Europe since 1945: now, there's another inversion of the telescope by Lord Skidelsky. What about Europe before 1945? Was it a poverty-ridden place? Was it not the richest, most advanced part of the world?
There was no rational reason for the First World War: in 1898, Ivan Bloch, a Russian banker, wrote a book that was published in English as Is War Now Impossible? Yes, he answered, because war was too destructive to be sustainable. In 1909, Norman Angell argued that it was a "great illusion" to think that any industrialized nation could benefit from war. A Lloyd's underwriter told the Committee of Imperial Defence that, were a German ship sunk by the Royal Navy, he would have to pay compensation. "Britain, France and Germany were all industrialised countries with highly educated populations and more or less universal male suffrage," observes Richard Vinen. "Why should states that were so well placed to calculate their interests rationally embark on a war that was to bring such destruction?" (Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, Ma: Da Capo Press, 2001, p. 44). Answer: precisely because they had educated populations with the vote. As Vinen said of the Great War: "The fact that the war proved so long and so destructive was the result of the 'sophistication' of western European societies, not the 'primitive' nature of east European ones" (p 46). Does that sound terribly familiar?
According to J. M. Roberts: "Europe had, after all, been prepared for war by the first age of mass education and literacy, by the first mass newspapers, and by decades of the propagation of ideals of patriotism. When it started, the Great War, which was to reveal itself as the most democratic in history in its nature, may well also have been the most popular ever" (emphases added) (J. M. Roberts, Twentieth Century: The History of the World: 1901 To The Present (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1999, pp. 244-5).
By 1939, the Second World War came around, and the democracies were fighting each other with the frenzy of crazed animals.
The historian Norman Davies observes: "Hitler's democratic triumph exposed the true nature of democracy. Democracy has few values of its own: it is as good, or as bad, as the principles of the people who operate it. In the hands of liberal and tolerant people, it will produce a liberal and tolerant government: in the hands of cannibals, a government of cannibals. In Germany in 1933-4, it produced a Nazi government because the prevailing culture of Germany's voters did not give priority to the exclusion of gangsters" (Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 969). Whoops! That's politically incorrect, Mr. Davies. Don't you know that cannibals are the exclusive preserve of autocracies? And it sounds a lot like the former military strongman of Bangladesh, General Moeen U. Ahmed, telling TIME magazine that: "No systems of government are bad in their own right. It's the human beings who make it so."
And to compound insult to insult, another Norman, this time, Norman Finkelstein, has even suggested that Hitler's quest for lebensraum was modeled on America's "manifest destiny" (Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2001), p. 145) -- the long march to the Atlantic that dragged, like a juggernaut, the lesser nations of the Native Americans. But then, the latter were not democracies, so it was all right to decimate them. Only democracies don't fight each other, remember?
Now, we are in the thick of things at last: Lord Skidelsky's magic year, 1945! From here on the European nations are at peace because they are prosperous. "Is it democracy that has kept Europe peaceful since 1945, or is it the long period of peace since 1945 that has allowed democracy to become the European norm?" That democracy since 1945 has kept Europe peaceful is not quite right; peace has kept Europe democratic. But Europe was democratic even before 1945 -- as far as the major nations were concerned. And yet there was no peace; so what caused the peace after 1945? Prosperity, of course. Now, peace caused prosperity, and prosperity caused democracy, so peace ultimately caused democracy. Here, I'm totally lost -- what was cause and what was effect? There seems to be a chicken-and-egg problem. And then there's India: poor, but apparently peaceful (this is false because India, right after 1947, was stitched together by violent encroachments and annexations of sovereign princely territories, but let's not nitpick).
Lord Skidelsky -- no doubt as a patriotic Englishman -- forgets that after the war, Europe came to be run by bureaucrats. He never mentions the European Union, and the famous "democratic deficit" of the EU. One of the chief aims of the EU was to prevent future wars in Europe, and the elite knew that democracy would not deliver that. They wanted "ever closer union". If all that was necessary for peace was democracy, then why the European Union? And why the single currency? Helmut Kohl pushed through the single currency, claiming that it was a matter of "war and peace". That the pathologies of democracy are fresh in the minds of the European elite was glaringly obvious after the Austrian election that produced a government consisting of the Freedom Party. Louis Michel, the foreign minister of Belgium, said that voters can be "naive" and "simple". Of Jorg Haider's Freedom Party, he said that to be a democratic party "you must work by democratic rules, you must accept not to play on the worst feelings each human being has inside himself" (T he Economist, February 26th 2000, p. 66). The contempt of the EU elite for the masses can be read in such lines as this one quoting a German diplomat: "If we had had a referendum on the Treaty of Rome, people might have rejected it on the grounds that it raised the price of bananas" (The Economist, October 5th 2002, p. 52). Quite.
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