Postwar

Nor was Austria’s Freedom Party a Nazi movement; and Haider was not Hitler. On the contrary, he took ostentatious care to emphasize his post-war credentials. Born in 1950 he had, as he repeatedly reminded audiences, ‘die Gnade der spaten Geburt’: the good fortune of a late birth. Part of Haider’s success—like that of Christoph Blocher, whose Swiss People’s Party won 28 percent of the popular vote in 2003 on an anti-immigrant, anti-EU ticket—came from his skill at burying a racist sub-text under the image of a modernizer, a national-populist of the liberal persuasion. This played surprisingly well to youthful voters: at one point the Freedom Party was the leading party in Austria among the under-thirties.[383]

In Austria as in France it was the fear and hatred of immigrants (in France from the south, in Austria from the east, in both cases from lands over which they once ruled) that has replaced the old obsessions—anti-semitism especially—as the tie that binds the far Right. But the new anti-system parties also benefited from something else: clean hands. Excluded from office, they were untainted by the corruption which seemed, by the early Nineties, to be gnawing at the roots of the European system. Not just in Romania or Poland or (above all) Russia, where it could be explained away as the collateral cost of a transition to capitalism: but in the democratic heartlands of the continent.

In Italy, where ever since the war the Christian Democrats had enjoyed a cozy and profitable relationship with bankers, businessmen, contractors, city bosses, state employees and—it was widely rumored—the Mafia, a new generation of young magistrates began courageously to chip away at decades of barnacled public silence. Ironically it was the Socialist Party that fell first, brought down by the tangentopoli (‘bribe city’) scandal in 1992 that followed investigations into its management of the city of Milan. The party was disgraced and its leader, the former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, was forced to flee across the Mediterranean into exile in Tunisia.

But the Socialists’ affairs were inextricably intertwined with those of the Christian Democrats, their long- time coalition partner. Both parties were further discredited by the wave of arrests and charges that followed, and they took down with them the whole web of political arrangements and accommodations that had shaped Italian politics for two generations. In the elections of 1994, all the country’s leading political parties except the former-Communists and the ex-Fascists were virtually wiped out—though the only lasting beneficiary of this political earthquake was a former lounge singer, the louche media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, who entered politics not so much to further the national house-cleaning as to ensure that his own business dealings remained safely unaffected.

In Spain it was a scandal of a rather different sort that ended the political career of Felipe Gonzalez, when it was revealed in the mid-’90s (by an enthusiastic younger generation of investigative reporters in the dailies El Mundo and Diario 16) that his government had conducted a ‘dirty war’ against Basque terrorism during the years 1983-87, allowing and encouraging death squadrons to practice kidnapping, torture and assassination, both in Spain and even across the frontier in the Basque regions of France whence ETA frequently operated (see Chapter 14).

In view of ETA’s reputation, this might not have sufficed to discredit the charismatic Gonzalez—thanks to the cynical public mood of the late Franco years many of his contemporaries had grown up with a distinctly instrumental view of the state and its laws—were it not for parallel revelations of graft and influence-peddling by Gonzalez’s Socialist colleagues that echoed the Italian example and aroused widespread anxiety over the moral condition of a Spanish democracy still in its infancy.

In France—or Germany, or Belgium—the spate of scandals that disfigured public life in the Nineties suggested not so much the fragility of institutions and mores as the rising cost of practicing democracy under modern conditions. Politics—staff, advertising, consultancies—are expensive. Public cash for political parties was strictly limited in Europe by law and tradition and usually made available only for the purpose of standing at elections. If they needed more, politicians had in the past turned to their traditional backers: party members, mass unions (on the Left) and private businessmen and corporations. But these resources were drying up: party membership figures were falling, mass unions were on the decline and with a growing cross-party policy consensus on economic affairs, companies and private individuals saw little reason to contribute generously to any one party.

Perhaps understandably, in any case more or less universally, the major political parties of Western Europe began to seek out alternative ways to attract funding—just at the time when, thanks to the abolition of controls and the globalization of business, there was a whole lot more money around. Gaullists and Socialists in France—like the Christian Democrats in Germany and New Labour in Britain—were revealed to have raised cash over the past two decades in a variety of shady ways: whether by selling favours, peddling influence or simply leaning rather more insistently than in the past upon conventional contributors.

Things went a little further in Belgium: one scandal among many—the so-called Dassault/Agusta affair—can serve as an illustration. At the end of the 1980s, the Belgian government contracted to purchase forty-six military helicopters from the Italian firm Agusta and to give the French company Dassault the job of refitting its F-16 aircraft. Competing bidders for the contracts were frozen out. In itself this was not unusual, and the fact that three countries were involved even lends an ecumenically pan-European quality to the affair.

But it later emerged that Belgium’s Socialist Party (in government at the time) had done rather nicely from kickbacks on both deals. Shortly thereafter, one leading Socialist politician who knew too much, Andre Cools, was killed in a parking lot in Liege in 1991; another, Etienne Mange, was arrested in 1995; and a third, Willy Claes, a former prime minister of Belgium, sometime (1994-1995) secretary-general of NATO and foreign minister when the deals were made, was found guilty in September 1998 of taking bribes for his party. A fourth suspect, the former army general Jacques Lefebvre who was closely involved in the affair, died in mysterious circumstances in March 1995.

If this is a peculiarly Belgian story (‘La Belgique’ according to Baudelaire, ‘est sans vie, mais non sans corruption’) it is perhaps because the duplication and dilution of constitutional authority there had led not just to the absence of government oversight but to the near- collapse of much of the apparatus of the state, including the criminal justice system. Elsewhere, with the exception of Italy as noted above, there was strikingly little evidence of personal corruption—most of the crimes and misdemeanors were undertaken quite literally for the good of the party[384]—but a number of very prominent men were nevertheless forced abruptly out of public life.

These included not just Gonzalez, the French ex-Prime Minister Alain Juppe and the historic leaders of Italy’s Christian Democrats; but even former German ChancellorHelmut Kohl, the hero of unification, whose reputation was cast under a cloud when he refused to divulge the names of secret donors to his party’s funds. Had he not been protected by his office, French President Jacques Chirac—mayor of Paris during a time when the city was awash in party-political graft and favour-peddling—would surely have joined their ranks.

What is perhaps most striking about these developments is how relatively little discredit they seem to have brought upon the political system as a whole. The decline in turnout at elections certainly bespeaks a general loss of interest in public affairs; but this could already be detected decades earlier in rising abstention rates and the diminished intensity of political argument. The real surprise is not the rise of a new cohort of right-wing populist parties but their consistent failure to do even better than they have, to capitalize on the disruption and discontent since 1989.

There was a reason for this. Europeans may have lost faith in their politicians, but at the core of the European system of government there is something that even the most radical anti-system parties have not dared to attack head on and which continues to attract near-universal allegiance. That something is certainly not the European Union, for all its manifold merits. It is not democracy: too abstract, too nebulous and perhaps too often invoked to stand in isolation as an object for admiration. Nor is it freedom or the rule of law—not seriously threatened in the West for many decades and already taken for granted by a younger generation of Europeans in all the member states of the EU. What binds Europeans together, even when they are deeply critical of some aspect or other of its practical workings, is what it has become conventional to call—in disjunctive but revealing contrast with ‘the American way of life’—the ‘European model of society’.