagogical function, and the canon of French theatre in particular was still rigorously inculcated in the national curriculum. Jane Brown, the London headmistress who in 1993 forbade a school visit to a performance of
Romeo and Juliet
—on the grounds that the play was politically incorrect (‘blatantly heterosexual’ in her words)—would not have made a career across the Channel.

The scale of public funding was perhaps most striking in France and Germany, but the state was the main—and in most cases the only—source of funding for the arts all across Europe. Indeed ‘culture’ was the last important area of public life in which the national state, rather than the European Union or else private enterprise, could play a distinctive role as a near-monopoly provider. Even in Eastern Europe, where the older generation had good reason to recall with trepidation the implications of allowing government a controlling say in cultural life, the impoverished public treasury was the only alternative to the baleful impact of market forces.

Under Communism the performing arts had been worthy rather than exciting: usually technically competent, almost always cautious and conservative—anyone who saw
Die Zauberflöte
performed in, say, Vienna and Budapest could hardly fail to note the contrast. But after Communism, while there was considerable low-budget experimentation—Sofia in particular became a hotbed of
recherché
post-modern experiments in choreography and staging—there were almost no resources and many of the best musicians, dancers and even actors headed west. Joining Europe could also mean becoming provincial.

Another reason for this was that the audience for Europe’s high arts was now itself European: national companies in major cities performed in front of increasingly international audiences. The new caste of transnational
clercs
who communicated readily across frontiers and languages had the means and the time to travel freely in pursuit of entertainment and edification no less than clothing or careers. Reviews of an exhibition, a play or an opera would appear in the press of many different countries. A successful show in one city—London, say, or Amsterdam—could hope to attract audiences and visitors from as far afield as Paris, or Zurich or Milan.