AMERICA IS THE TRUE THIRD WORLD COUNTRY. THE EUROPEAN POLITICAL CLASS IS A FAILURE. THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN IS GERMANY – A CONVERSATION WITH BRITISH HISTORIAN TONY JUDT.
By ANDRIAN KREYE

ANDRIAN KREYE: In recent years I’ve noticed a shift amongst the American Left with regards to their view on Europe. When it comes to any consideration of the American Dream, they actually don’t look so much inward for some return to their own dream of America, but they’re starting instead to look towards Europe.
TONY JUDT: Absolutely. Europe is the other against which you measure yourself, just as Russia used to be Europe’s other. Increasingly, America and Europe now see each other as the other, because China is not a model for the future of Europe or America. So these are the two competing visions of the life well-lived, the well organized society. For many Americans, to think critically about the American present, is not to look to the American past or future, but to look to the European present.

Further, there does seem to be this urgent need in America to have a sense of “the other” also in a militarily sense. It all appears geared towards this increasingly abstract notion of Evil.
The only remaining, unambiguous area of absolute American initiative and power and uniqueness is the military. You cannot justify psychologically – forgetting politically – spending more money than any country has ever spent in world history, unless you have some rhetorical image of the reason why you’re doing it. There has to be an enemy. This entity took shape before 9/11, and especially after 9/11, but it’s astonishingly amorphous. It was Iraq; it’s not anymore. Most Americans are extremely cynical about Iraq, so it’s a sort of a dangerous abstraction. The more the American government exploits it, the more people become cynical about it. So the evil entity has to be hyped up more and more, but in doing so it discredits the hype-up. Unless there is another 9/11 very soon, the war on terror and evil is going to become very difficult to sell domestically.

So these cultural differences between America and Europe over the past five years are actually much deeper than people perceive them?
I founded the Remarque institute in 1995, in the middle of the Clinton years, because I had a growing sense that America and Europe were drifting apart, that young Americans had no idea what Europe was like and no sense of the reasons why there could or should be common interest. I was very conscious of the loss of the generation of Americans who led foreign policy from the 1940s to the ’80s.

In what way was Bush a catalyst for existing transatlantic frictions?
Bush accelerated it in every way. He forced it into the open as a way of being American. The way to be American is to be anti-French. The way to be American was to believe that the Europeans just didn’t get it. Your identity was either European or American. I became uncomfortable as a European after 2001 for the first time in the twenty years I have lived here. I don’t think that’s going to change. While Bush has made it much worse symptomatically, the deep trends are there. But I would go one step further. I would say that Europe and America came together as an entity called the West by the accident of WWII and the Cold War – so from Pearl Harbor to the fall of the Berlin wall.

Shouldn’t both continents accept that we are actually two very different entities?
They should, but it’s difficult. In the foreseeable future the world might be like it was before 1939, where the common interests of the United States and the western European democracies can’t be taken for granted.

Meanwhile, the German chancellor Angela Merkel has obviously made great advances to resurrect the deutsch-amerikanische Freundschaft!
Merkel muddies the waters a bit because she is an Ossie, and whether she is the daughter of an East German pastor, or an intellectual like Adam Michnik in Poland, or a son of the Czech bourgeoisie like Vaclav Havel – they all share the same sensibility, which is a sort of inversion of the old Communist instinct. You really saw this over the Iraq war. Everything the authorities said before ’89 must be untrue, so that there is an instinctive pro-Americanism, an instinctive desire to believe well of Washington. If you are in favor of human rights and liberty, then you must be in favor of the invasion of Iraq as well, because as Havel says, “It’s an indivisible unity and so we must always support the liberation of countries from dictatorship. Otherwise we are being hypocritical to our own past in Prague.”

But isn’t this understandable?
Merkel’s style of political reasoning confuses the issue. The way she speaks about the Turkish issue, for example, shows a sort of curious provincialism that doesn’t take the bigger picture into account. And I was struck while I was in Turkey that people kept saying to me, “How can someone want to be the chancellor of Germany and not understand the costs of protecting Turkey?” She had made a speech at the time about how Turkey will and should never be a full member of the European Union.

What are the costs for the European Union?
The geopolitical costs, the damage domestically within Turkey – throwing it back into the arms of either the army or the religious radicals; the likelihood that it will go to what the Turks call Plan B, an alliance with the Russians, the loss of influence in the Middle East. It is a kleindeutsche way of thinking about politics.

And now Merkel is the chancellor for the next four years!
I don’t think she will remain so provincial. She seems to bring with her some of the baggage of eastern experience, including the instinctive pro-Americanism.

