Resistance Is Futile

The Weekly Standard, December 28, 2009

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive--at least if you were Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d'Estaing. The one-term president of France was awarded the job in 2002 of chairing the convention responsible for designing a constitution for the European Union. He compared his fellow delegates--a dismal, handpicked, largely Eurofederalist claque--with America's Founding Fathers, and, splendidly de haut en bas (however tongue-in-cheek), told this self-important rabble that, in the "villages" they came from, statues would be put up in their honor--"on horseback" no less.

But that's not quite how it worked out. When the villagers saw the hideous blend of bureaucratic centralism, transnational control, political correctness, and daft pomposity that slithered out of Giscard's convention, they were none too impressed. The draft constitution staggered its way to approval in some EU countries, but was killed off by referenda in France and Holland in mid-2005.

Except that's not quite how it worked out. Properly speaking, those two defeats should have put a stake through the heart of the constitution. Instead the ratification process was frozen "for a period of reflection"--a dignified term for buying time to cook up a scheme to bypass the awkwardness of voter disapproval. The scheme was the Treaty of Lisbon.

It preserved the content of the draft constitution, but junked its form. The constitution that had been rejected was scrapped, but its essence was preserved under the guise of a series of amendments to the EU's existing treaties that smuggled in most of the changes which would once have been incorporated in Giscard's monstrosity. It was a stroke of genius. Dropping the "c" word minimized the legal or political risk that referenda might once again be required. It was also an insult. Neither Giscard nor the key architect of the new treaty, Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel, made any attempt to conceal their view that the substance of the constitution was alive and well.

Channeling Louis XIV, Nicolas Sarkozy ruled that France's disobedient voters would be denied any further say on the matter. No surprise there, but I like to think that Merkel's coup might have caused a few pangs in the ranks of Holland's rather more respectable Council of State (the government's highest advisory body). Maybe it did, but the august if pliable Dutchmen somehow felt able to determine that the new treaty did not contain enough "constitutional" elements to require a referendum. Meanwhile, Britain's shameless Labour government just brazened things out. Labour had been reelected in 2005 on the back of a manifesto that included the promise of a referendum should the United Kingdom be asked to sign up for a revived constitution. The Lisbon Treaty was, however, cooed Messrs Blair and Brown, something completely different. There would be no popular vote.

In Ireland, though, significant changes to the EU's treaties require a constitutional amendment, and the Irish constitution can only be amended by referendum. The Irish government did not attempt to dodge its responsibilities. Nor did Irish voters. In June 2008, the Lisbon Treaty was voted down. As the treaty had to be ratified in each of the EU's 27 member states, the Irish snub should have finished it off. Except (you will be unsurprised to know) that's not quite how it worked out.

Within minutes of the Irish vote, the EU's top bureaucrat, Commission president José Barroso, announced that the treaty was not dead. When it comes to the European project, no does not mean no--as Danish and Irish voters had already discovered in the aftermath of their rejection of earlier EU treaties. Ratifications of Lisbon rolled in from elsewhere, the Irish government secured some placatory legal guarantees, setting the stage for a mulligan this October. In the event, however, the result of this second vote was determined not by the changes won by the Dublin government, but by the global financial meltdown, a blow that had brought Ireland's over-leveraged economy to its knees.

There was something almost refreshing in the lack of subtlety with which Barroso traveled to Limerick to announce--just weeks before the second referendum--that Brussels (in other words, the EU's conscripted taxpayers) would be spending 14.8 million euros to help workers at Dell's Irish plant find new jobs. In case anyone missed the point, Barroso also reminded his listeners that the European Central Bank had lent over 120 billion euros to the battered Irish banking system. Frazzled by financial disaster and fearful of the consequences of alienating their paymasters, Ireland's voters reversed their rejection of the Lisbon Treaty just a couple of weeks later.

Being a realist means knowing when to fold. In the wake of the Irish vote, a nose-holding, teeth-gritting Polish president committed his country to the treaty. This left the Czech Republic's profoundly Euroskeptic president, Václav Klaus, as the last holdout. If Klaus could delay signing the treaty (which had, awkwardly for him, already been approved by the Czech parliament) until after a likely Conservative victory in the upcoming British general election (due no later than next June), then the whole process could be brought to a halt. The Tories had vowed to withdraw the U.K.'s existing ratification and hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty before proceeding any further. Given most Britons' views (quite unprintable in a respectable publication), the result would have been to kill the treaty. The U.K. isn't Ireland. The U.K. isn't Denmark.

If, if, if .  .  .

It didn't take long for the blunt Klaus to dash those hopes: "The train carrying the treaty is going so fast and it's [gone] so far that it can't be stopped or returned, no matter how much some of us would want that."

Klaus signed the treaty on November 3. Shortly thereafter the EU's leaders began maneuvering to fill two new jobs: "president" (actually president of the European Council) and "foreign minister" (the latter will rejoice in the grandiloquent title of High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy). Following a couple of weeks of intrigue, backstabbing, and secretive quid pro quos, it was agreed the new president would be Herman van Rompuy--Belgium's prime minister and thus a man who knows a thing or two about unnatural unions. But the somewhat obscure van Rompuy (what Belgian prime minister is not?) is a world historical figure when compared with the woman who has become High Representative, a Brit by the name of Baroness Ashton of Upholland, a dull hack known--if at all--for her loyalty to the Labour party. The treaty finally came into force on December 1. The age of van Rompuy had begun.

Some commentators are presenting the emergence of the Belgian and the baroness as a triumph for the EU's member states over its bureaucracy's more federalist vision. The thinking goes that by securing the appointment of two nonentities to what are (notionally) the most prestigious jobs in the union's new structure, Sarkozy, Merkel, and the rest of the gang successfully defended what remains of their countries' prerogative to decide the most important matters for themselves. To believe this is to misread just how lose-lose the situation was. In reality, the nonentities will be as damaging (maybe even more so) to what's left of national sovereignty as better-known candidates such as the much-anticipated Tony Blair. Blair would have given the presidency more clout. He would have done so, however, at the expense not only of the EU's member states, but also of the Brussels bureaucracy.

The EU's new president is, as mentioned above, technically the president of the European Council, a body formally incorporated within the EU's architecture by the Lisbon Treaty after years in a curious organizational limbo. With a membership now made up of the union's heads of government, van Rompuy, and the inevitable Barroso, it is theoretically the bloc's supreme political institution. And theoretically therefore, the stronger it is (and with a heavyweight president it would supposedly have been stronger), the more it would be able to operate as a counterweight to the bureaucrats of the EU Commission. I suspect that this would never have been the case, but with van Rompuy, a housetrained federalist (he has already told a meeting arranged by--let a hundred conspiracy theories flower--the Bilderberg Group that he favors giving the EU tax-raising powers), at its helm, the point is moot. The key, van Rompuy reportedly claimed, to high office within the EU is to be a "gray mouse," and so, to the chagrin of Blair and those like him, it has proved. Sarkozy, Merkel, and all the rest of their more colorful kind will continue to prance and to parade, and power will continue to leach away from the nation states and into the unaccountable oligarchy that is "Brussels."

"It's all over," my friend Hans told me when Klaus threw in the towel, "Brussels has won." Hans, thirtysomething, a native of one of the EU's smaller nations, and a former adviser to one of the continent's better-known Euroskeptics, comes as close to anyone I have ever met from the European mainland to being a Burkean Tory--and Hans has now given up. He would, he sighed, have to move on with his life.

With Lisbon in force, little is left of the already sharply curtailed ability of any one member-state (or its voters) to veto the inroads of fresh EU legislation. In Hans's view, the treaty means that the momentum towards a European super-state is now irreversible. With their sovereignty emasculated and, in many cases, their sense of identity crumbling under the linked assaults of multiculturalism and mass immigration, the old nation states of Europe have neither the ability nor the inclination to say no. Euroskepticism will now be portrayed (not always inaccurately) as the mark of the crank or the Quixote. "And that," added Hans, a man still at a relatively early stage in his career, "is not the way to go either politically or professionally."

Signing up, however unenthusiastically, for the orthodoxies of the European Union is now de rigueur in the continent's ruling class. And if there was once idealism behind the Brussels project it has long since been overwhelmed by another of the beliefs that lay behind it--that neither nations nor their electorates could be trusted to do the right thing. Sovereignty, whether national or democratic or both, is being replaced by oligarchy, technocracy, and the pieties of the "social market." If you live in an oligarchy, it's best to be an oligarch.

This realization is one of the reasons that the EU has got as far as it has. It has provided excellent opportunities for some of Europe's best, brightest, and lightest-fingered to move back and forth between the union's hierarchy and those parts of the private sector (and indeed the national civil services) that feed off it.

Yet all was not gloom, said Hans. A stronger sense of their own identity and a still distinct political culture meant, he thought, that it wasn't too late for the Brits to do the right thing (as he sees it) and quit the EU. He is too optimistic. While correct that most Britons are irritated by the EU and its presumptions, he overlooks the fact that they have not yet shown any signs of wanting to end this most miserable of marriages. Hans also underestimates the subtler factors standing in the way of the long-promised punch-up between any incoming Tory government and Brussels--an event that in any case has now been postponed. David Cameron's party has shelved its plans for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Now that it has come into force, modifying the treaty to accommodate the U.K. would require the assent of all the other member-states and that won't be forthcoming. A British referendum, Cameron claims, would therefore be pointless. How convenient for him.

Cameron has also made it clear that he has no intention of revisiting the U.K.'s relations with the EU in any serious way for quite some time. With Britain's economy in ruins, any incoming government will have more pressing priorities. And the passing of time only further entrenches the EU's new constitutional settlement deeper into the U.K.'s fabric--and especially the landscape in which the country's able and ambitious build their careers. That's something that Cameron may also have recognized. He appears to have concluded that it is better to win a premiership diminished by Brussels than no premiership at all, and a major row over Britain's role within the EU could yet cost the Tory leader the keys to 10 Downing Street.

The additional complication is debt-burdened Britain's dependence on the financial markets as a source of fresh funds. Investors are averse to uncertainty. They are already twitchy about Britain's disintegrating balance sheet, and a savage row between Britain and the rest of the EU would set nerves even further on edge. Then there's the small matter that such a conflict is hardly likely to help Britain persuade its European partners to bail the U.K. out in the event that this should prove necessary--and it might.

The more time passes, the more an empowered EU will insinuate itself within national life (rule from Brussels is a fairly subtle form of foreign occupation: No panzers will trundle down Whitehall). It will come to be seen as "normal," not perfect, by any means, and certainly the cause of sporadic outbreaks of grumbling, but if handled with enough discretion (it will be a while before the Commission resumes efforts to sign Britain up for the "borderless" EU of the Schengen Agreement) and enough dishonesty, it will benefit from the traditional British reluctance to make a fuss. As on the continent, protesting deeper integration within the union, let alone trying to reverse it, will be depicted--and regarded--as the preserve of the eccentric and the obsessive.

With Britain hogtied, the Lisbon structure will endure unchanged unless a prolonged economic slowdown (or worse) finally shatters the gimcrack foundations on which the EU rests. That cannot be ruled out, but if Lisbon holds, the implications will be profound for the international environment in which the United States has to operate. There is already chatter (from the Italian foreign minister, for instance) about a European army. Can it be long before there is a drive by Brussels to replace the British and French seats on the U.N. Security Council with one that represents the entire EU, a move that would eliminate the one vote in that body on which the United States has almost always been able to rely?

And to ask that question is to wonder what sort of partner the EU will be for the United States. One clue can be found in the fact that the new High representative for foreign affairs and security policy was treasurer and then a vice chairman of Britain's unilateralist Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at the end of the Brezhnev era. Another comes from remarks by Austria's Social Democratic chancellor Werner Faymann in response to the speculation that Tony Blair would be appointed to the new presidency during the fall: "The candidate .  .  . should have an especially good -relationship with Obama and not stand for a good working relationship with Bush."

Leaving aside the minor matter that George W. Bush has not been president for nearly a year, it's not difficult to get Faymann's drift. The Obama administration will find the EU a reasonably congenial partner, even ally, so long as it sticks to the sort of transnationalist agenda that could have been cooked up in Turtle Bay, the Berlaymont, or Al Gore's fevered imagination. If on the other hand, Obama, or any subsequent president, should turn to policies that are more avowedly in this country's national interest, the EU could well turn out to be an obstacle. After all, in the absence of any authentic EU identity, its leadership has often defined their union by what it is not. And what it is not, Eurocrats stress, is America.

Washington will have to learn to accept surly neutrality, if not active antagonism, from the oligarchs of Brussels. The EU may not be able to do much to hinder the United States directly, but, as its "common" foreign (and, increasingly, defense) policy develops, there's a clear risk that it will be at the expense of NATO. Shared EU projects will drain both cohesion and resources away from the Atlantic alliance, not to speak of the ability of America's closer European allies to go it alone and help Uncle Sam out.

Some of this will be deliberate, but more often than not it will be the result of institutional paralysis. As a profoundly artificial construction, the EU lacks--beyond the shared prejudices of some of its elite--any sense of the idea of us and them that lies at the root of a nation or even an empire, and, therefore, the ability to shape a foreign policy acceptable to enough of its constituent parts for it to take any form of effective action. But if the EU might find it difficult to decide what it will do, it will find it easy to agree what its members cannot do. The days when Britain will have the right, let alone the ability, to send its troops to aid America over the protests of Germany and France are coming to a close.

Bowing, but this time to the inevitable, Obama has welcomed the completion of the Lisbon Treaty process, saying that "a strengthened and renewed EU will be an even better transatlantic partner with the United States," an absurd claim that one can only hope he does not believe.

Ah yes, hope.

