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large industrial state—a military superpower—simply collapsed: its authority drained away, its institutions evaporated.
Part of the answer is Mikhail Gorbachev’s unintended success in eviscerating the administrative and repressive apparatus on which the Soviet state depended.
in former Yugoslavia it was the mass of the population who actually spoke an interchangeable single language, while a minority of nationalists sought to differentiate themselves by accentuating the narcissism of small differences.
an ostensibly neutral international stance in practice favoured the aggressor in a civil conflict:
war crimes, and worse, were being perpetrated just a few score miles south of Vienna.
Overcoming a lingering reluctance on the part of the UN leadership, certain European leaders and even some of his own military, President Clinton authorized a serious and sustained bombing campaign
But this irony should not blind us to Serb responsibility. The appalling ferocity and sadism of the Croat and Bosnian wars—the serial abuse, degradation, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens—was the work of Serb men, mostly young, aroused to paroxysms of casual hatred and indifference to suffering by propaganda and leadership from local chieftains whose ultimate direction and power came from Belgrade. What followed was not so unusual: it had happened in Europe just a few decades before, when—all across the continent and under the warrant of war—ordinary
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Capitalism, as it had emerged in the Atlantic world and Western Europe over the course of four centuries, was accompanied by laws, institutions, regulations and practices upon which it was critically dependent for its operation and its legitimacy. In many post-Communist countries such laws and institutions were quite unknown—and dangerously underestimated by neophyte free-marketers there.
Nationalism and Communism had more in common with one another than either had with democracy: they shared, as it were, a political ‘syntax’—while liberalism was another language altogether.
the appeal of outright nationalism proved strongest and most enduring in Russia.
‘The Russian people have become the most humiliated nation on the planet’.
the Soviet Union had been a world power: a territorial and cultural giant, the legitimate heir and extension of Imperial Russia.
Separating condemnation of Communism from rehabilitation of its Fascist predecessors was not always going to be easy.
Regional or provincial identification, on the other hand, was unpolluted by authoritarian association:
Not only was Edinburgh in some ways the intellectual capital of early industrial Britain and Glasgow the radical core of the British labour movement in the early years of the twentieth century; but Scottish businessmen, Scottish managers—and Scottish émigrés—were responsible for establishing, settling and administering much of England’s empire.
An independent Scotland, then, was a perfectly plausible proposition—particularly in a European Union in which it would have been by no means the smallest or the poorest nation-state.
The tragedy of the Irish ‘troubles’ lay in the opposed but otherwise identical objectives of the ultras of both sides:
What made the difference was the fact that the states of Western Europe were no longer free-standing national units with a monopoly of authority over their subjects. They were also and increasingly part of something else as well.
For four decades, the institutions and rules of a new continental system had been quietly designed and decided in obscure Benelux towns with no reference to public wishes or democratic procedure.
the fact that neither France nor Germany was adhering to its own rules represented a significant challenge to the whole agreement.
Within less than a decade of its appearance, the growth and stability pact was dead.
still fighting the anti-inflationary battles of the 1970s.
the Union was not ‘owned’ by its citizens—it seemed somehow to stand apart from the usual instruments of democracy.
In these circumstances, the Union’s democratic deficit could easily turn from unconcern into hostility, into a sense that decisions were being taken ‘there’ with unfavourable consequences for us ‘here’ and over which ‘we’ had no say: a prejudice fuelled by irresponsible mainstream politicians but fanned by nationalist demagogues.
it is hard for Europeans to care about a Union whose identity was for so long unclear, but which at the same time appears to impinge upon every aspect of their existence.
Whereas, in the past, economic upswings had tended to lift many of the poor into better paid and more secure employment, this was no longer happening.
Nor was Austria’s Freedom Party a Nazi movement; and Haider was not Hitler.
the Freedom Party was the leading party in Austria among the under-thirties.
an extended epilogue to the European civil war that had begun in 1914,
Two generations of Europeans grew up under the hitherto inconceivable impression that peace was the natural order of things.
East and West, Asia and Europe, were always walls in the mind at least as much as lines on the earth.
contemporary England, then, history and fiction blend seamlessly. Industry, poverty, and class conflict have been officially forgotten and paved over.
The English capacity to plant and tend a Garden of Forgetting, fondly invoking the past while strenuously denying it, is unique.
As an object of European public attention, football, it was sometimes suggested, now substituted not just for war but also for politics.
The only remaining arena in which European intellectuals could still combine moral earnestness with universal policy prescriptions was in foreign affairs,
The continuing failure of European governments to forge an effective military force of their own was what kept it in business.
‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity
Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket.
There was never any mystery about what had happened to Europe’s Jews. That an estimated 6 million of them were put to death during the Second World War was widely accepted within a few months of the war’s end.
offering the Führer to the world as a scapegoat.
This change in mood was driven in large measure by a wave of anti-Semitic vandalism at the end of the Fifties and by growing evidence that young Germans were utterly ignorant about the Third Reich:
the television series was by far the most important.
The Nazi crime—the German crime—was unique: unique in its scale, unique in its ambition, unique in its un-plumbed evil.
(in the one country—Denmark—where that collaboration was not forthcoming, the Jews survived).
Vichy did more than accommodate itself and its subjects to France’s defeat and run their country for Germany’s convenience.
because Pétainist rule allowed the French to continue leading their lives in an illusion of security and normality and with minimum disruption.
Pétainist rule allowed the French to continue leading their lives in an illusion of security and normality and with minimum disruption.
the Jews just hadn’t mattered...
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In GDR school texts, Hitler was presented as a tool of monopoly capitalists who seized territory and started wars in pursuit of the interests of big business.
The Second World War, as we have seen (see Chapter 6), was labelled and taught as an anti-Fascist war; its racist dimension was ignored.