But maybe also because she sees an entrepreneurial spirit in America, which does not exist in Europe?
I think that’s true, but this could be treated as both a good and bad thing. It could be bad on the grounds that it’s much harder to start a small business and Europeans have been historically less likely in the last 50 years to come up with new ideas, find money to support them, and create a profitable enterprise. The other half of that is that Europeans have, over the course of the last three generations, collectively accepted a de facto compromise whereby they are less entrepreneurial but more secure. They are more dependent on the state, but they also have by most measures a better lifestyle. Less of them die when they are born. They live healthier and longer lives compared to the US.

Certainly the European model is still in need of many reforms.
But very often that is really just a way of saying we need to make the market freer, restrict the role of the state, limit rules and laws concerning employment and unemployment pay, and so forth. In other words, make it more or less like the American model, on the grounds that America is more entrepreneurial and grows better. This is what Europe wants, so it must become more that way.

But weren’t the reforms in Great Britain successful because they oriented to the American market model?
When people, especially Blair, say the British have been more successful at reforming, they’re saying they had more success at imitating aspects of the American market model – but at enormous costs. Firstly, there’s a much bigger gap between the poor and the rich in Britain than in any other European country, and much bigger than it was before the 1980s. Secondly, the public services, particularly education and health, have declined seriously and are regarded as increasingly inadequate compared to the European alternatives. Even the European alternatives are not particularly wonderful. Thirdly, and this is rather more nebulous, the quality of communal existence in Britain, the sense of the place still being a society, has changed radically. If you want to be positive, you can say there’s more individualism, more initiative, less state dependence, both economically and in social contacts and mobility. Negatively of course there is more crime, and less of a sense of being part of the community. I can see it quite clearly because I visit occasionally and I remember it as it was, and Britain resembles America in many respects now. I do think this can be directly traced to the consequences of the Thatcherite revolution. It is, after all, Mrs. Thatcher who famously said, “There is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families”. And this is the de facto new liberal model towards which Britain has been moving under both Conservative and Labor, and it’s extremely dysfunctional. It would be a catastrophe if it were adopted wholesale across Europe.

Most Europeans will see Britain through their visits to London, and there you see a booming metropolis with wonderful restaurants, where everybody’s well dressed and apparently gets very high salaries.
Oh, you’re absolutely right, but that’s exactly the point. Everything you say, from my point of view, is in fact negative, not positive. They’re all signs of a boom town – a relatively small number of people with very high salaries chasing a limited property market, which creates a permanent property bubble. Those people depend upon the services and the business of those who are not earning high salaries in the transport, education, health, cleaning, restaurant businesses, and so on. Those people can find nowhere to live because they can’t afford housing in London anymore, and for them it’s a major problem.

A gentrification process which you can observe in New York, too.
When you leave London and you drive 50 miles north you enter another world. Most Londoners I know never go on holiday in the west of England. You see education failure, you see the absence of investment in public services, you see not only low-grade wealth but very considerable poverty. It is not as bad as in some of the American countryside. Britain is still protected by the fact that it is a welfare state which was largely put in place by 60-70-year-old liberals and Christian democrats in the years between 1945 and 1960 as a sort of security against a return to the inter war years.

Aren’t the European middle classes afraid that the bloated welfare state endangers their social security?
The welfare state had the enormously important function of binding together the middle and working classes. The benefits for the working class are obvious. But for the middle class, in many ways are even more important, because they provided free education, free health and good public services to a class which before had to pay for them. Now it had disposable income, so it could use its money to buy vacations and consumer goods and so on. That is why Margaret Thatcher could not completely privatize education. She could not totally privatize the health service either. She could not, even though she started to privatize all transport networks because the middle class voter – the typical Conservative voter – depends on the welfare state just as much as the Labor voter used to.

But is that not changing? Especially among the upper middle class there is the sentiment that the welfare state stifles their entrepreneurial spirits?
Well, there are two illusions involved in that assumption, and one statement of truth. It certainly restricts their capacity, typically, to become very wealthy, because the tax structure in Scandinavia, Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands, even in Italy and Spain, largely functions to re-direct resources from the very wealthy to the public sector to pay for the services provided for everyone. This is deliberate and it’s part of the principle of any social service state. That is why outside of Britain you don’t see the kind of wealth in Europe that you see in America, with all the consequences that we could then talk about. But the rest is problematic. It’s not the welfare state which limits entrepreneurship, efficiency, or modern economic wellbeing. The four most efficient states in the world, economically speaking, according to the Davos World Economic Forum, are the United States, Norway, Denmark, and Finland – so it’s got nothing to do with the welfare state. It has something to do with the particular arrangements in a welfare state, because in Denmark it is much more advanced than in a less efficient state like Italy. I think some of the problems in what we collectively call the welfare states of Europe are linked to the fact that in the good years of the ’50s and ’60s, we locked in very early retirement. It varies from country to country, as does advantageous systems of unemployment insurance. Structures were put in place in the ’50s to limit the risks of finding yourself unemployed. It didn’t matter back in the ’50s and ’60s because you had economies essentially based on full employment. Times change. Very early retirement is a problem now because people live much longer, and so you have two consequences. One, you have people living on their pensions for 30 or 40 years instead of the 15 years that was expected actuarially in 1960. And, two, you have a limitation upon the possibility of young people finding work, because these old people retire, but there aren’t enough young people to work to support them. And so you’re constantly looking for more young people to find work, but at the same time you have protection for employment in many countries, which was necessary, particularly in countries like England or Belgium where unemployment was a horrific memory.