Paying for the Piper

The Weekly Standard, June 22, 2009

France is a famously volatile place. Talk of cake can trigger a revolution. The British are made of more phlegmatic stuff. Pastry alone would never do the trick. What it takes, it turns out, are a tea caddy, jellied eels, vitamin supplements, a sandwich cage (I have no idea), Scotch eggs (don't ask), dog food, a stainless steel dog bowl, a leather bed, six "leather-effect" dining chairs, a leather rocking chair, a leather sofa, a pink laptop, toilet seats (one of which was "glittery"), horse manure, Christmas tree decorations, potpourri candles, hanging baskets, an HD-ready 32-inch television, a 26-inch LCD television, a 40-inch flat-screen television, a 42-inch plasma television, light bulbs, people to change light bulbs, a pewter-finish radiator cover, mock Tudor beams, "imperial thermostatic" faucets, rubber gloves, electric gates, private security patrols, moat-clearing, stable lights, a five-foot-tall floating duck house, and a "Don Juan" bookcase. And, of course, a newspaper: in this case the Daily Telegraph gleefully telling appalled readers that these were among the many, many items they had been asked to buy for their Members of Parliament.

If you are wondering why exactly British taxpayers should be paying for the horse manure used to fertilize David Heathcoat-Amory's garden, the beginnings of an answer can be found in the fact that many MPs have to live in two places at once. They spend most of their working week in London attending parliament, but they must also (if they wish to be reelected) "nurse" their constituencies--something that often entails having a house there. This state of affairs was said to have forced (the verb can be debated) many MPs to maintain two homes, a burden somewhat alleviated by regulations permitting them to charge the nation for the cost of running that second home. It's when you come to define cost that the fun begins. Mortgage interest, absolutely. Utility bills, sure. Moat clearing, uh, maybe not. But so far as Parliament's permissive fees office was concerned, moat clearing was indeed fine.

That the full disclosure of this state of affairs could cause trouble was no great surprise. Fears that what has happened would happen explain the prolonged and desperate struggle to exempt MPs' expenses from the "right to know" provisions of the Freedom of Information Act passed by the Labour government in 2000, a struggle that eventually ended in failure early this year. Even then some critics worried that provisions to allow MPs a limited right to "edit" what would be released might be abused. Such concerns were rendered moot when copies of electronic records of MPs' expenses--detailed down to the last gloriously petty and last ingloriously questionable claim--were leaked to the Telegraph. That newspaper splashed the story in early May and has been drip-feeding an enraged and enthralled public with further revelations ever since. The resulting scandal has ruined careers, is helping destroy a government (which was doing a good job of destroying itself), and is wrecking the reputation of the mother of parliaments.

In some respects, this has been a very British scandal. The reimbursement policy that lies at its heart was the result of typically British fudge. Its extraordinary generosity (it is likely that only a few MPs will be shown to have broken the letter rather than the spirit of the rules) was an attempt to allow politicians to keep up financially with their professional peers in a prosperous era without going through the political awkwardness of voting themselves the sort of pay increase many thought that they deserved. (Yes Minister's Sir Humphrey would, doubtless, have approved.) The scandal's minutiae are also very British--that tea caddy and the obsession with gardening--and so is the delight with which Britons, never so deferential as Americans imagine, have witnessed the puncturing of formerly mighty reputations. Puncturing? Oh yes. Pause for a moment to digest the splendid news that the MP who claimed for that glittery toilet seat was John Reid, a former Labour home secretary previously known as a Glaswegian tough guy. Previously.

And Britain being Britain, a land where acute class sensibility is curse, art form, and blood sport, there has also been plenty for snobs and their reverse to savor. The snooty will have snickered at the thought of Labour's horny-handed (in all respects) John Prescott, a former deputy prime minister who has never been slow to talk up his proletarian credentials, putting mock Tudor beams on his house. Mock Tudor! Equally the painstaking efforts by the Conservative leader David Cameron (Eton and Oxford) to persuade voters that the Tories were no longer the toffs of old will not have been helped by the fact that it was a member of his team who needed help with his moat.

And Britain being Britain, journalists have been unable to resist dredging up Macaulay's well-worn observation that there is "no spectacle more ridiculous than the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality," and as always they have a point. Some of the criticism has been overwrought and unfair, an unintended consequence of a system that compelled MPs to submit details of almost every claim, however trivial, a system that could never have made them look good, but, for all its faults, is infinitely preferable to, say, the opacity of the much more corrupt procedures for "reimbursement" of expenses that have prevailed (at least up until now) in the EU's Potemkin parliament.

All the same, those claims were made, and they are an indication that the ideal of fair play that once underpinned the UK's once largely unwritten constitutional arrangements is dying. The temptation to see the current furor as a simple explosion of jealous rage (although that emotion has undoubtedly played its part), vaguely reminiscent of the shameful, hysterical spasm of fury and grief that followed the death of Princess Diana, should be resisted. A better comparison would be with the storm over congressional overdrafts that made so much news over here in the early 1990s. Seen in isolation, that row was overdone; seen in the context of decades of one-party control of the House of Representatives, it was long overdue.

Not all MPs were at the trough. Far from it. Nevertheless, this scandal has added further tarnish to the reputation of the political class as a whole, a class already widely perceived as greedy, venal and, in the midst of an economic crisis that may yet lead to a cap-in-hand approach to the IMF, incompetent. Equally, it's worth adding that claims by MPs that the investigation of their expenses has been overly intrusive might be more sympathetically received had those same MPs not spent so long micromanaging, sometimes very punitively, their fellow citizens.

What are Britons supposed to make of Alistair Darling, the finance minister who subjects them to a bewildering, fiercely enforced range of taxes, yet appeared to feel no qualms about sticking them with bills he received from his personal tax advisers? And what are Britons to make of those MPs who "flipped" the designation of "second homes" (yes, there were sometimes more than one) for tax and other purposes, or worse still, the handful of MPs who appeared to have sought reimbursement for "phantom" mortgages? Under the circumstances, to criticize the reimbursement of the embattled Gordon Brown, the country's flailing, faltering prime minister, for the cost of the bagpiper he retained to play at a ceremony for veterans in a Scottish church may even seem a touch harsh. Harsh, but oddly, poetically appropriate: Those who paid for the piper may--finally--be calling the tune.

Swiss, Cross

National Review Online, December 10, 2009

So far, so predictable. The now infamous referendum amending Switzerland’s constitution in a way that prohibits the construction of any more minarets in the land of Heidi (there are already, um, four) has been damned by the usual suspects, including a gaggle of Christian clergymen, a babble of media, crazy Colonel Qaddafi, Turkey’s thuggish Islamist prime minister (the one who once referred to minarets as “our bayonets”), Iran’s thuggish Islamist foreign minister, Egypt’s Grand Mufti (try building a new church in Egypt), a collection of Saudi “scholars” (don’t even think of building a church in Saudi Arabia), and, of course, Jon Stewart.

Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking, but condemnation by these clowns is not by itself a reason to decide that the vote went the right way — or that holding the referendum was a particularly good idea in the first place. It’s a start, however.

It is important to realize what the referendum was — and what it was not. What it was not was an assault on the ability of Switzerland’s 400,000 Muslims (roughly 5 percent of the population) to practice their religion. Their ability to worship freely is untouched, and they can build all the mosques they want — so long as they are not adorned with minarets.

But it is not unusual to find mosques without minarets, especially outside historically Muslim territories. Thus Switzerland has 150 to 200 mosques or public prayer rooms, but only those four lonely minarets, none of which — thanks to noise-pollution regulations — are actually used for the adhan, the call to prayer. Those numbers suggest that this vote is no threat to anybody’s freedom of religion. They also suggest that minarets are no threat to the freedom of the Swiss to be Swiss, but this is to miss the point. The referendum was always about more than a few towers. Voters took aim at the minarets as a way of venting their fears about militant Islam and, more generally, their unease at the ways in which their country has been — and is being — changed by high levels of immigration. The latter is a factor that should not be underestimated. Despite playing host to various international organizations, numerous banks, and countless tourists, Switzerland is at its core still a conservative, somewhat insular place, comfortable in its own skin and more than a little suspicious of outsiders. There’s a reason why the Swiss joined the U.N. (the fools!) only in 2002, and wisely continue to stay outside the EU.

The trouble is that fear and unease make bad legislators. The effect of the new rules may be mainly symbolic, but symbolism can kick both ways. It’s no great stretch to suspect that the consequences of this vote will be counterproductive. Switzerland’s Muslims, who mostly hail from the Balkans or Turkey, are a largely moderate, secularized bunch. Unfortunately, the result of the referendum — along with some of the ugly rhetoric that preceded the vote — risks changing these peoples’ sense of their own identity. There’s a danger that they will come to view themselves as primarily defined by their common religious background rather than by their very different ethnic and cultural heritages or, for that matter, their hopes of a thoroughly Swiss future. Banning the minarets may fill the mosques.

There’s also a clear risk that what is preached in those mosques will lurch in a more extreme direction. This would be a natural response to the sense of siege and resentment that the vote may create, particularly if that resentment is fanned by money and ideas from Middle Eastern sources keen to stiffen the resolve of co-religionists toiling in the land of the wicked, oppressive kuffār.

Rather than spending their time in architectural micromanagement, it would be far smarter for the Swiss to increase their efforts to integrate the Muslims in their midst, and to do so in a way that creates no special spaces, privileges (other, perhaps, than the extension to Islam of the “official” status enjoyed by other religious denominations in many cantons), or obstacles for their religion. No religion should be fenced off from the hurly-burly of debate, criticism, and ridicule. The fear of giving (dread word) “offense” should not be allowed to trump free expression. That would be true in the case of any creed, but it’s particularly true of Islam, a muscular faith with little room for clear dividing lines between mosque and state. Muslims should be free to practice their religion in Switzerland, but Islam must be made to take its chances in the rough-and-tumble marketplace of ideologies essential to any open society, and to do so within democratic constraints.

You’d think that this would be an obvious, even superfluous, argument to make, but in today’s Western Europe — hogtied by the exquisite sensitivities and repressive legislation that are the hallmarks of multiculturalism — that is no longer the case. One of the most telling moments in the referendum campaign came after the appearance of a controversial — and brilliantly designed — poster in which missile-like minarets pierced the Swiss flag, and a woman clad in abaya and niqab stared out with an oddly come-hither look in her eyes. Overstated? Certainly. Harsh? Certainly. Nevertheless, in a properly functioning liberal democracy, those who disagreed with the poster would have tried to dispel its message with the force of their arguments, not the force of law. Some did. Others preferred coercion.

The poster was banned in, to name but a few places with a thing against free speech, Lausanne, Fribourg, Basel, and Neuchâtel, in a spasm of censorship that, as much as anything else, demonstrates why so many Swiss have rallied behind the SVP (the Swiss People’s Party), a distinctly rough-edged party of the populist Right that is now the largest political grouping in Switzerland (it won some 29 percent of the vote in the 2007 elections) and was the principal driving force behind the referendum. To its discredit, the SVP has more than a touch of the bully about it, with, for example, a disturbing weakness for rhetoric that is as much anti-immigrant as it is anti-immigration. Sadly, that has only added to its appeal. But a large number of more moderate voters have found that they too have been left with nowhere else to turn but the SVP, a phenomenon echoed in the rise elsewhere in Western Europe of parties prepared to stray beyond the spectrum of conventional opinion.

It’s revealing that the referendum’s results came as such a nasty surprise to those who make up Switzerland’s traditional political establishment. Their shock was an embarrassing reminder of how out of touch they have become. And no, the result was not a simple matter of Left versus Right, of hick versus sophisticate. Not only did a striking 57.5 percent of those who voted favor the minaret ban, but the ban won support across the country, including, predictably enough, the heartlands of the Schwiizertüütsch, but far beyond too.

In the end, however flawed the referendum’s focus, there was something impressive about the way voters chose to defy the wishes of those who supposedly knew better. The government opposed the measure, as did a clear majority in the federal parliament, but (such are the joys of the Swiss system) there was nothing these politicians could do to block a referendum once 100,000 citizens had formally endorsed the call for a vote. And there was little, it turned out, that they could do to influence the way the vote went. The Swiss took their decision on November 29. The timing was almost perfect. Just two days later, the Lisbon Treaty (the European Union’s constitution in all but name) came into force. The latter was a triumph for the Brussels oligarchy, a win for deception, double-dealing, and the sidestepping of electorates. The former was a victory for a straightforward, bottom-up form of democracy that is the antithesis of everything for which the EU stands.

That contrast explains why the Swiss elite has become so keen that Switzerland should sign up for the EU, a political structure deliberately designed to replace the inconveniences of popular sovereignty with the smoothness — for those on the inside — of technocratic rule. If the Swiss had been members of Brussels’s unlovely union, it is highly unlikely that their referendum would have gotten as far as it did, and it is almost completely inconceivable that its results would be able to survive review by the EU’s rampaging judiciary. As it is, the voters’ decision is likely to face legal challenges arising out of other provisions in the Swiss constitution, not to speak of those flowing from the country’s international treaty obligations.

The fact remains, however, that there has indeed been a point to this once seemingly pointless referendum. Swiss voters may have exaggerated fears of the Islamic problem that they face now (the future is a different matter), but they have taken the opportunity offered by a stupid question to give a sensible answer to the political class. Their message was clear. Switzerland must have nothing more to do with the multicultural politics and misguided immigration policies that have done so much to contribute to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism elsewhere in Western Europe.

It’s worth noting that such a change of tack would not be possible were Switzerland to join the EU. More critically still, it would be difficult to reconcile with the existing arrangements that govern the free movement of workers between Switzerland and the EU, not that that fact would worry the SVP overmuch. The party would relish a punchup with Brussels.

What’s tricky is that most Swiss do not yet appear to feel the same way. They have backed the free-movement agreements (and then their extension) in a total of three referenda since 2000, the most recent earlier this year. With the EU’s elites opposed to putting their own house in order (and unwilling to offer their own increasingly discontented electorates the sort of say available to voters in Switzerland), the SVP’s leaders know how vital it is for the Swiss to restore absolute control over their own borders, but for most of their countrymen this remains a step too far. It is so much easier to grumble about minarets.

It is probable, therefore, that the next stages in this drama will remain rooted in the symbolic. A leading member of the SVP has announced that forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and the wearing of the burqa in public are all problems that need to be addressed. That’s certainly fair enough (and the SVP is not the only party to think so), even if some other areas of concern for the party (such as the existence of separate Muslim cemeteries) reveal that it has not lost its taste for provocation and overreach. Ultimately, however, these are all peripheral topics when compared to the more basic question of immigration. Indeed, they can be seen as a soft substitute for tough action in that field, something that remains unlikely for now.

