A EUROPEAN CALL TO ARMS

The following appeared in today's issue of the French daily 'La Croix'. It is a cry of alarm, and a call to action, from a MEP (Member of the European Parliament) who is also a lifelong activist, from his wilder days in the Sixties to his refusal to knuckle under to the supposedly inevitable even today: Daniel Cohn-Bendit. 

Americans tend either to believe that Europe is finished anyway, or that a United States of Europe is so obvious and simple that they can't see why Europeans don't just go and do it; but that is to reckon without 27 different languages and cultures. Imagine uniting in one political federal nation with Canada, Mexico, and Brazil . . . Anyway, this piece by Dany Cohn-Bendit (a deeply likeable and intelligent politician) struck me as worth translating and presenting here. 


‘THE SITUATION IS APPALLING BUT NOT IRREVERSIBLE’

We need Europe. And don’t think that this is simply a credo. For the first time in their history, the nation-states no longer have the capacity to resist the assaults of the economic sphere. They don’t admit it, but their leaders are no longer capable of keeping their promises. Common sense is enough to let us understand that individually they cannot manage to regulate the markets, control the financial sector, come to grips with climate worsening, or solve the social and economic crises.
Obviously, we didn’t get to this point by an act of God. The collective responsibility of the political leaders is well and truly involved. If only because they have not been able to gauge the degree to which globalization would destabilize things.  Occupied entirely by their ‘internal affairs’, they have not wanted to see the opportunity offered by the European dimension to enlarge their political sphere of action. The situation is appalling but not irreversible. As long as everyone begins by understanding that globalization forces us into a change of scale.
Thirty years from now, no state of the European Union will be part of the G8. The influence of France will be no greater than that of Luxemburg. From now on, if we want to conserve our civilization’s heritage, have our democracies progress, defend the ideas of social justice and protection, prevent our culture from being swept away by globalization, we will need to fight the battle at the European level. And a battle is exactly what it is. 
The accusations currently levelled at Europe are justified. Economic belt-tightening is no response to the recession: true. The criticism of the European Union’s faults and failures is right. But for heaven’s sake, let’s open our eyes! Believing in a national response is senseless. It’s only by way of Europe that we can remain in control of our lives. 
If, in France or elsewhere, a government follows a bad policy, the normal response is that either the policy must change or the government must. This is equally true for Europe. It’s not Europe that we should dump, but those who are making it. Don’t be fooled: it’s not re-nationing the European continent that will get us out of the mess. Don’t give up. That would guarantee our inability to act positively in the world. Europe has brought about an incredible progress of civilization. In this space which has produced atrocious wars and totalitarianisms, the very possibility of a war has been removed from the political imagination. That is an extraordinary achievement, but it is no longer enough.
  Open your eyes! Refuse a Europe of states left to a new war of economic powers. But for heaven’s sake don’t be trapped in the illusion of redemption by the Nation. 
See the battle for what it is: a struggle to the death between visions of Europe linked to diverging models of society and opposing conceptions of politics. 
It is evident that the European model of a Cameron is not that of a united Europe that bases its legitimacy upon a democratization of globalization, but rather that of a subversion of the European Union – and of the States – by the markets. His model of Europe is based on a conception of politics reduced to its simplest expression: to insure his re-election and to defend the interests of his City [of London]. Let’s not mistake the adversary: it is the failure of political will, alias the inaction of public power, that acts against the Europeans. 
We are in an unstable situation with an uncertain outcome. But we need to take it in hand because it will not ‘naturally’ move in the direction of a Europe set up for the 21st century and structured according to our common interest. Get rid of ‘there is no alternative’ [NB: in English]. Let us have the courage of a European federalism. We must create the United States of Europe, demand a serious European budget that allows us to intervene in the recession, to guarantee unemployment insurance for the young and a health-care system worthy of the name. Such a goal may seem unattainable. But take France. It looks back to the Revolution as its founding moment. And yet it took more than 150 years to give women the vote and to become a genuinely democratic republic. 
A political Europe that acts in the common interest in matters of economics, ecology, social development and education: there’s a utopia for this century. Get on with it, dissident Europe! 

HOUNDS OF SPRING

In the glory of a Southern French spring -- forsythias, fruit trees, hawthorn, entire fields full of daisies and dandelions, blackbirds, thrushes, doves and soon the nightingale -- someone sent me an e-mail asking me what I thought was the most euphonious word in English. I pondered "melancholy", "valerian", "singular" and others, but soon they were all crowded out of my mind by the most melodious piece of poetry I know in the English language:


WHEN the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
    The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
    With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous         
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
    The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
    Maiden most perfect, lady of light,         
With a noise of winds and many rivers,
    With a clamor of waters, and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendor and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,         
    Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
    Fold our hands round her knees, and cling?
O that man’s heart were as fire and could spring to her,
    Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!         
For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player;
For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
    And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing.

For winter’s rains and ruins are over,         
    And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
    The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remember’d is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,         
And in green underwood and cover
    Blossom by blossom the spring begins.