How would you then characterize the necessary European reforms?
Europe and America have different needs. For example, in France you clearly need reforms so that men can no longer automatically retire on nearly full salary from the railway services at the age of 56. I mean, that’s clearly crazy today. You also need reforms in France to make it easier for companies to take on young people and if necessary relinquish them. You have to make sure the unemployment protection is solid enough, but then there has to be an element of risk built in. But you don’t need those reforms in, say, Finland, because the Finnish structure is such that there is already incentive to work. The unemployment system works very well for these purposes, and the pension systems are not over-burdened demographically. So each country’s needs are very different. America needs a national health service and then following very quickly with an emergency reform of the pension sector. I don’t mean Social Security but private pensions, before they all go bankrupt and throw everyone on to the charity of the state. Every capitalist country needs change to adapt to the new structures of a moving economy. There is this notion that Europe has to get rid of its welfare state and make itself more competitive; this seems the dangerous myth. It’s not only an economical myth, it’s political. If you enforced it somehow, if you could do this politically, the radical transformation of Germany or France into New Jersey, so to speak, or even into England … well, long before that reform became effective you would have a huge political backlash. You would have the equivalent to Flamsblock, Le Pen, or Haider.

But the Right-wing radical in Germany was pretty much non-existent in the last elections, even though people perceive times as harder then ever before. How do you react to an example like that?
The German case is distinctive. It’s much more problematic there for a radical Right-wing party to arise from 0 to 27 percent as in Austria, or 22 percent as in Norway, because echoes of the past make that both legally and psychologically much harder. On the other hand, the distinction between radical Right and radical Left is not very important here. Both benefit from the same sort of insecurities. Notice that the collapse of the Communist Party in France is in exactly the same places where you have the rise of Le Pen, so it’s the same discontents transferring themselves.

Much like the German model, where the rise of the new Left party is in the places where the right wing radicals used to be successful.
Where the neo-Nazis used to function, that’s correct. However, I think there is another factor. You said there is discontent and unease in Germany, but notice that the radical Right or populist parties have not risen in Europe in places where the economy is in trouble or where there is worry about the economic future. They’ve risen in Austria; they’ve risen in Antwerp. The Flamsblock got 38 percent of the vote in Antwerp in the last local election. It’s the richest city in the richest part of the richest region of the richest continent in world history. There is no trauma of unemployment in Antwerp and there is no threat of a collapsing economy, and yet they can get 38 percent, including the Jewish vote, on the security issue. Security not in the sense of fear or terrorism, but fear of change, fear of outsiders, fear of foreigners and immigrants, fear of the future. The rise of the radical Right in Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland also trades not upon desperation or economic problems, but upon some intangible security that the world is getting out of control.

Isn’t the European fear of having to compete with the now legendary Polish plumber or with the Chinese production facility … isn’t that the wrong way of looking at competition?
Absolutely. I mean, the Polish plumber is an irrelevance. In five to eight years, the salaries and wages in Poland, or Slovakia, or Hungary will rise so much that the gap between West and East European wages will no longer be advantageous enough to make German firms invest in Slovakia. All booms have a half life. It’s not as much a half life as the boom we are seeing in what one Bulgarian sociologist calls the Little Americas of Slovakia, parts of Poland, Budapest, Slovenia, where there is free enterprise, minimal taxation, reduced public services. And everyone under 30 thinks it’s marvelous because they’re going to live like in California.

So they would suffer the same fate as the Central American countries which lost their clients to China?
China is a different issue altogether. Europe cannot compete with China. Any race to the bottom the Chinese will win, obviously, because there are no social services, there’s no protection, there are no labor laws and the scale of production is going to be better there. In Germany and in France, I do think that the responsibility for the crisis around so called reforms is partly a failure of the political class. Demographically and budgetarily it would be necessary to slowly shift the balance of emphasis in welfare and social service payments away from unemployment insurance and into investment in research and development and into creating jobs rather than protecting people against loss of them. Ironically, if only the Europeans were aware of it, they are very well placed because Europe is a more educated population than America.