But it will be interesting to see how the Swiss react if the European Court of Human Rights (its judgments are binding on all members of the Council of Europe, a grouping that is larger than the EU, and that includes Switzerland) tries to ban the minaret ban.

Sometimes a nation — if it is to remain a nation — just has to go it alone.

Too Small To Fail

The Weekly Standard, November 9, 2009

Independence Monument, Riga, Latvia, 2009  © Andrew Stuttaford

It's a measure of the tension of the times in which we live that Anders Borg, the finance minister of famously polite Sweden, has been going around threatening Latvia. Yes, Latvia. "The patience of the international community is," he growled on October 2, "very limited, and Latvia has little room to maneuver."

If it's rare for a Swede to lose his cool, it's astonishing that a small Baltic state (Latvia's population is just over 2.2 million) was the cause. But Latvia is in an economic mess that is extraordinarily deep (GDP will fall by nearly 19 percent this year), and the consequences have already spread far beyond its borders. Evidence that it was pushing back at those who have been trying to help is what triggered Borg's explosion--well, that, and the risk posed to three of Sweden's largest banks by their roughly 40 billion euros of Baltic exposure.

The story of the Latvian crisis is, if nothing else, proof of the old maxim that no good deed goes unpunished. While the underlying sources of the country's difficulties can be put down to the devastation of half a century of incarceration in the Soviet domain, the immediate cause can be found in one of the happier events in Latvian history: its 2004 admission, alongside the other Baltic states (Lithuania and Estonia), into the European Union.

The integration of large swaths of Eastern Europe into the wider European economy and, ultimately, the EU is something that even Euroskeptics concede has been a triumph: a fusion of enlightened self-interest, generosity, and strategic vision that has done much to smooth the path away from Soviet rule and Communist ways. Initial flows of capital lured to the region by the collapse of Communism were, as the 1990s progressed, supplemented by waves of investment attracted by the reassuring spectacle of former Soviet satellites rediscovering the pains and pleasures of the free market. The transformation was further accelerated by the prospect of eventual EU membership as a final guarantee that they would not slip back.

This was the way it worked in Hungary, Poland, and other former Warsaw Pact nations, and this was the way it eventually worked for the three Baltic states, the first former Soviet republics to apply for, and be accepted into, EU membership. Thus funds began flowing into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia almost as soon as they regained their independence--at a time when the prospect of losing it again to Brussels was still but a distant dream. Much of this money came from the neighboring Nordic countries attracted by an exciting local investment opportunity, historical connections (the Latvian capital, Riga, was once the largest city in greater Sweden), and a keen interest in avoiding the development of three turbulent post-Soviet slums in their backyard.

So far, so benign. But the onrush of Nordic cash overwhelmed the small and rickety enterprises typical of economies emerging from Communist rule. A huge part of the Baltic banking sector ended up in Nordic hands--roughly 70 percent of borrowing in Latvia is now sourced from banks controlled by foreign (primarily Nordic) institutions. What began as a change for the good (the Nordic-run institutions were better managed and capitalized than their local predecessors) degenerated into an unhealthy codependency as the banks financed an unsustainable boom on ultimately disastrous terms. By the time it was all over, they were essentially funding the current accounts of all three Baltic nations.

The bubbles began to inflate as EU membership loomed early this decade and ballooned after the three countries crossed the finish line. Too much money (and too much credit) was pouring into economies too small to absorb it productively, which triggered inflation, speculation, and a consumer binge. Overall government borrowing remained modest in each of the Baltic states, but debt racked up in the private sector--in Latvia it reached 130 percent of GDP in 2008. Imports were sucked into the region, and exporting industries were priced out. (Latvia's textile sector was 12 percent of the country's exports in the early 2000s; it is today only 5 percent.)

Alberta Iela, Riga, Latvia, 2009  © Andrew Stuttaford

As the Baltic economies roared (Latvia's GDP grew by 12 percent in 2006, and 10 percent in 2007), current account deficits soared (Latvia's peaked at some 25 percent in 2007). Fueling the inflationary fire still further, a number of EU countries (notably the U.K. and Ireland) waived the transitional period that has traditionally followed the accession of less-developed countries into the EU and opened up their labor markets to workers from the Baltic, attracting far more immigrants from the region than originally expected. That was good news for employers in London and Dublin, but it siphoned off talent back home, increasing already fierce upward pressure on wage rates and, incidentally, adding to the demographic anxieties of three small peoples that had--only just--succeeded in preserving their ethnic, cultural, and political identity after half a century of Moscow's best efforts to Russianize their countries. Not the least of the ironies facing the Baltic states is the way that their long overdue reintegration into the global economy could, by offering their best and brightest citizens better opportunities abroad, destroy the integrity and the essence of the nations they leave behind.

When economies overheat, real estate prices tend to boil over, and so it was all over the Baltic. In Latvia, house prices jumped by (on some estimates) 300 percent between 2004 and 2007. Never a healthy phenomenon, the real estate bubble had an extra malignant aspect in the Baltics as most of the mortgage lending (a chunk of it distinctly subprime) that financed it was denominated in euros--not yet the Baltic countries' currency. Back in 2004 when Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia signed up for the EU they took a seat in the waiting room for the monetary union. They were in a strong position to satisfy the Maastricht preconditions for adoption of the euro (subdued inflation, low levels of government debt, and well-managed public spending), and all three local currencies--the Latvian lats, the Estonian kroon, and the Lithuanian litas--had been pegged to the euro by 2005. Forecasts that they would be replaced by Brussels' money in 2008 did not seem out of line. Borrowing in euros looked like the smart thing to do. Euro interest rates were well below those charged for borrowing in lati, krooni, and litai and, with the adoption of the EU's single currency purportedly just around the corner, there was not supposed to be much in the way of foreign exchange risk. International (mainly Nordic) banks keen to minimize their exposure to the small illiquid Baltic currencies were only too happy to oblige: Some 80 percent of all private borrowing in the Baltic countries is in euros.

But the cash that cascaded into the Baltic countries pushed up their inflation rates to levels far in excess of the Maastricht criteria. In Latvia inflation peaked at nearly 18 percent in May 2008--up from 6.2 percent in 2004 and the 2 percent range between 2000-03. Drawn in by the prospect of near-term Baltic adoption of the euro, the flood of new money has perversely done a great deal to delay that switch (the latest predictions cluster at around 2011 for Estonia, 2012-13 for Lithuania, and, fingers crossed, 2014 for Latvia, although the IMF recently suggested that the latter date will slip still further). Foreign exchange risk was back.

And so were tough times. The inevitable bust arrived, gathering pace at roughly the same time as international financial markets were freezing up in 2008, an unhappy coincidence that made bad things worse as the (already slowing) foreign capital inflows that had done so much to sustain the boom came to an abrupt halt. To get an idea of the scale of the disaster that has struck, Latvian retail sales are running at 70 percent of 2008, the nation's real estate prices are down some two-thirds from their levels of two years before, and industrial production slumped 18 percent between June 2008 and June 2009.

The textbook response to this type of boom-and-bust would be a drastic devaluation of the currency to slash the cost of exports, discourage imports, and bring burgeoning current account deficits under some degree of control. If textbooks aren't sufficiently persuasive, markets can usually be expected to help out, and, sure enough, the lats came under strong pressure in June. But the sparse market in Baltic currencies gives them considerable protection against speculative attack. It's almost impossible to short thinly traded lati, krooni, or litai to the extent it would take to break their pegs to the euro. The fact that Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia all operate currency board systems (in Latvia's case de facto rather than de jure) under which their monetary base is essentially backed up by gold and foreign exchange reserves means it would take an almost complete collapse in domestic confidence to trigger a run on the currency.

Of the three Baltic currencies, the lats has come under the most pressure (the economic and political fundamentals are weaker in Latvia than in Estonia or Lithuania, and the Latvian central bank had to spend around 1 billion euros to defend the currency in June). Yet the Latvian authorities continue to believe that now is not the time for devaluation. Latvian central bankers told me in August that depreciating the currency is simply not the answer to the country's predicament, and they make a good case. Devaluations work best in economies where a good portion of demand can be satisfied domestically, where the export sector has a high value-added component (i.e., not textiles and the like), and when the global economy is in good shape. None of these descriptions applies to the Baltic states or the world in 2009.

The alternative approach being pursued by Latvia is an "internal devaluation" (Lithuania and Estonia have taken a similar tack) designed to rebuild its international competitiveness by purging the inflationary excesses of recent years and, while it's at it, restore badly needed fiscal and budgetary balance--in other words to generate some of the positive effects of a devaluation without abandoning the currency peg. If most countries are trying to reflate their way out of the current economic crisis, Latvia is doing the opposite. Public sector pay is slated to be reduced by as much as 40 percent (though actual cuts appear to have been less so far) as part of a budgetary squeeze that has included the closing of hospitals and schools (admittedly Latvia was oversupplied with both) and sharp reductions in both welfare payments and pensions--payments that weren't generous in the first place. Adding to the misery: Taxes are being increased. As economic cures go, this is about as tough as it is possible to get, and it has already yielded some tentatively positive results. Latvian inflation has been brought to its knees (in September it was running at 0.1 percent), the trade deficit has shrunk dramatically, and the current account is back in surplus (14 percent of GDP in the second quarter).

Advocates of a conventional devaluation retort that any signs of improvement are merely symptoms of an economy where all demand has been crushed and will stay crushed for quite some time. This is not, they argue, the sort of recovery that will persuade the nation's best and brightest to stay at home once the broader European economy has improved enough to resume hiring. Nor will it attract the new capital that Latvia so badly needs, capital that will only be further deterred as the "hopeless" defense of the peg perpetuates uncertainty over the currency's future while underpinning a real effective exchange rate that continues to rise.

Such arguments are too pessimistic--though only just--and they also fail to address the implications of all those foreign currency loans. Repaying them is already difficult within the context of a devastated real estate market and collapsing economy. Increasing the outstanding balances by 30 percent (the percentage generally thought to be by how much the lats would have to be devalued) would generate Sisyphean agony and drive domestic demand even deeper into the hole. Complicating matters still further is the fact that the affected borrowers are drawn disproportionately from the ranks of the young (many older Latvians remain ensconced in the properties they received gratis in the post-Soviet privatizations), the enterprising, and the upwardly mobile, who are the main hope of any lasting revival. (Undoubtedly a good number of them are also to be found in Latvia's governing class. Unsurprisingly they are not that keen to devalue. Would you vote yourself into bankruptcy?)

Crucially it was the harsh medicine of the internal devaluation that secured the international financial support without which Latvia's economy might have already collapsed. The country's key lenders have so far shown themselves willing to assist in propping up the Latvian currency. It's not hard to guess why, despite some rumored disagreements within the lending consortium, this strategy prevailed. The Swedish banks most heavily involved in the Baltic have all made substantial provisions against lending losses in the region (and raised major amounts of capital to replace what has been lost), but neither they nor the Swedish state that has effectively underwritten them would welcome the massive additional hit to balance sheets that would follow a devaluation of the lats--particularly as it would likely trigger devaluations (and further losses) in Lithuania and Estonia. There's also a clear risk (although less than there was a few months ago) of a domino effect--Baltic devaluations pressuring other vulnerable Eastern European currencies with the potential for extremely unpleasant implications for Western banks exposed in the former Soviet empire. To give just one example of what could be at stake, earlier this year outstanding loans by Austrian banks to Eastern Europe were reported to amount to roughly 75 percent of Austria's GDP.

It's this fear of wider contagion that largely explains the willingness of the multinational group that includes the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, and, of course, the Nordic countries to lend Latvia 7.5 billion euros (and that's before counting the indirect help Latvia has received, including critically, Sweden's support for its banks). In the wake of last year's global financial meltdown, those few billions may seem like chump change, but they represent a huge sum for Latvia (whose GDP stood at around 22 billion euros in 2008). For once, the country is benefiting from the size of its economy: It's simply too small to fail. In absolute terms a bailout of Latvia (or for that matter, any of the Baltic countries) does not involve that much money. If such a rescue can stave off catastrophe elsewhere it will be a bargain. Who needs a Baltic Lehman?

But will this support buy enough time for the internal devaluation to work? Talking to Latvian civil servants, it is impossible to miss their unease about what may happen when the bleak Baltic winter descends on a population struggling through economic disaster. Nobody has forgotten the rioting in Riga (and in Lithuania) in January, the low point of a fraught few months that also saw the collapse of Latvia's sitting government. While there was a reasonable level of confidence amongst those to whom I spoke that the social net will hold, a winter of discontent may be difficult to avoid as benefits ratchet down (unemployment benefits fall sharply after five months on the dole and are then eliminated altogether after nine months--although the unemployed remain eligible for other forms of assistance), savings evaporate, and jobs remain scarce. Unemployment now stands at 18 percent, a devastating number in a climate of deteriorating welfare support. There are indications that the economy's fall is slowing (GDP is currently forecast to decline by a mere 4 percent next year), but what few green shoots there are have sprouted too late to make much difference this winter.

Adding to the worries is the fear that the country's economic woes will be used by the ever more revanchist Kremlin to foment discontent among the roughly 30 percent of the population that is of ethnic Russian descent. Maddening symbols of lost empire, and small enough to bully, Latvia and Estonia have long been placed amongst Russia's worst enemies by Vladimir Putin. He may be unable to resist the temptation to make their problems worse.

The Latvian government's strategy appears to be to hang on grimly and hope that the global economy recovers quickly and strongly enough to pull a sensibly deflated Latvia out of the mire and into hailing distance of the allegedly (that's a debate for another time) safe haven of eurozone membership. So far this tough approach enjoys at least a degree of grudging popular support. Some two-thirds of Latvians are thought to support the defense of a currency that is a symbol of both hard-won independence and the ability of ordinary Latvians to build a better future for themselves. They have seen their savings wiped out twice in the last 20 years, first by the Soviet implosion (and the chaos that accompanied it) and then again, after painful rebuilding, by a massive banking crisis in the mid-1990s. Devaluation would look all too much like round three. Latvian officials also put a great deal of faith in the country's flexible labor markets and the resilience of a people with recent memories of times far, far harder than now. Latvians will know, I was repeatedly told, how to cope.

