Writing in the February Commentary, Arthur Waldron is candid, but guardedly optimistic about the prospects of Europe successfully dealing with their problems of demographics, self-defense, and economy. Having been jarred out of their collective terror-denial mindset by the Van Gogh murder, Waldron suggests they might benefit by buying into some of that Bush Doctrine. Of course they'll have to find something else to call it:
We hear a great deal about European values, and how they differ from their inferior American counterparts. But in practice what we see in Europe day to day is a series of low-minded attempts by member states to use the EU for their own narrow purposes, or groups of states insisting on the indefinite postponement of pressing continental issues. These can never constitute a moral compass, let alone a direction forward.Posted by dan at February 4, 2005 12:01 AMWest European capitals today tend not to grasp the degree to which the world is moving toward the ideals of economic and political freedom. Central and East Europeans are miles ahead on this point, as has become clear with the rapid expansion of the EU and the emergence of ideological differences between what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld termed "old" and "new" Europe. Reactions to the Ukrainian crisis, as I have already suggested, underscored the difference; new Europeans instantly grasped its significance, old Europeans fell back into silence. As a letter writer to the Guardian observed, "Clearly it still only takes a growl from Russia for Western Europe to abandon all support for human rights on its eastern borders." One might add that it likewise takes only a growl from Beijing to silence any protest at Chinese actions which, if carried out far more gently by white people, would most certainly be labeled war crimes.
The noble values of economic and political freedom, pioneered by Western Europe, are in low repute in Western Europe, though they are plainly what should serve as the EU’s missing ideological cement.