Mark Steyn: Gaulic Genius

What are the chances? The number of times in my lifetime I've given a passing thought to Rimbaud could be numbered in the low single digits and Dominique de Villepin occupies my thoughts about twice as much as that. So I was amazed that Mark Steyn happened to be on the same page, although with considerably more substance.

MARK STEYN

Rimbauds, Not Rambos

Most of us are familiar with the subtle differences between even
relatively compatible cultures. One notes, for example, that what’s
known to Americans as “The Hokey-Pokey” is called in Britain “The
Hokey-Cokey.” Just when you think you’ve figured out what it’s all
about, it turns out you haven’t quite grasped all the nuances.

Accustomed as I am to these linguistic variations, I was nevertheless
brought up short browsing the /Guardian/ the other day and reading that
Angela Merkel’s election victory would make Germany “the 20th of the 25
EU nations with a centre-right government.”

That’s right: The EU — you know, the EUnuchs, the Euro-weenies, the
proverbial cheese-eating surrender monkeys, etc. — are four-fifths
“center-right.” Half a decade ago, they were all center-left Third
Wayers. But having put its left foot in, Europe pulled its left foot
out, stuck its right foot in, and shook it all about.

The /Guardian/ is technically correct. At the moment, Europe is governed
largely by politicians of “the right.” Jacques Chirac, for example, is
in French terms a “conservative.” Granted, “conservative” is an elastic
designation, and, in the hands of the media, it’s usually shorthand for
the side you’re not meant to like. Thus, George W. Bush is
“conservative,” and so are unreconstructed Marxists in the Chinese
politburo and the more hardline ayatollahs. But even under those
expansive rules of admission, I find it difficult to encompass President
Chirac within the definition. If he’s “center-right,” where the center
is doesn’t bear thinking about. Still, the fact remains that the
transatlantic estrangement of the Bush era has occurred during a period
of supposed political convergence between Washington and chancelleries
of Europe — the end result of which is that the president’s closest ally
is the center-left survivor Tony Blair.

That’s why I’m unpersuaded by those Europhiles in Washington who are
pinning their hopes on a Euro-American realignment under Frau Merkel and
France’s Nicolas Sarkozy. The differences between Europe and America are
so profound that political labels are simply lost in translation. You
know those showers where the merest nudge of the dial turns the water
from freezing to scalding? Mainstream European politics is the opposite
of that. You can turn the dial all the way from “left” to “right” and it
makes no difference.

Over the last half-century, Continental politics evolved to the point
where almost any issue worth talking about was ruled beyond the bounds
of polite society. Austria was the classic example: Year in, year out,
whether you voted for the center-left party or the center-right party,
you wound up with the same center-left/center-right coalition presiding
over what was in essence a two-party one-party state. In France, M.
Chirac isn’t really “center-right” so much as ever so slightly
left-of-right-of-left-of

-center — and even that distinction applies only
when he’s standing next to his former prime minister, the
right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of-center Lionel Jospin. Though
supposedly from opposite ends of the political spectrum, in the 2002
presidential election they wound up running against each other on
identical platforms, both passionately committed to high taxes, high
unemployment, and high crime.

Americans often make the same criticism of their own system — the
“Republicrats,” etc. — but take it from me, the U.S. still has a more
genuinely responsive politics with more ideological diversity than
anywhere in western Europe. On the Continent, the Eurodee and Eurodum
mainstream parties are boxed into a consensus politics that’s no longer
sustainable. The people are weary of certain aspects of this postwar
settlement — permanent double-digit unemployment and the Islamification
of their cities — but they’re not yet ready to give up the social
programs, the short work weeks, long vacations, and jobs for life.
They’re voting against the center-left consensus but there’s little sign
they’re willing to vote for any medicine tougher than a modest tweak
toward a right-of-left-of-right-of-center consensus.

Remember Dominique de Villepin, the magnificently obstructionist
big-haired French foreign minister in the run-up to the Iraq war? He’s a
poet — a veritable Rimbaud to Bush’s Rambo. Well, he’s prime minister
now and, in his first big speech in the job, he was at pains to reassure
French voters that the internal contradictions of a pampered lethargic
welfare society could all be resolved through “Gallic genius”:

“In a modern democracy, the debate is not between the liberal and the
social, it is between immobilism and action. Solidarity and initiative,
protection and daring: That is the French genius.”

Oh-la-la! C’est magnifique, n’est-ce pas? All those elegant nouns just
waiting for a stylishly coiffed French genius to steer the appropriate
course between the Scylla of solidarity and the Charybdis of initiative,
between protection and daring, immobilism and action, inertia and panic,
stylish insouciance and meaningless gestures, abstract nouns and street
riots, etc., etc. The French electorate was in the mood to hear
something about crime or jobs. But for a man of letters with a Byronic
hairdo that’s all too dreary and prosaic compared with an open-ended
debate between solidarity and initiative stretching lazily into the future.

Tony Blankley’s well-argued new book, /The West’s Last Chance/, is among
other things a heartfelt plea for the European political class to rouse
itself before the canoe goes over the waterfall. I don’t think they’re
ready to tell the voters and I don’t think the voters are ready to hear
it. They put their center-right foot in, they pull their center-left
foot out. But they don’t yet understand they’re about to be shaken all
about.