Maybe, but all attempts to measure public opinion are guesswork--bedeviled by societal division (ethnic Latvians and ethnic Russians often see matters in very different ways) and the fact that Latvia's political parties are often little more than collections of a few friends or co-conspirators, sustained by self-interest, shared ethnic identity, and passing eddies of voter enthusiasm. They are bad at reflecting public opinion and worse at shaping it. If overall living conditions deteriorate badly this winter, there may be no one able to speak honestly to the nation or for its concerns. That's not a recipe for social peace.

There will be parliamentary elections next year and the uncertainty about the degree of support the internal devaluation will continue to enjoy helps explain September's unexpected failure of the governing coalition to pass all elements of the austere 2010 budget that was a condition for the continued support of Latvia's international lenders. This was the failure that so angered Anders Borg in early October. His mood will not have been improved by the market tremors that followed both his comments and subsequent press reports in Sweden that he had told Swedish banks to prepare themselves for the worst.

It's difficult to imagine that he would have been cheered up by the almost simultaneous revelation that the Latvian government was contemplating measures limiting the liability of homeowners to their lenders, a move that would have serious implications for a number of Sweden's banks. This proposal may have been an unsubtle attempt to pressure the Swedes into agreeing to go a little easier on the 2010 budget, but, with the furor it stirred up, it backfired. Its most controversial element--the idea that it would have retrospective effect--has been withdrawn, and the budget hiccup has been resolved with a Latvian climb-down. But these spats were a reminder that the realities that define this uncomfortable situation continue to hold true: Latvia is still both highly vulnerable and too small to fail, the codependent relationship between Sweden's banks and their Latvian borrowers continues to be both intact and unhappy, and the durability and extent of popular support for Latvia's harsh economic medicine remains an unknowable, unnerving mystery.

It's going to be a long winter.

Never such innocence again

The Boy's Own Paper

The New Criterion, October 1, 2009

Tom Royden

Except for the vague impression of a heavily built, benignly gruff, occasionally encountered man with short silver hair, I cannot claim to remember my great-uncle Tom very well. Tom Royden was, I understand, an English country doctor of the old school with a lady friend down the road, a flourishing practice, a keen interest in songbirds, and a shrewd understanding of the practice of medicine that owed as much to common sense as to science. I can remember, just, being told of his death in 1966 (I was eight), and the flock of cheeping, singing, and trilling folk that moved into our house shortly thereafter.

Not so long later, four bulky, musty volumes turned up at home, each stamped with a different date from the first decade of the twentieth century, each smelling of sixty years. Battered and fine, their covers embossed with cowboys, Vikings, and other examples of the formidably tough, they had belonged to my great-uncle all his life. Now, I was informed, they were mine. They still are, artifacts of an era over long before I began, belongings of a man I never really knew, and, in some senses, an introduction to both. To read them was to be transported back from the Beatles on the transistor to Daisy Daisy Bell on the calliope, from phasers on the starship to battles on the veldt, to a time and a place that was no longer sepia, no longer then. To read them was to sit with young Tom turning those same pages on some long-forgotten Edwardian afternoon, and to wonder about the child that the old man had once been.

The four volumes in question were collections (“annuals”) of all the editions of the Boy’s Own Paper issued each week over the course of a given twelve months. Tom’s 1909 annual happened to cover the period from October 3, 1908 to September 25, 1909, but in reality it oozed the ideals, assumptions, and myths of any year plucked from the three or four decades in which imperial Britain slid from its Victorian apogee into an Indian summer of, perversely, even greater splendor. It was a period of rapid social change yet, all things considered, extraordinary social peace, a social peace of which the Boy’s Own Paper was both symptom and, in its own small way, architect.

“The prince of boys’ papers” (as the London Times once described it) was published by, of all people, the Religious Tract Society, an organization founded in 1799 to spread the word of the Lord amongst those with “little leisure and less inclination to peruse entire volumes.” The RTS soon expanded its activities to include the publication of materials designed to save souls overseas but never stopped keeping a sharp eye on those in peril back home. With Britain’s ever more literate population displaying a growing appetite for less than salubrious publications, there was much to look out for. Appalled by the public’s grimy tastes, the society’s committee met in 1878 to discuss “providing healthy boy literature to counteract the vastly increasing circulation of illustrated and other papers and tales of a bad tendency.”

The BOP (as it quickly came to be known) debuted on January 18 the following year. To guess that this worthy committee’s notion of “healthy boy literature” would be glum little pamphlets filled with clerical homilies, Gospel stories, and tales of biblical derring-do is to underestimate the subtlety of the Victorian mind. Despite a cover price (one penny) pitched low enough to put the new paper within the grasp of youngsters from almost all social classes, production values were high, complete with masthead designed by the conqueror (British, naturally) of the Matterhorn, Edward Whymper, and Latin motto: right from the beginning, the creators of the BOP were signaling that they took their paper—and its readers—seriously.

If the BOP’s packaging was good, so too, at their best, were its contents. These were crammed each week into sixteen densely printed pages (there was also a monthly edition which, like the annual, came with some extras) filled with a nicely chosen, well-illustrated blend of story-telling, practical advice, sports coverage, accounts of faraway lands, technological updates, sagas of self-improvement, competitions, puzzles, career opportunities, instructions on how to make various new-fangled devices at home, patriotic tidbits, and informative chat about hobbies, particularly the care and maintenance of pets: the first issue featured “My Monkeys and How I Manage Them” by Frank Buckland, M.A., a touch of Noah in a paper where most of the writing on pets was focused on Britain’s rather pedestrian domestic fauna. The origins of Tom’s aviary may well lie in the practical, unsentimental guide to rearing birds that was a regular feature of the BOP in his youth, and which (in the January 30, 1909 issue) included this typically hard-headed piece of advice for the owners of pigeon lofts: “Don’t keep wasters. Pigeon-pie is good.”

The challenge of the dreaded penny dreadfuls was met head-on. Amongst the stories serialized in the paper’s early editions were Nearly Eaten, Nearly Garrotted, and How I Lost My Finger, all by James Cox, R.N. (M.A., R.N.—at the BOP credentials counted). In the words of G. A. Hutchison, the paper’s founding genius and first managing editor, the BOP had to appeal to “boys not their grandmothers,” an attitude that helps explain a series of not notably grandmother-friendly articles from the 1880s dedicated to “peculiar punishments”:

It is singular that a Chinaman will prefer to die by crucifixion rather than beheading. He has the greatest horror of appearing in the next world without his head and therefore chooses a slow and lingering death rather than a quick one.

That’s the spirit.

But while, as legendary BOP contributor Dr. Gordon Stables, R.N., noted in October 1908, there was no “namby-pambiness” or “silly goody-goodiness” about the stories the paper ran, no “British boy ever found in [them] even the remotest suggestion to do that which was not right and gentlemanly,” reassuring words for the parents and schools whose approval underpinned the paper’s continued success. If the BOP had sermons to preach—it did, sometimes overtly, sometimes not—they were rooted in patriotism, decency, hard work, and fair play (the practice of clubbing seals was, noted the author of one 1887 tale, “too much like hitting a man when he is down”) rather than the peculiar intricacies of theology.

Despite the best efforts of some in the RTS (stoutly resisted by Hutchison), in the pages of the BOP, God was the God of that splendid nineteenth-century hymn, immortal, invisible, and wise, emphasis on the second adjective. He was there—around, reassuring, in charge, and basically British. There simply was no need to go on about Him. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise to find that of the two articles most directly regarding the church to be found in Tom Royden’s 1909 annual, one (from May 29) concerned the Rev. W. W. Beverage, “ministerial athlete” and unfortunately named temperance campaigner, and the other, “Athletic Parsons,” published the following week, hymned the sporting achievements of a series of sporting clergymen:

The number of parsons who take part in the first rank of games is not, of course, as large as that of those who have given up active participation after taking Holy Orders, but for all that there are some excellent representatives of muscular Christianity in the first flight of several games.

My suspicion is that young Tom will not have lingered too long over this revelation nor, for that matter, over other distinctly eat-your-greens pieces, including—hang onto your hat—a lengthy description (May 8, 1909) of what the London County Council (“a municipal mother of boys”) was doing for young people and, from August 7, 1909, “The Boyhood of Tennyson” (“his father had a delightful library”).

Mercifully, the corner of the BOP inhabited by sporting parsons, bountiful municipalities, and the doings of future poet laureates was a small one. The long-running serials, generally tales of adventure or public school, that constituted the paper’s mainstay were a source of far livelier entertainment. Tom will have begun 1909 with an issue (January 2) that included the fourteenth installment of both In the Heart of the Silent Sea (“The two boys, left unceremoniously by the screaming natives, had nothing for it but to follow in the wake of the fugitives”) and Rowland’s Fortune (“Having seen that two of the ruffians were dead, we returned to where the third lay. This was the fellow Don Carlos had beaten down with the flat of his sword”), as well as the first chapter of The Quenching of the Fiery Tide, a tale of ancient British fighting folk (“Conan, the exquisite, laughed scornfully”). The public schools were represented by The Bluffing of Mason (“Mason was a beast—everyone said so”), Mr. Lattimer’s Tax (“The two boys obeyed, one with a gleam of triumph breaking through a frown of concern; the other, pale and defiant”), and The Doctor’s Double: An Episode at Monkton School.

A large number of these once-ripping yarns now sag badly, and, as anyone who has waded through that fiery tide could tell you, others were not much good to begin with. But it’s impossible not to notice the sophistication of their grammar and vocabulary. The BOP may have had a tendency to patronize its audience, but it usually did so without talking down to them. It says a lot that amongst the writers who wrote for the BOP in its first three decades were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the BOP was “one of the first papers that grew tired of returning my MSS and published them instead”), Jules Verne, R. M. Ballantyne, and the great G. A. Henty, the author of a long sequence of novels (Wulf the Saxon, Under Drake’s Flag, The Young Carthaginian, and many, many others) often involving a enterprising young lad, stirring historical times, and a respectable amount of bloodshed.

The formula worked. Precise data are hard to come by, but the paper’s weekly readership probably peaked at around a million in the late 1880s, the highest level reached by any such publication. Thanks not least to competition from the likes of Chums and, later, The Captain, more up-market (and racier) ventures unburdened by the high-mindedness and rich-man-in-his-castle, poor-man-at-his-gate social inclusiveness that were key parts of the BOP’s ethos, the paper’s circulation fell sharply in the following decade, but it continued to boast a readership that ran easily into the hundreds of thousands and a significance in British life that was more than a matter of mere numbers. It had become, and was to remain, a national institution (a 1929 lunch to celebrate the BOP’s fiftieth anniversary was attended by both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition) and deservedly so.

Those who produced the paper clearly felt a genuine responsibility towards their readers, very few of whom would have had any chance to attend the Eton-and-Harrow surrogates where so many of the BOP’s school stories took place, settings that owed as much to the BOP’s ceaselessly aspirational creed as to snobbery. In part, these stories were, like today’s Gossip Girl, an opportunity for vicarious thrills in a privileged, inaccessible world, but, in part, they were also intended to train their readers how to behave like the public schoolboys they could never be. In similar vein, a recurrent theme that ran through stories both factual (“Boys Who Have Risen”; “Dunces Who Became Famous”; “From Wheelwright’s Bench to Academy: the story of George Tinworth’s boyhood”) and fictional (From Powder Monkey To Admiral; From Fisher Lad to Fleet Surgeon) published by the paper was that of the poor boy made good. Not everyone could become an admiral, or even a fleet surgeon, but the BOP would still do what it could to help its readers make something of themselves.

This may be the only charitable way to interpret the paper’s often shatteringly abrasive advice column, much of it written by that fierce foe of namby-pambiness, Dr. Stables, a Scottish “gentleman gypsy” and wildly prolific writer ( From Fisher Lad to Fleet Surgeon was one of his) who spent much of his time traveling the country in a purpose-built caravan accompanied by dog, parrot, coachman, and valet. A tartan-clad, fantastically bewhiskered, counter-intuitively married (he was a father of six) man, Stables was in his sixties by the time that Tom Royden was reading the BOP, but he cannot be said to have mellowed with age. His frequently questionable prescriptions (many of which can be found reprinted in Karl Sabbagh’s marvelous Your Case is Hopeless: Bracing Advice from the “Boy’s Own Paper”) placed heavy emphasis on the “cold tub” and the avoidance of a habit too ghastly to be referred to directly (readers’ letters themselves were rarely published) and little in the way of good cheer.

Even when the advice was sensible, the delivery tended to be brusque. In the March 6th, 1909 issue, G. F. D. (VITALITY) was told:

Don’t be a little fool. You are, I suppose, by this time in the hands of these quacks. Your money will go, and you’ll get worse.

But the Edwardian era was predominantly an age of optimism. Like the paper for which he wrote,Stables was no doom-and-gloom reactionary (well, not always). The previous week he had written how “the boy is improving vastly. The ordinary town lad is a gentleman compared to the boys we found in our streets in the early eighties.” Progress!

Those behind Tom Royden’s BOP were comfortable with change, but confident that it would be on the right lines and be able to coexist comfortably with the best of what had gone before. To read those issues from 1909 is to be struck by the strong sense of continuity they convey. The cover price (maintained with difficulty) was the same as it had been thirty years before, the editor Hutchison (“the experienced old captain,” in the words of one advertisement) was still at his post, and Stables was just one of a number of contributors who had been published there for decades.

Even the serials, rambling on for months (In the Heart of the Silent Sea sailed on for an exhausting thirty-three weeks) reflected this notion of permanence, a notion unsurprising in a paper published in the heart of an empire on which the sun was never supposed to set. This was the empire whose past, present, and glorious future permeated almost every issue Tom read that year, whether in poetry (“The Song of the Union Jack”; “Britannia Victrix”) or as a subtext (without much sub about it) of many of the serials or in reports from the imperial territories (“Romance of Surveying: Thrilling Stories Told by the Men Who Are Now Mapping Out Our Possessions”; “Birds’-Nesting in India”; “Rhodesia’s Thin Red Line”; “Our Somaliland Fleet”).

