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The State of the World

Last night I went to the Free Library to hear a lecture on post war Europe by super-scholar, Tony Judt. Educated at King’s College, Cambridge and the École Normale Supérieure, professor of history at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkley and NYU I knew Judt only by an article I read in the New York Review of Books way back in 2003. In that article, Judt argued the same points I have always argued myself about the state of Israel.

In cold historical terms, Israel was an anachronism. World War II ended with the Western World’s ultimate rejection of the ethno-religious nation state. Israel was founded on the very principles that WWII so horrendously purged. Many of Israel’s international problems of legitimacy stemmed from the fact that Western consensus ultimately rejected the most fundamental grounds on which Israel was established. In Judt’s words:

“The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”

This article was written in 2003. At the time it was regarded with widespread derision and even death threats.

But this is one hell of a watershed historical era. Things are happening very quickly. It can be argued (and Judt argued this last night) that Europe today is becoming much more like Israel than Israel has become like Europe.

The crucial question in Europe today – he argued – is Muslim immigration and the frightening reaction to it. If you think the backlash against immigrants in this country is ugly, you’ve seen nothing compared to the state of affairs in European politics.

Denmark’s recent election split the country between far right and far left. To put this in some kind of identifiable context, imagine the U.S. political landscape being split not between some amorphous centrist Congressional lump and a (now publicly regretted) far right executive branch, but instead between a passionate Green Party and an equally passionate Republican party led by Pat Buchanan. This comparison isn’t quite accurate, but it gives you a sense of things in Europe these days.

Judt argued that Europe is faced with its first real test since the Second World War. So far the signs are extremely discouraging.

Western Europe established the cherished welfare state in order to fend off the economic and political scenarios, which led to devastating war and the rise of fascism. Cultural homogeneity made a society based on a socialist ideal of trust much easier to establish and maintain.

What I mean by this is that, a terrible result of WWII was the near total ethnic cleansing of European nation states. The distastefully serendipitous result of that “cleansing” was the ethno-cultural homogenization of Europe. Now that these states are required to deal with visible minority populations, that trust is quickly evaporating. Old prejudices are returning as if they never left. Judt made the extremely important point that if you replace the word “Muslim” with the word “Jew” in any of the European right’s rhetoric, what you get is startlingly similar to what existed before the 20th century wars.

What we have then is a Europe increasingly based on ideas of ethnic and cultural majority identity. From state to state, these identities are based on shared myths of nationality. Muslim populations are marginalized and regarded as pariah groups different culturally, linguistically and racially.

To bring this back to my earlier point, Europe is slipping backward into the pre-war intellectual territory of the ethnically based nation state. The Israeli model, which just 3 years ago was regarded by Judt and myself as an anachronism is increasingly relevant in modern Europe.

Also following the 20th century pattern, is the United States, which in it’s own unique way is right there with Europe. The world is beginning to split again. This time the fracture is between the West and the Muslim world. Of course you already knew that, but if you’ve read this far, I hope that now you have a greater understanding of what it is that’s actually going on. That’s all for now.