The Latest(ish)
It’s always bloody Europe. It was Europe (specifically, Tory splits over Britain’s relationship with the EU) that finally did in Mrs. Thatcher, and it did in poor John Major too. Now it is beginning to look like David Cameron might eventually go the same way, felled by the issue he has tried to dodge since becoming party leader in 2005. To borrow his phrase from the following year, “banging on” about Brussels was over. Saving the planet was in. But the elephant was still in the room, increasingly intrusive, increasingly destructive, and increasingly unwanted. Britons have never truly warmed to [...]
Europe, Bloody Europe
August 13, 2012
By the late spring of 1945, Germany had lost a war, its honor and millions of dead. There was more to come. The Allies had decided that the country’s east should be carved up between Poland and the Soviet Union and that its German inhabitants should be moved to the truncated Reich. There they would encounter Sudeten Germans, Czechoslovakia’s second largest ethnic group, now also scheduled for deportation. In August 1945, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed at Potsdam that these transfers, which had in any case already begun, should be “orderly and humane.” They [...]
The Tragedy Europe Forgot
August 9, 2012
Orderly and Humane By R.M. Douglas.; published originally in the Wall Street Journal
Dystopias — dark, funhouse mirrors of our fears — will always be with us. Nineteen Eighty-Four was the product of a time when Big Brother Stalin was on the march, and the Eloi and the Morlocks of The Time Machine reflected H. G. Wells’s anxiety about where the onrush of 19th-century capitalism could lead. So what to make of the success of a “young adult” trilogy set in a North America that has — here a shout-out to a fashionably green vision of global catastrophe — emerged after “the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up [...]
Quidditch, It’s Not
July 30, 2012
The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.; published originally in National Review
That the eurozone has been reduced to a financial and economic shambles was predictable. How little that has changed the continent’s politics was not. To be sure, there have been massive protests in Greece and elsewhere, but the widespread disorder feared by many (including me) in the wake of the 2008/09 financial collapse—arguably the iceberg to the euro’s Titanic—hasn’t materialized, yet. If there is a revolt in the making, it is burning with a slow fuse. Yes, government after government has fallen, but to what effect? Spain has witnessed the rise of the Indignados, a mass Occupyish movement, but when [...]
Europe’s Political Contagion
June 11, 2012
The starving, shattered Europe that Hitler left behind is a topic so vast, so terrible and so chaotic that it is hard to see how it could be confined to a single volume. The British historian Keith Lowe has not attempted to do so. In Savage Continent he uses just some of the fragments of history to assemble a vivid, if occasionally unevenly written, portrait of a broken, vagrant place oscillating between ancient barbarism and a post-apocalyptic future. With the Marshall Plan as yet undreamed, and Marshal Stalin on the prowl, no safe haven lay in sight. Such a vision [...]
Darkness at dawn
June 1, 2012
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe.; published originally in The New Criterion
James T. Kirk has been voyaging through my head since I was about ten years old, ambassador for a Technicolor, offbeat, promising, and very American future that caught my very British imagination in about 1968 and has never quite let go. But the only time I had ever seen William Shatner — the real McCoy, so not to speak — in the flesh was in a New York City steakhouse a few years back. It was a brush with nostalgia and a certain askew greatness, and it was not enough. Under the circumstances, the hundred-minute one-man show that Shatner launched [...]
Shatner’s World
May 1, 2012
Shatner’s World: We Just Live in it.; published originally in National Review Online
A phony peace is unlikely to end much better than a phony war. When the European Central Bank (ECB) poured a total of $1.3 trillion in cheap three-year funding into the continent’s financial institutions, that’s what it got. Sure, it beat the alternative. Lehman part deux was staved off yet again. All those billions (and the suggestion of future ECB support that they represented) were enough to restore confidence that Europe’s sickly banking system would not crumble too far or too fast—for now. Between the announcement of the first of the bank’s long-term refinancing operations (LTRO) in December and the [...]
Here We Go Again
April 30, 2012
How to make a nation? In Vanished Kingdoms, his fascinating — and characteristically hefty — new book chronicling the rise and fall of 15 European states (from Visigoth Tolosa to the good-riddance empire of the Soviets), historian Norman Davies offers a number of suggestions. They include “good fortune, benevolent neighbors, and a sense of purpose.” There are nods to the power of a common language and a shared myth, and an implied recognition of the usefulness of conquest (where now are the Baltic people, the Prusai, whose land formed the core of ascendant Teutonic Prussia?), but little focus on the [...]
What Lies Beneath
April 30, 2012
Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations, by Norman Davies.; published originally in National Review
He’s a tolerant man, Nigel Farage, a devotee of John Stuart Mill, a cricket-loving happy warrior, an “accidental politician.” The leader of the Euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence party (UKIP), and, since 1999, a member of the EU’s Potemkin parliament, he is standing expectantly at the bar of his local, the George & Dragon (of course) in Downe, a friendly low-ceilinged Kentish pub as English as its name. I’m ordering the beers. There’s a traditional, brewed-by-two-yokels county bitter for him (of course) and for me an industrial, vaguely Teutonic lager, bitte. “Euro-piss, I see.” Mock shock: Live and let live. Later [...]
Declarer of Independence
March 19, 2012
Purity has no place in a crisis. The 2008 TARP bailout was a clumsy, ugly, and rather shameful creation, but by signaling that Uncle Sam was in the room (with his printing press not far behind), it headed off the final descent into a panic that would have brought the banks, and, with them, the economy, and, with that, who knows what else, tumbling down. Three years later, another four-lettered program has been launched, this time in Europe, but once again designed to calm fears that were threatening to metastasize into catastrophe. It was no coincidence that the European Central [...]
A Bridge, but Leading Where?
February 13, 2012