This was, the BOP made clear, a Boy’s Own Empire, one run by the sweet, just, boyish (the last a telling adjective in this connection) masters of George Santayana’s infinitely flattering description. The nation that built it was fair, benevolent, and, in all senses of the word, the best. When foreigners appear in Tom’s annuals, it is usually as objects of curiosity and genial, but unmistakable, disdain—an expression of a feeling of not necessarily unkindly superiority that sharpens noticeably when some of the subject peoples of the empire come into view. The BOP wins no prizes for cultural sensitivity, something that has earned it the not so genial disdain of generations of tut-tutting academic commentators with very little cultural sensitivity of their own.

Of the cataclysm that was to overturn this ordered world only a handful of years later, taking many of the BOP’s former readers with it, the only hint in the 1909 annual is this passage from a real-life account of a camping holiday in Germany by Algernon Blackwood, an author better known for stories of the supernatural than for his vacation reminiscences. On this occasion, however, the problems were caused not by ghosts, but by the Kaiser’s police:

On previous trips, when we camped too near the towns, die Polizei often came to ask us what our business was. Often, too, they were very disagreeable and troublesome, poking about in our tents, searching through our kit in the boat, evidently suspicious that we were spies of some kind.

To be sure, the BOP of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages was somewhat more militaristic in tone than it had been before, but it was so in a way that, more often than not, brings to mind Powell and Pressburger’s Colonel Blimp rather than anything more sinister. Its attitude was a manifestation of the blithe (over)confidence in British might that played such a role in the country’s fatal decision to go to war in August 1914. It was not an anticipation, eager or otherwise, of that conflict or the horrors it would bring.

The BOP made it through both world wars (although the weekly edition had been scrapped in 1913) before finally succumbing to changing tastes and publishers in 1967, just a year after Tom’s own death, to live on in memories that have grown only fonder. And not just memories. Academic disapproval now has to compete with not only indulgent nostalgia but also the implied compliment paid to the old paper—and its disgraceful archaic values—by the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys (2006), which is, in many respects, an affectionate updating of the BOP, a point underlined by the fact that the cover of the British first edition was designed to resemble one of the old annuals.

Even if we don’t cheat (and we shouldn’t—that wouldn’t be the BOP way) by counting this unexpected coda as some sort of resurrection, the length of the paper’s actual lifespan—nearly ninety years —remains a tremendous achievement. The BOP’s remarkable durability was a testimony to the strength of the culture from which it sprang, a testimony to the strength of its own distinctive vision, and also to the way that culture and paper merged within the minds of some sometimes equally remarkable readers. In the introduction to his book The Best of British Pluck—The Boy’s Own Paper Revisited (1976), the author Philip Warner recalled his time as a POW of the Japanese working on the Bangkok-Moulmein railway in 1943:

Food was inadequate and appalling; the work was … exhausting; the … guards seemed scarcely sane; malaria … and a host of other diseases were rife… . Men died with steady regularity. Around was the jungle, hot, oppressive, menacing. There was really no hope of survival… . I remember one day looking round at the scene and saying to myself: “What an extraordinary situation! It’s like some strange adventure in the Boy’s Own Paper.” Suddenly it was less real, more bearable: after all BOP characters lived to tell the tale. Fantasy perhaps, but in certain conditions illusion may be more genuine than reality.

That’s the spirit.

Playing the Joker

National Review Online, August 18, 2009

If the right to vote (or not vote) for our leaders is a sign of a healthy democracy, so is the right not just to criticize, but also to insult them. Jeering, heckling, and rude, impious laughter are no less a part of the democratic process than the force-fed ecstasy of a party convention, the cheers of the shining-eyed faithful, or the complacent applause at rubber-chicken dinners. A statement of the obvious? You’d think so, but judging by some of the more overwrought reactions to a new and notably unflattering portrait of President Obama, some of his supporters need to relearn how to live with an American way of debate that is vigorous, rarely sedate, and often distinctly rough about the edges. That is not to say that this depiction of the president does not raise some troubling issues of its own — part of its force, unfortunately, if probably inadvertently, derives from the fact that it does — but those issues are, on balance, rather less disturbing than the near-hysterical response of a number of those who claim to be offended by it, reactions that suggest that too many of Obama’s disciples still believe their god-king should be allowed to float, untroubled and undisturbed, above the hurly-burly that the rest of us call politics.

The offending image, as most Americans know by now, is a photograph of Obama manipulated into an approximation of Heath Ledger’s Joker character in The Dark Knight. Its origins remain somewhat obscure, but it appears to have been based on an earlier photoshopped Obama-as-Joker created by a Chicago student. That image was not apparently a reflection of its creator’s political views (and was subsequently removed from his Flickr page). The same cannot be said of the new version. Joker-Obama has been given a blue background and a red frame. These colors combine with a chalk-white face and red slash of mouth to conjure up a harsh, scornful retort to the serene red, white, and blue of the legendary “Hope” by Shepard Fairey that did so much to shape and enhance Obama’s electoral magic.

When comparing these two clashing portrayals, we notice that in Fairey’s poster Obama’s mouth is set, serious, determined, while Joker-Obama’s is transformed into a hideous, thoroughly unconvincing smile, a smile made even more disconcerting by the subject’s staring panda eyes. His face, like that of the movie character on which it is based, is that of a madman. Fairey’s Obama by contrast is a saint, a visionary, a leader, his eyes peering out at the radiant future into which, no doubt, he intends to take us, a future summed up in only two words (first “hope” and later “change,” or was it the other way round?) that can be both noun and commanding verb, but are as empty of real meaning as the “socialism” with which the anonymous artist behind Joker-Obama captioned his creation.

Posters of Joker-Obama first appeared a month or so ago, before going viral and becoming the first anti-Obama artifact to attract a mass following in a country still littered with adoring Obamabilia. In a sense, therefore, this brutal little portrait has already done its work. The icon is chipped. A sharp, disrespectful cackle has interrupted the self-satisfied chorus of agreement with which Obama’s skillfully teleprompted sermons are usually received, a cackle made even more dangerous to the administration by the fact that mounting public skepticism over some of the Democrats’ initiatives has, for the first time since the election, created an opening that even the stumblebum GOP might manage to exploit. It is this (as much as any sense of lèse-majesté, although there is that too) that helps explain some of the outrage that this one image has generated, a tantrum rendered grimly amusing by still-fresh memories of the silence, or even approval, with which so many Democrats greeted the cruel renderings (including, naturally, one as the Joker from, naturally, Vanity Fair) of George W. Bush that scarred the political landscape throughout his term in office.

To be fair, some of those who object to Joker-Obama have attempted to clothe their complaints in something more substantive than “You can’t do that to our guy.” The word “socialism” is inaccurate, they grumble, and to the extent that the Democrats do not appear intent on reviving the spirit of Upton Sinclair they are quite right. On the other hand, we live in 2009, and the bundle of resentments, superstitions, and aspirations once dubbed socialism have evolved into a protean collection of ideas that don’t fit comfortably with traditional notions of what that antique ideological label should mean. Who needs common ownership of the means of production? With growing government intervention in the economy (even excluding the current emergency arrangements), in your pocketbook, and in the more general ordering of society, there are worse ways to describe the direction in which this country is sliding. “Socialism” may not be the most precise, the most carefully calibrated, professorially approved term to use, but as shorthand for the understandable fear that a remodeled leftist leviathan is stirring, it will do.

Others have tut-tutted that using the Joker in this fashion makes no sense because (a) the Joker isn’t a socialist and (b) President Obama is not a raving homicidal maniac — criticisms that may suggest that the literalists are now running the asylum. We are after all talking about a caricature. We can, I think, agree that — despite persistent rumors of his earlier involvement in the Biden campaign — the Joker is not even a Democrat, let alone a socialist (he is more of a nihilist, I suppose). Equally, I hope that even the most rabid of those of us on the right can admit that Obama — while not so preternaturally calm as frequently asserted — is very far from being a raving homicidal maniac. We ought also to be able to agree that using the Joker to deface (in two senses of the word) a picture of Obama was, sit down please, a joke — a pointed joke, sure, a nasty joke, maybe, but a joke nonetheless. There’s nothing much to parse here, folks, just move along.

And yet that grotesque image has made more of an impact than might have been expected. Perhaps it’s just because it represents a chance at last — after months of generally worshipful media coverage — to protest and, better, to make fun of our sainted president. And maybe it does come with a certain crude logic. You can at least make a case that the Joker is an agent of chaos, and that Joker-Obama thus taps into fears that chaos (hyperinflation, say) will soon be with us if the Democrats’ policies continue in their present direction. Maybe. But the best bet is that the real power of Joker-Obama is as a mask, a device that plays to the anxiety of many Americans (an anxiety so strong in some cases that it has given birth to the Birthers) that they do not know who Obama is, an anxiety that is the not altogether surprising consequence of his rapid rise, guarded personality, deceptive governing style, and — it’s a shame that this should be perceived as relevant, but it apparently is — an upbringing and ethnic background that differ sharply from what was once considered the American norm.

That last aspect brings us to the regrettably inevitable question as to whether the poster is any way racist. Of course, the manner in which elements in the Obama claque attempt to shut down debate by blaming (it sometimes seems) almost any criticism of the president on racism has become a cliché of contemporary American politics. And in that respect, the reaction to Joker-Obama has not disappointed. Blogging for LA Weekly, Steven Mikulan claimed “the only thing missing” from the poster “is a noose.” Over at the Washington Post, culture critic Philip Kennicott tied himself up in knots as he tried to demonstrate that applying the “urban” make-up of Heath Ledger’s Joker to Obama (rather than that of Jack Nicholson’s supposedly more “urbane” take) was a “subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument,” an attempt to assert that “Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time.”

Ridiculous, yup, but just because most such allegations of racism are ludicrous, that does not mean that all are. There is something — the whiteface — about Joker-Obama that means this poster is not a banner under which the opposition to the president should rally. To be sure, “clown white” (to use the technical term) makeup is an essential element in the appearance of Batman’s archenemy: it’s impossible to transform anybody — whether George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama — into the Joker without it. Nevertheless, even if (as I would guess) the Joker-Obama poster was created without any racist intent, it can still be read in a way that resonates very uncomfortably indeed. However much we might want to, we can wish away neither the uglier parts of history nor their continuing echoes. As a result, therefore, and regardless of the intention behind it, giving Obama the Joker’s stark white skin tone takes what would (in the case of Bush and Clinton) be simple caricature dangerously close to the badlands of minstrelsy.

Of course, most (though not all) minstrel shows featured whites in blackface rather than the other way round, but a key theme that lurked within almost all of them was the use of, to adopt a clumsy phrase, racial cross-dressing to mock and belittle black people. It’s the memory, however vague, however buried, of this, I suspect, that has contributed to both the poster’s offensiveness (to some) and, sadly, its appeal (to others). Yes, About.com (owned by the New York Times!) is, at the time of writing, running a picture of RNC chairman Michael Steele made up to look like a clown, but when I look at it all I see is a depiction of a man (who happens to be African-American) portrayed as a clown. The far more disturbing Joker-Obama is something else. Unlike Steele’s sleek clown, we are shown an unhinged, sinister trickster, with make-up that is not so much costume as (rather poorly executed) camouflage, a disguise that can at least conceivably be interpreted as a suggestion that Obama could not have been elected if he had revealed, so to speak, his true colors, a suggestion that in its most literal sense is deeply demeaning to African-Americans.

Stretching too hard, perhaps, overly “sensitive,” possibly, but both America’s troubled racial history and the current febrile state of our politics call for caution in this area — and so does clear-eyed political calculation of what it will take to beat Obama in 2012. Playing the Joker just isn’t the way to go.

Destination Moon

National Review Online, July 17, 2009

Apollo_11_BBC_Studio

I don’t know where I was when I heard that JFK had been shot, but I can remember where I was at teatime the following day — at home in the east of England, watching the very first episode of Doctor Who. It was the halting, creakily paced beginning of a long, beguiling tumble through time and space that, in the absence of any proper space program of our own, became an eccentric and quintessentially English alternative to Gemini, Apollo, and footsteps on the moon.

Not for the first time, we had sweetened our failure with fantasy. NASA’s Mission Control may have been the acme of American industrial cool, a collection of (Alfred) Sloan Rangers, calm, crew-cut men in white shirts methodically guiding tiny vessels over immense distances, but we had Doctor Who, an almost-perfect embodiment of the chaotic, improvisational genius that Brits like to believe is one of their better national characteristics. The doctor generally appeared to have little control and less interest over where or when his spacecraft might land — but wherever and whenever it was, and whatever the perils he encountered there, he invariably managed to emerge victorious at the end. To be sure, he was an alien from another world, but he was a very British alien, amateurish, surprisingly effective, and clad in vaguely Edwardian clothing, a wistful nod to a lost empire’s last good time.

Yes, the fact that the Union Jack would never preside over some far lunar crater was a disappointment to a nation still proud of its explorers of old, but it was with a certain sardonic, stoic grace that this once-great power came to terms with its role as a space-race spectator and concluded that it performed that role rather well. In addition, the world famous Jodrell Bank Observatory was, Britons told themselves, an essential element in man’s thrust into the unknown, a listening post that provided the Americans with invaluable assistance, not least in eavesdropping on the intriguing Soviet spacecraft that sailed through the heavens. These vehicles were shrouded in mystery and lies, yet were quite capable of delivering a series of spectacular achievements — the first orbit by an artificial satellite, the first man in space, the first space walk, the first successful soft landing of a probe on the moon.

To tell the truth, we were able to take more pleasure in those Soviet triumphs than were our cousins across the Atlantic. Naturally, we were more or less on the side of the Yanks, our allies, “family,” and, don’t say it too loudly, heirs, but we had a touch more room for the idea that the us-versus-them that counted most was man against the dangers of the universe, not man against man.

When, in August 1961, four months or so after his pioneering orbit around the Earth, Yuri Gagarin visited the British capital, the London Times sniffed that he had “received a welcome that sometimes bordered on hysteria” (this was before Beatlemania). At just three years old, I was a part of the frenzy. My parents, no stooges of the Kremlin, decided it was “important” that I was taken to stare at the Soviet spaceman. Sadly, I have no memory of this historic event, but I like to believe that it played a part in triggering my lifelong fascination with what might lie out there among the stars, a fascination only partly attributable to my subsequent abduction by aliens (well, you never know), a fascination rocket-powered throughout my boyhood by the way that science fiction and science fact played off each other in that first great age of space exploration, an era that promised, or so it seemed, to make a reality of the wonders already foretold by Asimov, Clarke, and the best of the rest of the paperback seers.