Yet the most important and respected universities are in the US.
The American research universities are marvelous, which is why I’m here and not in England. Compared to Oxford, the top 50 American universities have better facilities, better support, better libraries in many respects. So there’s no question that at the very top, American research and education is world class. But below that level it’s a catastrophe, and there the Europeans could easily compete in skills, education, services, creating an educated class capable of both inventing, imagining and producing skills and knowledge in a way that could easily push America into a very uncomfortable position. America is the true Third World country in a way, with a fantastically wealthy, skilled, educated, powerful elite, and a desperately, increasingly poor, medically undercovered, badly educated, increasingly ignorant and unskilled mass working population. So I think Europe has a big opportunity there, but of course investment and energy has to go in that direction and if it doesn’t, then Europe will be simply lost in this international space.

And yet it is seductive to look to America when times are getting tough and there’s need for reform. Why?
It’s a habit.

America is the hero or superhero of some action movie myth, who will come to our rescue and do the right thing?
Well, it is, of course a habit ingrained over the 20th century because that’s in fact what did happen in the 20th century. America was regarded as the model, good and bad, of a modern society: open, ruthless, cosmopolitan, exciting, constantly changing and so on. But, we always live one generation out of date. America’s not like that any more, not nearly as much as it used to be, even when I first came here in the ’70s. The big transformations in the American way of life were, intellectually speaking, a consequence of the immigration of the 1930s.

But America was always an immigrant country.
Everyone – I exaggerate a bit here – but basically everyone who was smart in Hungary, Germany, and Austria who survived the Nazis ended up in America. Most of them – 80 percent of them – played an enormous role in the universities and cultural life, in musical life, in literary life, and the scale of that transfer of intellectual resources. And also of course it repeated itself from the Soviet Union in the 1940s and ’50s. You look at it in ballet, you look at it in American music, you look at it in American literature and in American scholarship, and you can see this great bubble like a pig inside a boa constrictor from where all the original ideas and skills come. From Balanchine and ballet to all the University of Chicago sociologists. Most of them were émigrés from Germany or Hungary, or the Russian writers who turn up here. That bubble goes from 1940 to 1970, where this was the most exciting country in the world. Then you add in WWII. There’s only one country which won WWII, and that’s the United States. Britain and Russia had a special relationship to the war because it’s a powerful myth, but they lost it in most economic and demographic respects. It cost the Soviet Union 35 years to get their economy back to where it was or would have been in 1939. Britain never recovered from the war, and in fact became a different country, a poorer country. So the United States have the advantage of WWII, and this massive cultural transfer, and that I think is why my generation lived in this image of the United States as the place which was the most exciting, the most modern, the cutting edge of interest. When I was doing my book, I came across an opinion poll in Hungary just after the enlargement of Europe where people were asked what they thought of the comparison between the European Union and America. And one middle-aged guy said, “When you were young and single you go to America. And then when you grow up, not when you get old, but when you grow up, you come back to Europe.” And I think there is this sense now that America is no longer a model society. It is a place where it is good to be young, because you can risk much more, that it’s big and open and exciting and physically challenging and you don’t care that there’s not much security. But underneath that I don’t detect the same level of cultural innovation, of economic excitement. Certainly not of social energy, and I think everyone agrees the political system is in serious trouble in many ways. Even people who wouldn’t agree with me on other things agree with me on that.

I think even half the Republican party agrees with you on that.
Also we now know, if we didn’t before, that looking to America as the legitimate, dominant actor to keep the world in balance is no longer going to be a universally agreed upon idea. From WWII until 1989, the United States was unique because it was the most powerful country in the world. But also it had passed its power through all these international institutions beginning with the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, what was going to become the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the various legal and global governments and institutions. America and international governance were somehow mixed up together in peoples’ minds. The United States has incredibly stupidly insisted on separating those in the public image so that it is now against all these international agencies of governments which are limitations on American power, with the result, I think, that America’s much weaker and its legitimacy is much reduced. So for all of these reasons, I think that the Europeans will not, in the next generation, look to America in the same way.

Still Germany now eagerly tries to rebuild the transatlantic bridges. Do you think realpolitik will change that?
If Germany wishes to play a significant role in Europe, and it must – in fact Europe desperately needs it to – then you can’t have German leadership which is totally focused on being friendly with Washington. One of the reasons why Blair has failed in his ambition to be a European leader is because he was desperately trying to juggle the image of being friendly with Washington and influential in Europe and got it wrong. Iraq was strategically catastrophic for that, and Britain will pay the price in Europe for some years to come.

So Germany should concentrate on Europe and neglect or non-emphasize its American relations?
I think it’s absolutely crucial, because there is nothing in German-American relations which is vulnerable to a little bit of neglect, as you put it, but there is everything in the future of Europe which is vulnerable to German failure to take over from the French collapse as the natural leaders of Europe. The only game in town is Germany, who else? It’s absolutely crucial that Germany once again pick up – within a new key – its potential to be the most influential country in making Europe a major player in international debates.