The European crisis threatens to re-awaken the old monster of nationalism, military historian Antony Beevor has warned.In an interview with the Telegraph, the author of Stalingrad and Berlin: the Downfall said that:
The great European dream was to diminish militant nationalism. We would all be happy Europeans together. But we are going to see the old monster of militant nationalism being awoken when people realise how little control their politicians have. We are already seeing political disintegration in Europe.
I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does. It is misleading and dangerous to make sweeping parallels with the Second World War. Politicians like Blair and Bush liked to sound Churchillian or Rooseveltian at times of crisis, but the comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Hitler were preposterous. Eden compared Nasser to Hitler and that led us into the Suez disaster.
We invite all citizens, political parties, unions, civil society, intellectuals and artists to fight the extreme right by promoting and bringing to life the European dream. We must always remember that this dream was built on the ruins of Nazism. We must never forget about the Shoah. Our dream is of a continent free from racism and antisemitism. It is the project of a society based on “togetherness” – beyond boundaries.
Second, we must refute the dogma of “the European fortress”, which favours the spread of anti-immigrant speeches and the lockdown of Europe’s frontiers, especially when a core element of European postwar identity – its social welfare system – requires the economic input of immigration to remain sustainable.
No political or cultural entity can exist without boundaries; indeed there cannot be any “togetherness” without boundaries in the first place. The very entity of “Europe”, or “Christendom”, came about in opposition to the rise of Islam, and Islam remains the only force that could ever unite Europeans (the Counter-Jihad movement is very pan-European, and Anders Breivik committed his terrible crimes, he said, to save Europe). Otherwise why not just have a “World Union”?
Neither can you build an “identity” on a social welfare system; quite the opposite. A welfare system relies on a strong sense of national community, something that its earliest proponents, such as William Beveridge, all pointed out. (And I have no idea where they get the idea that welfare requires the economic input of immigrants; the “replacement” theory of immigration has been blown apart by every body that has ever researched it, and minority communities in every western European country overall receive more welfare than natives.)
Where did this utopian vision come from? My grandparents, like most people in England in the 1930s, hated the Nazis; they hated their militarism, their criminality, their contempt for the rule of law and their racism (a word which was only coined in that decade). But my grandfather did not serve in order to create a world without borders or nation-states; no one did. And I suspect that, were he to see Britain and Europe today, he would conclude that it was in the grips of collective insanity.
Freud has rather gone out of fashion in recent years, but if we could psychoanalyse the people of Europe one might conclude that the continent’s leadership was behaving in a neurotic, self-destructive manner brought about by a horrific trauma.
As the letter writers say, this European dream was built in the shadow of Auschwitz, the aim being from the start the death of nationalism. The EU has been Godwin’s Law on a massive scale.
But it’s never been explained why, because of what the Nazis did – and the Nazis were not normal nationalists anymore than Mark Chapman is a normal music fan – the Dutch, the French or the English should embrace a utopian vision whereby they become minorities in their own major cities and their countries become provinces of a new Holy Roman Empire.
And, moral though I appreciate this vision might be, is it the best way to stop conflict? Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust came about for a number of reasons unique to the period, such as the First World War and the threat of Communism. (Incidentally, on the same day as the “Greek Jews” piece, The Guardian had a letter – perhaps a spoof – praising the Soviet Union’s education policy. And yes, I know that the USSR was rather less depraved than Nazi Germany, in the same way that Peter Sutcliffe wasn’t quite as sick as Fred West.)
But Golden Dawn and Jobbik are not going to bring about a new Holocaust – in fact the overwhelming, dominant threat to Europe’s Jewish community comes from the Arab and Muslim world, where anti-Semitism is unfortunately far more widespread than it was in Germany before Hitler. And the irony is that, out of collective guilt for what happened to Europe’s Jews, Europe imported millions of people from some of the world’s most anti-Semitic countries, made no attempt to counter these prejudices, and even began to adopt the idea that Israel was uniquely responsible for the world’s problems. Instead of preventing future atrocities by defending Israel’s very strong historic legitimacy – a crucial step on the road to peace – they are still trying to fight the last genocide, stuck in their solipsistic dreams.
There’s no harm in having dreams, of course, except that when they become nightmares, others are often forced to share them.