And as the decade progressed, each new program — Gemini, Apollo, Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz — seemed to bring that reality ever closer, especially when it became clear that man was at last on the threshold of a visit to his planet's nearest neighbor. By the late summer of 1968, the finish line was coming into view. September saw the Soviet Zond 5 become the first vessel to circle the moon and return safely to earth — complete with a cargo of worms, flies, and a turtle or two. America countered with a sharp ratchet-up of the evolutionary scale, dispatching Apollo 7 into orbit in October, the first successful manned Apollo mission.

That, thought NASA, was practice enough. It had to be. Nobody knew what the Soviets might try next. In December, Apollo 8 headed for the moon — and possibly the most magical Christmas since Charles Dickens first published his tale of Ebenezer, ghosts, and redemption. Britain was enthralled. The moon made stars of science correspondents such as the dignified Peter Fairley from ITV (then the UK’s sole private television network) and the boyishly enthusiastic James Burke of the BBC, and gave an extra boost to the career of Patrick Moore, the marvelously oddball host of The Sky at Night, a show the BBC has operated as a vespers for insomniac astronomers since, astonishingly, 1957 — with Patrick, these days Sir Patrick, Moore always in charge. As for me, in between painstakingly monitoring developments on the telly and painstakingly boring everyone I knew with my command of mission minutiae, I pored over diagrams from the newspapers showing Apollo 8’s tricky trajectory (suitably enough, it resembled a figure eight) and preparing for the tense vigil for to come once Anders, Lovell, and Borman first disappeared behind the dark side of the moon.

Then 1968 evolved into 1969, and Apollo 8 into Apollo 9 and from that into the dress rehearsal that was Apollo 10. The Soviet program ran into difficulties, leaving history to Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins — and the future to the rest of us. Looking at the diary I kept that year, I can see that I had marked out the projected date — July 16 — for the launch (“US MOON SHOT OFF TODAY”) of Apollo 11 some time before the momentous day itself actually dawned. This launch was something to count the days to, a grand historical happening to which the later entry in my diary didn’t do much justice: “It took off successfully.” True enough, but not enough. I gazed that day delighted and agog at television pictures of the giant rocket rising majestically into a sky then unscarred by memories of the Challenger.

Eventually Apollo 11 vanished from my sight — but not from my mind. Obsessed by thoughts of the moon landing ahead (at last!) and where it might lead (Mars!), I stalked that spacecraft over the next few days. Nothing must go wrong! TV’s designated experts did what they could to explain what was going on, helped by the models and the charts that were the best — not bad — that British television could come up with in a primitive time long before CGI. But it could never be enough: I needed to know more. I scrutinized footage of the three astronauts. How were they doing? Were they okay? I checked out cavernous, disciplined Mission Control for clues. Was all well? Who looked nervous? Between the beeps that became part of Apollo’s soundtrack, I strained to make sense of those exotic, evocative communications between Houston and spaceship that NASA chose to relay to us back “home,” a word itself now given a larger meaning than ever before.

The night of July 20 found me allowed to stay up way past my bedtime and sip from a glass of, strangely, cherry brandy (a sickly drink then mainly associated with a minor scandal involving Prince Charles) that I’d been given so I could toast Armstrong, Aldrin, and, as my mother usually described him, “poor Michael Collins.” We watched as the Eagle slowly (or so it seemed to me then) descended onto the gray surface that I believed would soon (the exciting-sounding year 2000 sounded about right) play host to moon bases and other treats; I listened to the clipped, sparse commentary of a BBC that had the sensitivity to let the descent — and the men from NASA — speak for themselves.

And it was the BBC that we watched. Despite perpetual parental muttering about its (undoubted) left-wing bias, the Stuttafords, like most British families in that era, tended to turn to the Beeb for coverage of anything really significant. July 20, 1969, showed why. ITV’s coverage revolved around hours upon hours of Frost/Moon or, more accurately, David Frost’s Moon Party, a broadcast that drove one guest, Ray Bradbury, to walk off in despair. It was not, grumbled Bradbury later, “a night for Sammy Davis Jr. or Engelbert Humperdinck.” Indeed it wasn’t.

Then finally (nearly 4 a.m., UK time — what had they been doing in there?), Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Eagle and onto the Moon. Sitting in a house in the quiet English countryside, we raised refreshed glasses and exhaustedly contemplated the spectacle of a man walking on a rock some quarter of a million miles away. The images transmitted from the Sea of Tranquility were blurry, shadowy, appropriately dreamlike, but what had taken place was clear, even if I didn’t remain awake long enough to see Aldrin join Armstrong out in that “magnificent desolation” of theirs. No matter. As my diary for that night records: “MAN on MOON.” And so he was. And so they were. And so we were.

There are, of course, those who say that the whole thing was both a waste of money and a blind alley. I don’t agree, but that’s a discussion for another time. For now, I’m waiting for Monday the 20th, and a chance to crack open the cherry brandy in a celebration of that extraordinary night of 40 years ago. Come to think of it, maybe not cherry brandy, but you get the point . . .

Millionaires' Brawl

the weekly Standard, June 8, 2009

With the economy floundering, Wall Street in disgrace, and American capitalism facing its most serious ideological challenge in one, two, or three generations (you can take your pick), it's a good moment to remember Lenin.

While the bearded Bolshevik's grasp of economics was never the best and his stock picks remain a mystery, he would have grasped the politics of our present situation all too well. The old butcher would not have found anything especially surprising about the rise of Barack Obama, the nature of his supporters, or the evolution of his policies. He would have simply asked his usual question: Kto/kogo ("Who/whom"). The answer would tell him almost everything he needed to know. Lenin regarded politics as binary--a zero sum game with winners, losers, and nothing in between. For him it was a bare-knuckled brawl that ultimately could be reduced to that single brutal question: who was on top and who was not. Who was giving orders to whom. Hope and Change, nyet so much.

Of course, it would be foolish to deny the role that things like idealism, sanctimony, fashion, hysteria, exhaustion, restlessness, changing demographics, Hurricane Katrina, an unpopular war, George W. Bush, and mounting economic alarm played in shaping last November's Democratic triumph. Nevertheless if we peer through the smug, self-congratulatory smog that enveloped the Obama campaign, the outlines of a harder-edged narrative can be discerned, a narrative that bolsters the idea that Lenin's cynical maxim has held up better than the state he created.

So, who in 2008 was Who, and who Whom?

In a Democratic year, it's no surprise that organized labor emerged as Who and large swaths of the private sector as Whom. Many of the other, sometimes overlapping, constituencies (whether it's minorities, the young, or the gay, to name but three) who saw themselves benefiting from an Obama presidency were equally easy to predict. After all, whether by the accident of his birth or the design of his campaign, Obama's victorious coalition was, even more than most, a creation of meticulously assembled blocks, more pluribus than unum, and each with plenty to gain from his arrival in the White House.

That said, for all the smiles, the reassuring vagueness, and the this-isn't-going-to-hurt (too much) rhetoric, it was somewhat less predictable that a large slice of the upper crust would succumb to Obama's deftly articulated pitch. Yes, it's true that there had been signs that some richer, more upscale voters were being driven into the Democratic camp by the culture wars (and the fact that prosperity had left them free to put a priority on such issues). Nevertheless, even after taking account of the impact of an unusually unpopular incumbent, it's striking how much this process intensified in 2008--a year in which the Democrats were not only running their most leftwing candidate since George McGovern, but also running a leftwing candidate with every chance of winning. Voting for Obama would not be a cost-free virtuecratic nod, but a choice with consequences. At first glance therefore it makes little sense that 49 percent of those from households making more than $100,000 a year (26 percent of the electorate) opted for the Democrat, up from 41 percent in 2004, as did 52 percent of those raking in over $200,000 (6 percent of voters), up from 35 percent last go round.

Yet, this shift in voting patterns is more rational than it initially seems: more Lenin than lemming. Class conflict is inherent in all higher primate societies (even this one). It can manifest itself at every level, right up to the very top, and certain aspects of the 2008 campaign came to resemble a millionaires' brawl--one that was, of course, decorous, sotto voce, and rarely mentioned.

In a shrewd article written for Politico shortly after the election, Clinton adviser Mark Penn tried to pin down who exactly these higher echelon Obama voters were ("professional," corporate rather than small business, highly educated, and so on). Possibly uncomfortable with acknowledging anything so allegedly un-American as class yet politically very comfortable with this obvious class's obvious electoral clout, he eulogized its supposedly shared characteristics: teamwork, pragmatism, collective action, trust in government intervention, a preference for the scientific over the faith-based, and a belief in the "interconnectedness of the world." We could doubtless add an appreciation of NPR and a fondness for a bracing decaf venti latte to the list, and as we did so we would try hard to forget this disquieting passage from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: "The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians."

We are not Oceania, and there's a messiah in the White House rather than Big Brother, but it's not hard to read Lenin, Penn, and Orwell, and then decide that Penn's professionals are the coming Who. They have certainly (at least until the current economic unpleasantness) been growing rapidly in numbers. As Penn relates:

 While there has been some inflation over the past 12 years, the exit poll demographics show that the fastest growing group of voters .  .  . has been those making over $100,000 a year. .  .  . In 1996, only 9 percent of the electorate said their family income was that high .  .  . [By 2008] it had grown to 26 percent.

This is a class that is likely to be more ethnically diverse and younger than previous groupings of the affluent--factors that may influence their voting as much as their income. Nevertheless, even if we allow for the fact that there is a limit to how far you can conflate households on $100,000 a year with those on $200,000, there are enough of them with enough in the way of similar career paths, education, and aspirations that together they can be treated as the sort of voting bloc that Penn describes. And it's a formidable voting bloc with a formidable sense of its own self-interest.

That sense of self-interest might seem tricky to reconcile with voting for a candidate likely (and for those making over $200,000 certain) to hike their taxes. In the wake of the long Wall Street boom and savage bust, however, it is anything but. Put crudely, the economic growth of the 1990s and 2000s created the conditions in which this class could both flourish and feel hard done by. Penn hints at one explanation for this contradiction when he refers to the alienating effect of the layoffs that are a regular feature of modern American corporate life. That's true enough. Today's executive may be well paid, sometimes very well paid, but he is in some respects little more than a day laborer. Corporate paternalism has been killed--and the murderer is widely believed to be the Gordon Gekko model of capitalism that Obama has vowed to cut down to size.

But Penn fails to mention (perhaps because it was too unflattering a motive to attribute to a constituency he clearly wants to cultivate) that this discontent stems as much from green eyes as pink slips--as well, it must be added, from a strong sense of entitlement denied. Traces of this can be detected in parts of Robert Frank's Richistan: A Journey through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich (2007), a clever, classically top-of-the-bull-market account of what was then--ah, 2007!--America's new Gilded Age. To read this invaluable travelogue of the territories of the rich (the "virtual nation," complete with possessions, that Frank dubs "Richistan") is to see how the emergence of a mass class of super-rich could fuel growing resentment both within its ranks and, by extension, without. By "without," I refer not to the genuinely poor, who have, sadly, had time to become accustomed to almost immeasurably worse levels of deprivation, but to the not-quite-so-rich eyeing their neighbors' new Lexus and simmering, snarling, and borrowing to keep up. The story of rising inequality in America is a familiar one: What's not so well known is that the divide has grown sharpest at the top. Frank reports that the average income for the top 1 percent of income earners grew 57 percent between 1990 and 2004, but that of the top 0.1 percent raced ahead by 85 percent, a trend that will have accelerated until 2008 and found echoes further down the economic hierarchy.

You might not weep for the mergers-and-acquisition man maddened by the size of an even richer hedge fund manager's yacht, but his trauma is a symptom of a syndrome that has spread far beyond Greenwich, Connecticut. Above a certain level, wealth, and the status that flows from it, is more a matter of relatives than absolutes. The less dramatically affluent alphas that make up the core of Penn's professionals--lawyers, journalists, corporate types, academics, senior civil servants, and the like--suddenly found themselves over the last decade not just overshadowed by finance's new titans but actually priced out of many things they view as the perks of their position: private schools, second homes, and so on. I doubt they enjoyed the experience.

Well educated, articulate and, by any usual measure, successful, they had been reduced to betas--and thus, politically, to a glint in Obama's eye. The decades of prosperity had swollen their numbers, but shrunk their status and their security. Their privileges were mocked or dismantled and their "good" jobs were ever more vulnerable. Wives as well as husbands now had to work, and not just down at the church's charity store either, a change that is more resented than Stepford's children would generally like to admit. Even so, things they felt should have been theirs by rights were still out of reach or, perhaps worse, graspable only by heavily leveraged hands. In a boom-time (July 2006) piece for Vanity Fair, Nina Munk interviewed two women amongst "the worn carpet and faded chintz" of Greenwich's old guard Round Hill Club. They told her how everything had gone downhill, "no one can afford to live here--all our kids are moving to Darien or Rowayton because it's cheaper."

It's a mark of the pressure to keep up that, as Frank noted, in 2004, 20 percent of "Lower Richistanis," those 7.5 million households (the number would be lower now, but it then would have constituted roughly 6-7 percent of the U.S. total) struggling along on a net worth of $1 million to $10 million, spent more than they earned. These poor souls will have included the most prosperous of Penn's professionals, but in an age of "mass luxury" and almost unlimited credit, the compulsion to do whatever it took not to be trumped by the Joneses spread to their less affluent cohorts, with the devastating consequences that were finally visible to all by the middle of last year.

Thus Penn's people had been outbid and outplayed by a rapacious Wall Street swarm of boors, rogues, gamblers, whippersnappers, the plain lucky, and the otherwise undeserving. Then came Wall Street's implosion and these prejudices were reinforced by that hole in the 401(k) and the collapse in the value of that overmortgaged house. Voting left looked better and better.

