Postwar

foreigners and their shared fear of European integration. Anti-capitalism—recast somewhat implausibly as anti- globalization, as though strictly domestic capitalism were somehow a different and less offensive breed—was attractive to nativist reactionaries and internationalist radicals alike. As for the political mainstream, the old differences between parties of center-Right and center-Left had largely evaporated. On a broad range of contemporary issues, Swedish Social Democrats and French neo-Gaullists, for example, might well have more in common with each other than with their respective ideological forebears. The political topography of Europe had altered dramatically over the previous two decades. Although it remained conventional to think in terms of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, what they distinguished was unclear.

The old-style political party was one victim of these changes, with declining membership and falling turnout at the polls, as we have seen. Another casualty was an almost equally venerable European institution, the public intellectual. The previous fin-de-siecle had seen the first flowering of politically engaged intellectuals—in Vienna, in Berlin, in Budapest, but above all in Paris: men like Theodor Herzl, Karl Kraus or Leon Blum. On the European scene a century later their would-be successors were, if not entirely absent, then increasingly marginal.

There were various reasons for the demise of the continental intellectual (the species had always been uncommon in Britain, its isolated occurrence usually the by-product of exile, as in the case of Arthur Koestler or Isaiah Berlin). In central and eastern Europe, the issues which had once mobilized the political intelligentsia— Marxism, totalitarianism, human rights or the economics of transition—now elicited a bored and indifferent response from younger generations. Ageing moralists like Havel—or one-time political heroes like Michnik—were irrevocably associated with a past which few cared to revisit. What Czeslaw Milosz had once described as the ‘irritation of East European intellectuals’ at the American obsession with purely material products was now increasingly directed at their fellow citizens.

In western Europe, the exhortatory function of the intellectual had not altogether disappeared—readers of the German or French quality press were still periodically subjected to incandescent political sermons from Gunter Grass or Regis Debray—but it had lost its object. There were many particular sins against which public moralists might rail, but no general goal or ideal in whose name to mobilize their followers. Fascism, Communism and war had been expunged from the continent, together with censorship and the death penalty. Abortion and contraception were almost universally available, homosexuality freely permitted and openly practiced. The depredations of the unrestricted capitalist market, whether global or local, continued to attract intellectual fire everywhere; but in the absence of a self-confident anti-capitalist counter-project, this was a debate better suited to think tanks than philosophers.

The only remaining arena in which European intellectuals could still combine moral earnestness with universal policy prescriptions was in foreign affairs, free of the messy compromises of domestic policy-making and where issues of right and wrong, life and death were still very much in play. During the Yugoslav wars intellectuals from west and east Europe strenuously took up the cudgels. Some, like Alain Finkielkraut in Paris, identified body and soul with the Croat cause. A few— notably in France and Austria—condemned Western intervention as an American-led affront to Serbian autonomy, based (as they asserted) on exaggerated or even falsified reports of non-existent crimes. Most pressed the case for intervention in Bosnia or Kosovo on general principles, extending the rights-based arguments first espoused twenty years before and emphasizing the genocidal practices of the Serbian forces.

But even Yugoslavia, for all its urgency, could not return intellectuals to the centre of public life. Bernard- Henri Levy in Paris could get invited to the Elysee Palace for consultations with the President, much as Tony Blair would occasionally host retreats with favoured British journalists and other literary courtiers. But these carefully staged exercises in political image-building had no impact on policy: neither France nor Britain nor any of their allies was moved by intellectual pressure to alter their calculations in any way. Nor could publicly engaged intellectuals play their once-crucial role in mobilizing opinion at large, as became clear in the course of the Atlantic rift of 2003.

The European public (as distinct from certain European statesmen) was overwhelmingly opposed both to the American invasion of Iraq in that year and to the broader lines of US foreign policy under President George W. Bush. But the outpouring of anxiety and anger to which this opposition gave rise, though it was shared and expressed by many European intellectuals, did not depend upon them for its articulation or organization. Some French writers—Levy, again, or Pascal Bruckner—refused to condemn Washington, partly for fear of appearing unreflectively anti-American and partly out of sympathy for its stance against ‘radical Islam’. They passed virtually unheard.

Once-influential figures like Michnik and Glucksmann urged their readers to support Washington’s Iraq policy, arguing by extension from their own earlier writings on Communism that a policy of ‘liberal interventionism’ in defense of human rights everywhere was justified on general principles and that America was now, as before, in the vanguard of the struggle against political evil and moral relativism. Having thus convinced themselves that the American President was conducting his foreign policy for their reasons, they were then genuinely surprised to find themselves isolated and ignored by their traditional audiences.

But the irrelevance of Michnik or Glucksmann had nothing to do with the particular cast of their opinions. The same fate awaited those intellectuals who took the opposite tack. On May 31st 2003, Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida—two of Europe’s best-known writers/philosophers/intellectuals—published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung an article entitled ‘Unsere Erneuerung. Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas’ (‘Our Renewal. After the War: The Rebirth of Europe’) in which they argued that America’s new and dangerous path was an urgent wake-up call for Europe: an occasion for Europeans to rethink their common identity, draw upon their shared Enlightenment values and forge a distinctive European stance in world affairs.

Their essay was timed to coincide with the appearance all over Western Europe of similar essays by equally renowned public figures: Umberto Eco in La Repubblica ; his Italian colleague the philosopher Gianni Vattimo in La Stampa; the Swiss President of the German Academy of Arts, Adolf Muschg, in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung; the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater in El Pais; and a lone American, the philosopher Richard Rorty, in the Suddeutsche Zeitung. At almost any point in the previous century an intellectual initiative on this scale, in such prominent newspapers and by figures of comparable standing, would have been a major public event: a manifesto and call to arms that would have rippled through the political and cultural community.

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.

Six decades after the end of the Second World War, the Atlantic Alliance between Europe and the United States was in disarray. In part this was the predictable outcome of the end of the Cold War—while few wished to see NATO dismantled or abandoned, it made little sense in its existing form and its future goals were obscure. The Alliance suffered further in the course of the Yugoslav wars, when US generals resented sharing decision-making with European counterparts who were reluctant to take the initiative and could offer little practical support in the field.

Above all, NATO was placed under unprecedented strain by Washington’s reaction to the assaults of September 11th 2001. President Bush’s uncompromising and tactless unilateralism (‘with us or against us’), the snubbing of his NATO allies’ offer of help, and the US march to war in Iraq despite overwhelming international opposition and the absence of any UN mandate, ensured that America—no less than the ‘terror’ on which it had declared indefinite war—would now be regarded as a leading threat to world peace and security.

The ‘Old Europe-New Europe’ distinction that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed to have identified in the spring of 2003, in order to drive a wedge between Washington’s European allies, explained little