The ‘European project’, in so far as it ever existed outside the heads of a few idealists, had stalled by the… — Tony Judt
The ‘European project’, in so far as it ever existed outside the heads of a few idealists, had stalled by the mid-nineteen-fifties. The French National Assembly had vetoed the proposed European army, and with it any talk of enhanced European coordination. Various regional accords on the Benelux model had been reached—notably the Scandinavian ‘Common Nordic Labor Market’ in 1954—but nothing more ambitious was on the agenda. Advocates of European cooperation could point only to the new European Atomic Energy Community, announced in the spring of 1955; but this—like the Coal and Steel Community—was a French initiative and its success lay, symptomatically, in its narrow and largely technical mandate. If the British were still as skeptical as ever about the prospects for European unity, theirs was not an altogether unreasonable view.
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The American President’s publicly-aired caution is a further salutary reminder of the limited part played by the USA in these developments. Pace the self-congratulatory narrative that has entered the American public record, Washington did not ‘bring down’ Communism—Communism imploded of its own accord.
But the Derrida-Habermas initiative, even though it articulated sentiments shared by many Europeans, passed virtually unnoticed. It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathizers. No-one implored its authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward. The governments of a significant number of European states, including France, Germany, Belgium and later Spain, undoubtedly sympathized in general terms with the views expressed in these essays; but it did not occur to any of them to invite Professors Derrida or Eco in for consultation. The whole project sputtered out. One hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, fifty years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe’s leading intellectuals had thrown a petition—and no-one came.
That history should have weighed so heavily upon European affairs at the start of the twenty-first century was ironic, considering how lightly it lay upon the shoulders of contemporary Europeans. The problem was not so much education—the teaching or mis-teaching of history in schools, though in some parts of southeastern Europe this too was a source of concern—as the public uses to which the past was now put. In authoritarian societies, of course, this was an old story; but Europe, by its self-definition, was post-authoritarian. Governments no longer exercised a monopoly over knowledge and history could not readily be altered for political convenience.