In 2007, the final financial reckoning was still slouching along waiting to be born. Back then, all they knew was that they had been shoved down the totem pole, which had changed beyond recognition. Nothing that had mattered did, or so it appeared. You can see an echo of this in the opening sections of one of the numerous (and, to be fair, not entirely unmerited) I-told-you-so articles penned by Paul Krugman in recent months:

Thirty-plus years ago, when I was a graduate student in economics, only the least ambitious of my classmates sought careers in the financial world. Even then, investment banks paid more than teaching or public service--but not that much more, and anyway, everyone knew that banking was, well, boring. In the years that followed, of course, banking became anything but boring. Wheeling and dealing flourished, and pay scales in finance shot up, drawing in many of the nation's best and brightest young people (O.K., I'm not so sure about the "best" part).

This social unease bubbled through Tom Wolfe's "The Pirate Pose," a 2007 essay that ran, apparently without irony, in the inaugural edition of Condé Nast's glossy Portfolio magazine, itself a lost artifact of the era when CDOs were still chic. Wolfe's sly--and in its exaggerations accidentally self-revealing--piece opens with an insistent pounding at the door of a Park Avenue apartment. Inside, a genteel lady rises from her "18th-century" (old!) "burled-wood secretary" (tasteful!), "her grandmother's" (old money!), "where she always wrote her thank-you notes" (refined!). Outside rages the absolutely dreadful hedge fund manager with "more money than God" who has just moved into the building:

Ever so gingerly, she opened the door. He was a meat-fed man wearing a rather shiny--silk?--and rather too vividly striped open shirt that paunched out slightly over his waistband. The waistband was down at hip-hugger level because the lower half of his fortyish body was squeezed into a pair of twentyish jeans .  .  . gloriously frayed at the bottoms of the pant legs, from which protruded a pair of long, shiny pointed alligator shoes. They looked like weapons.

Wolfe had fallen out of love with the Masters of the Universe. The ironic detachment that was one of the many pleasures of The Bonfire of the Vanities had been bumped and buffeted by the author's horror at the barbarians not just broken through the gates, but everywhere he would rather be, something that perhaps explains the faintest trace of glee that runs through this passage:

As for the co-op buildings in New York, their residents having felt already burned by the fabulous new money, some are now considering new screening devices. .  .  . The board of a building on Park Avenue is now considering rejecting applicants who have too much money.

Wolfe is angry, not so much because of the money (Sherman McCoy wasn't exactly poor), but because these loutish self-styled freebooters do not care for what he enjoys, what he stands for, even for where he might socialize (in his lists of some of the older Upper East Side hangouts, he throws in a couple of the more recherché names--the Brook, the Leash--as a reminder that he knows what's what). They despise what he favors, and even condescension, that traditional last line of defense against the arriviste who does not know his place, is unavailable. How can you condescend to someone who does not care what you think and is richer than you can imagine? The great writer finds himself sidelined on what is, quite literally, his home turf.

This is the class resentment that twists through recent remarks by another writer, a former academic who argued that it was ridiculous that "25-year-olds [were] getting million-dollar bonuses, [and] they were willing to pay $100 for a steak dinner and the waiter was getting the kinds of tips that would make a college professor envious."

The reference to a "college professor" as the epitome of the individual wronged by this topsy-turvy state of affairs is telling: 58 percent of those with a postgraduate education voted Democratic, up from 50 percent in 1992 (those with just one degree split more evenly). If those comments are telling, so is the identity of the speaker: one Barack Obama, a politician who has explicitly and implicitly promised the managers, the scribblers, the professors, and the now-eclipsed gentry that he would finish what the market collapse had begun. He'd put those Wall Street nouveaux back in their place. Higher taxes will claw at what's left of their fortunes and, no less crucially, their prospects. What taxes don't accomplish, new regulation (some of which even makes some sense) and the direct stake the government has now taken in so much of the economy will. Better still are all the respectably lucrative, respectably respectable jobs that it will take to run, or bypass, this new order: Former derivatives traders need not apply.

In an only slightly tongue-in-cheek February column in the New York Times, David Brooks neatly described what this will mean:

 After the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three .  .  . a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live.

If the price for this is a relatively modest (for now) tax increase on their own incomes, it is one the denizens of Ward Three and their equivalents elsewhere will be happy to pay. For it is they now who are on a roll, and every day the news, carefully crafted by the journalists that make up such an archetypical part of Penn's professional class, gets sweeter.

The humbling of Wall Street has made for great copy, but it's fascinating how much personal animus runs through some of the reporting; from the giddy, gloating, descriptions of excess, of bonuses won and fortunes lost, to the oddly misogynistic trial-of-Marie-Antoinette subgenre devoted to examining the plight of "hedge fund wives" and, more recently, "TARP wives" (who had not, of course, been compelled to work).

In his "Profiles in Panic" a January 2009, article for Vanity Fair, Michael Shnayerson wrote:

The day after Lehman Brothers went down, a high-end Manhattan department store reportedly had the biggest day of returns in its history. "Because the wives didn't want the husbands to get the credit-card bills," says a fashion-world insider.

Not quite the guillotine, but the tricoteuses would have relished the story.

And then there's this from the Washington Post's travel section last month:

For so long, they have been taking Manhattan. They as in the Wall Streeters who counted their bonuses in increments of millions. .  .  . The coveted restaurants, the hotels with infinite thread-count sheets .  .  . the designer shops that sniff at the idea of a sale--it was all theirs. But the times they-are-a-changin'. .  .  . Our moment to reclaim the city has arrived. To shove our wallets forward and say, Yes, we can afford this. In fact, give us two.

To anticipate what (other than Ward Three vacationers to Manhattan) is coming next, listen to the increasing talk of congressional investigations (modelled on the FDR-era Pecora hearings) into Wall Street's workings or for that matter an intriguing, much-discussed piece in the Atlantic Monthly by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist for the IMF (Academic: check! Bureaucrat: check!), in which he drew comparisons, not all of them unfair, between the incestuous relationship between Wall Street and Washington and the more overtly corrupt oligarchies he had witnessed abroad in the course of his work. As this analysis finds wider acceptance (and it's too convenient not to), it presages a far greater overhaul of the financial sector than the moneymen now expect and a permanent shift of the balance of power (and the resulting rewards) back in favor of the political class and those who feed off it.

If you think that leaves some of Obama's Wall Street backers in the role of dupes, you're right. But there is a group who are looking smarter by the moment: the tiny cluster that dwells in Upper Richistan (households with a net worth in excess of $100,000,000). If we look at the admittedly sketchy data, there are clear indications that a majority of the inhabitants of Lower Richistan--with their millions but not their ten millions--voted for McCain. However much they might dislike the GOP's social conservatism or hanker after, say, a greener planet, they know that they are not so rich that they can afford to overlook the damage that a high tax, high regulation, high dudgeon liberal regime could do to their wealth, position, and prospects.

The view from Upper Richistan looks very different. The (again sketchy) data suggest that its occupants voted for Obama, as they may well have done for Kerry. Platinum card and red (well, tastefully pink-accented) flag apparently go well together. Warren Buffett's ideological leanings are well known, as are the donations, causes, and preachings of George Soros. Then there was that campaign a few years back by some richer folk (including Soros, Sanka heiress Agnes Gund, and a nauseatingly named grouplet called Responsible Wealth) in defense of the Death Tax. Describing itself as a "network of over 700 business leaders and wealthy individuals in the top 5% of wealth and/or income in the US who use their surprising voice to advocate for fair taxes and corporate accountability," Responsible Wealth is these days busily calling for New York governor David Paterson to increase the tax on "those who can afford it--which means us."

To be sure, neither self-righteousness nor idiocy is a respecter of income, but taken as a whole such efforts are much more than gesture politics, and much more than an updated version of the radical chic so ably described by a younger Tom Wolfe. Many New Jerseyans might think that the very liberal, very rich (thank you, Goldman Sachs) Jon Corzine has been a joke of a governor, but his political career has been all too serious--easily gliding from Wall Street to the U.S. Senate to the governor's mansion--and he's by no means alone. Colorado's high-profile "Gang of Four" (three tech entrepreneurs and a billionaire heiress) may not quite share the politics of Madame Mao's even more notorious clique, but they have been enormously effective in pushing their state into the Democratic camp, and their tactics are sure to be emulated elsewhere. In Richistan, Frank cited a 2004 study that showed that among candidates who spent more than $4 million on their own campaigns, Democrats outnumbered Republicans three to one. Among candidates that spent $1 million to $4 million, Republicans outspent Democrats two to one: more evidence of the political split between Lower and Upper Richistan.

The notion that some of the very richest Americans (not all, of course) support the Democrats should no longer be seen as a novelty. Backing Obama was just the latest chapter in a well-worn story. And it is not as illogical as it might seem. These Croesuses are rich enough scarcely to notice the worst (fingers-crossed) that an Obama IRS can do. They were thus free to vote for Obama, a candidate whose broader policy agenda clearly resonated with many in this nation's elite and who seemed at the time both plausible and unthreatening. The shrewdest or most cynical amongst them will have realized something else, something that an old Bolshevik might call a class interest. The onslaughts on Lower Richistan and on Wall Street will make it more difficult for others to join them at mammon's pinnacle and thus to compete with them economically, politically (particularly in an era when McCain-Feingold has greatly increased the importance of being able to self-finance a campaign), and socially.

Who/whom indeed.

Tough Times in EUtopia

The Weekly Standard, March 30, 2009

Sometimes truth just has to speak to powerlessness. Addressing the EU's sham parliament in mid-February, the Czech Republic's refreshingly tactless and refreshingly Thatcherite president, Václav Klaus, raised the awkward topic of what the EU euphemistically refers to as its "democratic deficit" and told MEPs that they were part of this problem, not its solution:

 "Since there is no European demos-and no European nation-this defect cannot be solved by strengthening the role of the European parliament either. This would, on the contrary, make the problem worse and lead to an even greater alienation between the citizens of the European countries and Union institutions."

Klaus's listeners were predictably outraged. They ought to have been terrified. With the EU economies falling apart at an unprecedented pace, there is nothing that these toy-town parliamentarians can do-except get out of the way.

The EU's insultingly undemocratic nature is not news (indeed, it is part of its rationale), but it remains the key to grasping how those who run the EU have, for better and worse, had so much success in ramming their agenda through. Not having to bother too much about national electorates has been a great boon to Brussels. As the continent's economies slide ever deeper into the mire, however, that once handy feature could end up crashing the entire system.

An economic debacle on the current scale is going to shake any political structure, however securely moored, but the EU's persistent recourse to a form of soft authoritarianism has left it peculiarly ill suited to weather the storm to come. After decades of routinely bypassing its voters the union may well no longer have what it takes to secure their approval for the harsh medicine and painful sacrifices necessary to bring the EU through this ordeal in one piece. After all, it can barely even get them to vote: Turnout for the most recent (2004) elections for the EU parliament sank to a record low of 45.5 percent. Admittedly that total was dragged down by massively uninterested Eastern Europeans (only 16.7 percent of Slovaks voted and 20.4 percent of Poles), but it was sparse almost everywhere: Only 39 percent of Brits showed up, about the same percentage as made it to the voting booth in the Netherlands, one of the EU's founding nations.

As the history of the union's occasional, grudgingly granted referenda-a sorry saga of chicanery, rejection and do-overs-reminds us, appeals to the supposed solidarity of that imaginary European demos have never really worked. And that was in the good times. They surely won't do the trick now, nor will arguments based on the logic of a free market ideology widely, if inaccurately, said to have failed. Yet to steer a course through what may become hideously hard times without much in the way of popular consent threatens to push already alienated electorates in the direction of the extremist politics of left or right.

The story of this slump is too familiar to need repeating here, but it is worth pausing to consider how the introduction of the euro has left the EU marooned on a circle of economic hell all of its own making. Imposed on most of the European heartland by a characteristic combination of bullying, bribery, conclave, and legerdemain, the single currency was put in place with as little regard for the real world as for the ballot box. To squeeze a wide range of vastly divergent economies (and to do so with few safety nets) into one monetary system made little sense except when understood as a matter of politics, not economics. But economics has a nasty habit of biting back.

Up until the eruption of the present crisis, the European Central Bank's interest rate policy primarily reflected the needs of France and Germany, Euroland's largest economies. This left rates "too" low for naturally faster growing countries like Ireland and Spain, which in turn inflated unsustainable housing bubbles. These have now burst-in Ireland's case taking much of the banking system down with it. On some forecasts Irish GDP may shrink by 10 percent between 2008 and 2010, a dismal number that could eventually prove too optimistic. Gloomsters joke bleakly that the difference between Ireland and Iceland is six months and one consonant. Spain meanwhile now boasts an official (in other words, understated) unemployment rate of 14 percent. Over 600,000 migrant workers have been laid off. This is not a recipe for social peace.

In other countries, most notably a horribly in-hock Italy (public sector debt over 100 percent of GDP and expanding fast), low interest rates allowed governments to put off long overdue structural reforms. Instead of forcing the introduction of the badly needed discipline that was allegedly one of the principal reasons for its adoption, the euro (a hard currency when compared with shabbier predecessors such as the lira or drachma) was treated as a free pass. It has been anything but. Even before the current mess, Italy's crucial export sector was finding it difficult to cope with the brutal combination of rising cost inflation and a currency far stronger than the accommodating, and periodically devalued, lira. On some estimates, this latest recession is the fourth that Italy has suffered in the last seven years. Back in 2005 Silvio Berlusconi described the euro as a "disaster" for his country. He was not exaggerating.

Devaluations are to GDP what steroids are to sport. In the long-term they may be unhealthy, but in the short-term they frequently work miracles. The problem is that the option is no longer so easily available for the nations that adopted the euro. Italy, Ireland, and a number of other countries are in the grip of a one-sized currency that could never fit all, and the euro is now for them little more than a straitjacket or, more accurately, a noose. They have theoretically retained enough sovereignty to quit the euro, but for one of them to do so, especially if other states stick with the common currency, would be to risk something close to complete economic meltdown.

Money would pour out (so much so that capital controls would probably be required), interest rates would soar, and the reborn national currency would plummet. In the absence of a bailout from the eurozone it had just abandoned, the exiting country itself would probably be driven to renege (either de facto or de jure) on its foreign debt-as would much of its private business. In its consequences, this could be a Lehman-plus trauma with possibly devastating effects on already chaotic international capital markets. No less critically, it could set off a crisis in confidence in the credit of those weaker nations that had kept faith with the single currency, not to speak of feebler economies elsewhere. The cure, therefore, could well be worse than the disease.