Those of austere tastes consider this downright silly. But those of us who can still channel our 16-year-old romantic selves can even now murmur it in the glory of this season, and give thanks for poor tiny Algernon Swinburne, alcoholic, queer, masochist and word-freak.

FROM THATCH TO THATCHER: A FEW THOUGHTS

In the face of American media adulation and British vitriol, I’d like to offer a few scattered notes and a brief appreciation of Margaret Thatcher by someone uncomfortable with both.

In the first place, few people seem to want to remember how uniquely awful Britain was in the early Seventies. I’m interested in cars, and this was the decade when hidebound management and completely surrealist union practices together killed Europe’s greatest motor industry, so that today there is not one single genuine mass-market British marque left on British roads. It was a sign of the times, repeated in many areas.

Britain had emerged from the Swinging Sixties as the prime sufferer from the West’s hangover that began with the October 1973 Yom Kippur War and the resulting oil crisis. Playtime was over; gloom set in, big-time. Moreover, it had got rid of its Empire precipitately, under international pressure, and found itself with no thanks from anyone and as many complications as before, if not more.

I do not know what Margaret Thatcher was thinking, but I’ve often speculated. Here is my theory. She looked at this hung-over society, headachy from the passing of the Beatles and Carnaby Street – which had never been more than a brief buzz – and incapable of going back to the sound if boring stability that preceded them: a society that had lost its decent bearings and was incapable of finding substitutes; a society that for want of better ideas was retreating into atavistic class-war clichés and trying hard to ignore the modern world.

Now, my theory is that she then looked at Hogarth.

Contemplating  Hogarth and Rowlandson (and perhaps Fielding) made her wonder where all that raw and riotous English energy had gone. Into timid gentrification? Into imitating the playing fields of Eton in the Hampstead Garden Suburb? Into sterile class-war gestures? Into worrying about national decline?

So she tried to bring it back; or rather, to let it out again, because (she was convinced) it had never gone away. And if that meant less politeness, less courtesy, less timidity, so be it. She wanted a pre-Victorian Britain back: a Britain that made the Duke of Wellington hope the enemy was as afraid of his troops as he was; a Britain that conquered the Plains of Abraham; a Britain that ruled half the planet, fairly if possible but energetically at all times.

She recognised that in the modern world, power has primarily to do with money. So unchaining power meant unchaining money. What the French call ‘la libéralisation’ ensued: she won a merciless battle with the all-powerful trade unions, and helped create Britain as a post-industrial, financial power.

In 1981, Argentina’s war on the Falklands allowed her a morally justified military operation that did much to restore British pride in the armed forces.

Of course, her ruthless modernization did away with much that denizens and lovers of an older Britain held dear. The sense of discretion, civility, quiet common sense, and stoicism in the face of adversity that used to characterise the country went by the board; and some Frenchmen found their old ‘frenemy’ returning to earlier ways. ‘Les Anglais sont des brutes épaisses (the English are gross brutes),’ a French friend remarked to me, not unpleased at seeing his ancient prejudices reconfirmed.  And in a remark that focused  much of the difference, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan – the product of a far more aristocratic Scottish middle class -- murmured through his moustache, ‘The lady is selling the family silver.’

She was often referred to as a grocer’s daughter, the implication being that she had no gentility, no compassion and a middle-class mercantile disposition. Her patriotism also was a little strident, more Daily Mail than the old Thunderer.

She was a rival Queen, and her relations with the real Monarch were reputedly cool. But like the first Elizabeth, she manipulated her male courtiers with considerable talent, and at least one, Ian Gow, seems to have been her Christopher Hatton, genuinely in love with her until an IRA bomb murdered him.

She was what we would now call a Eurosceptic, realising that Britain would always have three spheres of activity none of which it could or should neglect: Europe, certainly, but also the Atlantic relationship with America, and the Commonwealth. Given that outlook, she had considerable influence outside Europe, notably in her friendship with President Reagan and in her encouragement of Mikhail Gorbachev.

In fairness, it should be said that much of what lovers of the older Britain regretted and regret had already been lost when she came to power. The Sixties changed the country’s culture far more radically than she did. The Seventies were a time of ruin, morosity, wildcat strikes everywhere and loathing. She picked the country up, shook it till its teeth rattled, kicked it in the seat of its pants, and set it on a new course. Richer but more vulgar; faster and more thrusting; more successful but more brutal.

I grew up in the older Britain, which I loved. But by 1974 that had disappeared, at least in public discourse. (In private it still lives on, in small towns and villages, at least wherever cottages do not have vast shiny BMWs parked outside.) My feelings toward the new Britain (now known as the You Kay) are ambiguous. As are those toward that strong, often harsh, often charming, intelligent woman. Her last pictures show the narrow, suspicious, angry eyes of Alzheimer’s, which I’ve seen close up in real life, and which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Someone tweeted furiously, ‘Iron Lady, Rust in Peace.’ She did not initiate but completed the change in her country. She did a mighty if controversial job. She deserves her rest.