In the meantime, in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't spasm, the markets are fretting that the disease is turning ever more dangerous-and, in a process that feeds upon itself, ever more infectious. Spreads on sovereign debt yields within the eurozone (between German Bunds, say, and paper issued by Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland) have widened noticeably. This is a warning that investors are beginning to think a once unthinkable thought: that one or more of the zone's less resilient members might go into default. On this logic these countries can neither afford to keep the euro nor to junk it. Rock, meet hard place.

These worries are made even more pressing by concern over the impact of Eastern Europe's spiraling economic woes on the already shattered finances of the western half of the continent. Contrary to some of the more excitable headlines, not all the countries of formerly Warsaw Pact Europe are, yet, in deep trouble, but the problems of those that are (notably Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, and Latvia) threaten to wreck confidence in those that are not. And those problems will not be confined safely behind the Oder-Neisse line: Two of Sweden's largest banks, for instance, are frighteningly overexposed to the faltering Baltic States, while their counterparts in Austria, seemingly lost in nostalgic Habsburg reverie, have reportedly lent out the equivalent of 70 percent of their country's GDP to once Kaiserlich und Königlich territories and parts nearby.

Eastern Europe's problems are Western Europe's and, given Eastern Europe's dependence on Western capital flows, vice versa, a state of affairs that neither side appreciates. Infuriated by the impression that they were being sidelined by the upcoming "G-20+" summit in London, nine of the EU's former Soviet bloc members held their own breakaway meeting earlier this month to discuss what to do. Meanwhile, led by Germany's indignant Angela Merkel in full prudent-Hausfrau, Thatcher-handbag mode, the Westerners have tried to damp down the East's increasingly aggressive demands for assistance. Good luck with that. Demonstrating a keenly cynical awareness of which buttons to press, the Hungarian prime minister warned that a severe slowdown in the East could lead to "a flood of unemployed immigrants traveling to Western Europe in search of jobs."

If you suspect that all this leaves the EU looking somewhat stuck, you would be right. But then this is no accident. The lack of democratic responsiveness so thoroughly ingrained into the union's architecture was always intended to stop the bloc's politicians from succumbing to the temptations of protectionism, beggar-thy-neighbor devaluations, and other questionable devices often found in the toolbox of an economically desperate national government. That's all very well, and all very praiseworthy, but it doesn't do anything about the desperation, a desperation that will be felt all the more sharply by electorates looking for their leaders to do something, anything, in response to this crunch-only to discover to their chagrin (to use too gentle a word) that there is little that the EU will, legally or politically, allow those leaders to do.

To take just one example, earlier this year Britain saw a series of wildcat strikes protesting the importation of cheap foreign workers from elsewhere in the union as a means of undercutting the locals. The facts that triggered the dispute are murky, but what is certain is that even if the British government had wanted to intervene under EU law it could not. Equally, while the opposition Tories grumbled, nobody was fooled. If the Conservatives had been in charge, they would have done just the same as Labour: nothing. If you want to drive voters to the political extremes, stories like this are a good place to start.

Except that "start" is the wrong word. Parties of the extreme, whether of left or right, already have more than a foothold in Germany and France. "Populists" of every description can be found in the legislatures in countries from Belgium to Denmark to Latvia to Austria to Poland to Hungary. Take your pick: There are plenty to choose from. Even in never-so-sedate-as-it-seems Britain, a country that has made a fetish (if not always convincingly) of its moderation, the much-reviled far rightists of the hitherto tiny British National party are showing some signs of evolving from being useful bogeymen for the left into a party with demonstrable political clout within elements of a white working class that has been neglected for too long.

The backgrounds and the prospects of these movements vary widely from country to country, as do the pasts and the resentments that have shaped them, but in recent years their appeal has begun to grow in sections of the electorate pummeled by the dislocations brought about by mass immigration and globalization-dislocations made all the more painful by the realization that the ruling elites who never really asked them for their opinion on these changes, let alone their agreement to them, couldn't give a damn about their plight. This is a perception that will only be sharpened when the populations of these countries, more and more of whom are losing their jobs, are told by that very same political class that protection is off the agenda and that austerity is on, that saving local industries is unacceptable, and that helping out foreign countries is a must. And, oh yes, none of this was our fault-it was all the bankers' doing-and, oh yes, they and their bonuses have got to be rescued too.

So what's next? The leaders of the EU countries will do their best to muddle through in rickety, unpopular unity. Here and there they will cheat both on each other and on the key EU principle of a single market. The warning signs are already there. In February, President Sarkozy attacked the way that French auto companies were supplying their home market from manufacturing facilities in the Czech Republic. The previous month, Britain's Gordon Brown had criticized the amount of overseas lending by the UK's beleaguered bailed-out banks. Nevertheless, however awkwardly, however reluctantly, the EU's members will attempt to hang together-for as long as (or indeed longer than) their domestic politics comfortably permit, an effort that will inevitably further boost the appeal of the wild men of the fringes.

That said, as the EU's leaders are all too well aware, the slump has so far brought down two European governments (in Latvia and non-EU Iceland). Nobody wants to be next, let alone run the risk of political and economic breakdown. The few remaining traces of the budgetary discipline that supposedly still underpins the euro will therefore probably be scrapped. The euro may hang on to its reach, but only at the cost of its integrity. To ordinary Germans this will be seen as a betrayal, a Dolchstoss even. A people haunted by memories of where a debauched currency can lead, they only agreed to part with their much-cherished deutsche mark on the understanding that the euro would be run with Bundesbank-style discipline. That was then.

So money will be thrown around, the imperiled brethren of both East and West will, after much shoving, screaming, and hesitation, be bailed out. Some protectionist measures (directed against those outside the EU) will be brought in and all fingers will be crossed. It won't be pretty, but with luck, it might be enough to stave off catastrophe. Pushing their luck, some glass-is-half-full Europhiles believe that the fact that no country can easily work its way through these tribulations alone will conclusively make the case for still closer European integration to some of the EU's more reluctant federalists. You can be sure that this is a rationalization that Brussels will look to exploit: Rahm Emanuel is not the only politician unwilling to waste a crisis. The EU's policy response to the slump is likely to have two objectives: the reconstruction of member-states' economies and the destruction of what's left of their autonomy. Going for the latter could well drive even more disaffected voters into the extremist fringe, though Brussels is arrogant enough to persist. There are already indications that the eurocrats may be pushing at an open door. In a startling example of mistaking the Titanic for the lifeboat, Poland has become just one of several nations speeding up plans to sign up for the euro-and the safe haven it is meant to represent.

On the other hand if, as appears disturbingly likely, the economic situation grows far darker, it's easy to draw an alternative picture in which both euro and union come under previously unimaginable stress, stress with unpredictable and potentially ominous consequences, stress that will be echoed and intensified by mounting political and social disorder in a Europe that discovers, too late, that there was something to be said for democracy after all.

Another Spectre Is Haunting Europe

The weekly Standard, March 2, 2009

As the worldwide slump deepens so must worries that the economic crisis will spill out onto the streets. In December, France's president Nicolas Sarkozy warned that les évènements of May 1968 could repeat themselves, and not only in the land of the torched auto. That same month IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn used the possibility of social unrest--in rich countries as well as poor--to drum up support for aggressive fiscal expansion. Now it's reported that the leaders of the EU's member states will spend part of their March summit discussing signs of growing disorder across their increasingly embattled union. After weeks in which Greece came close to anarchy, and riots broke out in Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania (and, just outside the EU, in newly destitute Iceland), they are right to be concerned.

After roughly three decades of growth, European living standards are imploding, and once-rising expectations are dropping down with them. It's the sense of something lost that hurts the most. People can deal with living without that which they never had (which is why so many dirt poor countries languish without any meaningful regime change), but when prosperity vanishes, rage will go hand-in-hand with disappointment, frustration, and despair. Extra-legal protest, whether it's antiglobalization riots, spasms of racial or ethnic violence, or the repeated recourse to highway blockade, is already a part of the European political landscape, east and west. Under the circumstances it's hard to see how an economic slowdown on the current scale can continue without expanding this miserable tradition. The only question is where. Riga today. London tomorrow? Hamburg? Lille? Madrid? Dublin? A glance at the business pages suggests there are plenty of places to choose from.

It's a sad commentary on the situation Europe's leaders are now contemplating that some of the best clues as to what might happen there can be found in China and Russia. This reflects how the increasing reach of the EU within its member states has left the individual nations less free to respond to the demands of their peoples at a time of distress and imposed upon them a soft authoritarianism that increases the chance of disorder.

Start with China where, despite the extraordinary economic expansion of recent years, the promise of prosperity has spread far further than its achievement. According to some reports, there were nearly 80,000 "major" incidents of unrest in 2007, an inevitable response to the dislocations of helter-skelter growth in a People's Republic where hundreds of millions of the People have been left behind, deprived of what scant security they once enjoyed, and given no legal way of making themselves heard. And that was in the good times.

Since 2007, growth has slowed dramatically to an annualized rate of perhaps 6-7 percent. That's some way below the near double-digit pace usually thought necessary to sustain China's vast army of migrant workers (some 20 million of whom are said to have lost their jobs in the downturn). More ominous still are the large numbers of new university graduates: articulate, ambitious, and now unemployed. There is a good reason that the Chinese regime has put in place a $600 billion stimulus package. It's the same as the one that has led some of the country's elite to worry openly about the prospects for social peace.

There are at least some (faint and fiercely disputed) signs that all those billions might be having an effect, but no such comfort is available in Russia. The ruble is sharply down, and the economic growth that legitimized Putin's rule has dwindled to nothing. This winter has seen protests in Moscow, Vladivostok, and other cities, events largely unthinkable a year ago. Like the Chinese, the Russians are throwing money at the problem. And, like the Chinese, they are tightening up internal security. The rigidities of authoritarian rule may ultimately provoke a violent reaction, but so long as these regimes retain a monopoly of force and a willingness to use it, disorder can generally be stamped out: until, of course, the revolutionary moment. But that moment still seems far away.

In a broad collection of countries to Russia's west, the situation looks more immediately dangerous. These states are all nominally democratic, but the extent to which democracy, and the shared trust that must go with it, have really taken root is not only unclear, but also about to be put to a brutal test. Emerging from beneath the rubble of the Soviet imperium has been a long and wearying process, marked by setbacks and punctuated by crises, but somehow nearly always sustained by the dream of better times to come and, more practically, massive transfusions of Western money, both public and private. That was then. GDPs across the region are in free fall (if you prefer another cliché, the governor of Latvia's central bank has offered up "clinically dead" as a description of his country's economy), a situation that may finally sink the hulks of the Western European banks already perilously exposed to this part of the world and not, therefore, in a position to come up with any fresh cash.

Economic collapse and fragile democracies are a fissile combination, and that's before considering the opportunity they present for geopolitical mischief-making. The Ukrainian state is politically weak, ethnically divided, facing tricky elections, and, many analysts reckon, on the edge of insolvency. Under these promising circumstances Moscow would be most unlikely to object to a destabilizing riot or two in a neighbor whose independence it still resents. And the same holds true for the Baltics. After all, the Kremlin was widely thought to be behind disturbances (unrelated to the economy) in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, in 2007.

But while Kiev, Riga, and Sofia may seem reassuringly remote, believing that the more established democracies in the western half of the continent will necessarily escape disorder is, as Sarkozy, Strauss-Kahn, and those fretting European premiers undoubtedly understand, to ignore the lessons of the past. Optimists like to see Iceland as a special case, and, yes, Greece too. They might also argue that the January protests in France were nothing more than business as usual. But all these supposedly discrete disturbances were beginning to look like a pattern even before a wave of wildcat strikes in the U.K. (protesting the importation of cheap foreign workers from other EU countries). Expectations are being dashed in the west of Europe just as much as they are in the east, and there will be consequences. To be sure, the nations of the EU's heartland are far better off (and, critically, have more generous social security nets) than those that so recently escaped Soviet rule, but a dashed expectation is a dashed expectation wherever it falls to earth.

In some ways the darkening of a once bright future may be more difficult to deal with for populations like those living in Western Europe where truly hard times (and the psychological mechanisms to cope with them) are scarcely more than a folk memory. Making matters worse, social cohesiveness within these countries has been badly battered, most notably by mass immigration and, more happily, the greater opportunities for individual autonomy that affluence has hitherto brought in its wake. The idea that, at some level, "we're all in this together"--a vital safety valve for a society under stress--may no longer be available for use.

Adding further poison to the mix is the catastrophic effect of EU membership on the relationship between Europeans and their political class. The idea that the governing should listen to the governed underpins any successful democracy. It does not underpin the EU--as those naughty no-voting Irish are just the latest to discover. National politicians, neutered by a confederation where most important decisions are taken within an opaque and remote political structure that is subject to but the barest pretense of democratic control, now function as little more than messenger boys or enforcers for the real bosses in Brussels.

This raises rather awkward questions as to what Europe's ballot boxes are actually for, questions that may turn very ugly indeed when the bread has gone stale, the circuses have shut down, and recovery remains elusive. Fortified perhaps both by images of disturbances elsewhere and the knowledge of the spinelessness that is a not-so-guilty not-so-secret of so many European governments, the peoples of the EU might well conclude that the street is a better way to force through change than the voting booth. Throw in the organizing capabilities of the Internet, relatively high levels of unemployment amongst the articulate and well-educated, and the rallying impact of a populist cause, and it's easy to see what will come if the slump lingers on.

No clear thread yet runs through the discontent now rippling across the EU, which remains mostly of the throw-the-bums-out variety. Yet in the midst of a debacle typically blamed (we could debate how fairly) on capitalist excess, a Trotskyite postman is the second most popular political figure in France and a party with its roots in the Communist dictatorship is polling at around 15 percent in Germany. If economies continue to spiral down, anxiety, uncertainty, and anger are bound to assume more concrete ideological forms, forms that are unlikely to be pretty.

Sometimes history repeats itself as tragedy, not farce.