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T H E E U R O P E A NC O N S E R V A T I V E

Issue 10 • Summer 2014 €5 *

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Contents

Editor-in-Chief: Alvino-Mario FantiniContributing Editors: Brian Gill, Mark C. Henrie, Ellen Kryger, G.K. Montrose, Jonathan D. PriceAddress: P.O. Box 85633 • 2508CH The Hague • The NetherlandsContact: editor@europeanconservative.comDonations: ABN/AMRO Account 0601773993 • IBAN: NL71ABNA0601773993 • BIC/SWIFT: ABNANL2AGoFundMe: www.gofundme.com/7nt5lk* The cover ‘price’ of €5 is a suggested donation.

Guest Commentary ........................................................................................................................................................ 3

Sarajevo & a Century of Terror — Reflections on a century of turmoilRobin Harris ........................................................................................................................................................................ 4

The EU & the Habsburg Monarchy — Today’s EU compared to the Habsburg monarchyRobert Cooper ..................................................................................................................................................................... 7

Chronicles of a French Earthquake — A look at the recent European Parliament elections in FranceCharles Adhémar ............................................................................................................................................................... 10

Hungary’s Parliamentary Elections — An analysis of recent electoral outcomes in HungaryKálmán Pócza .................................................................................................................................................................... 12

A New Faith in Spain? — Signs of a return of religious practice in SpainFilip Mazurczak ................................................................................................................................................................. 14

EU Parental Rights Under Attack — How the state tramples on the rights of parents in EuropeRoger Kiska ........................................................................................................................................................................ 16

What is Right? — Another chapter from a classic, long out-of-print workRoger Scruton .................................................................................................................................................................... 18

The Politics of Nostalgia — Considering what is best for man in politics, culture, and societyEdmund Waldstein ........................................................................................................................................................... 22

Briefly Noted — Recently published books we should be reading ........................................................................... 29-30

Building a Centre-Right Coalition — Tips and advice from one of the best strategists on the American RightGrover G. Norquist & Lorenzo Montanari ......................................................................................................................... 31

What Europe Can Learn from America — How the welfare state ruined European ‘customer service’Thomas Spannring ............................................................................................................................................................ 33

In Defence of Common Sense — A brief introduction to our next installment of T.E. Hulme’s “hard words”G. K. Montrose .................................................................................................................................................................. 34

War Notes, 9 December 1915 — A re-print of another Hulme article from the modernist pamphlet, the New AgeNorth Staffs / T.E. Hulme ................................................................................................................................................. 35

Europe’s Fathers — A look at a historically important exhibition at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches MuseumAlvino-Mario Fantini ........................................................................................................................................................ 37

Eugenio Corti, R.I.P. — A short profile of one of Italy’s greatest 20th century writersThomas Fleming ............................................................................................................................................................... 39

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 3

Guest Commentary

1914: Lessons to be Learned

The European Conservative is a publication of the Center for European Renewal (CER) based in Amsterdam. Back issues are available in PDF format at www.europeanconservative.com. We welcome unsolicited manuscripts and extend a “latitudinarian welcome” to all of the many varieties of “respectable conservatism”, whether anti-statists, constitutional monarchists, free-market enthusiasts, or traditionalists. For more information about the CER, please visit: www.europeanrenewal.org

Cover (clockwise, from top left): Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie begin their fateful car ride; family portrait of the royal family; funeral procession in Vienna; the Archduke’s bloodied uniform; authorities arresting Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo.

Issue 10 Summer 2014

I wasn’t aware of the approaching centenary of the beginning of the First World War until my sixteen-year old daughter came back from school and asked me with total astonishment: “Daddy, is it true that the First World War is the fault of us Habsburgs?” Everything in me wanted to cry out: “But certainly not, my poor little darling”. Why heave such a heavy burden on young shoulders?

Then I realized that I didn’t really know the answer. So I responded with the oldest Austrian answer to any such problem: “It’s complicated”.

Our family realized that this same question would be posed to many of the 400 to 500 members of our family worldwide. We researched and formulated wordings. And we signalled to the Austrian media that the family wanted to participate in the discussion over the centenary of the First World War.

So far the year has been going well, with several members of our family speaking at events, writing in newspapers and appearing on TV. But what exactly is our position? Whose fault is the First World War?

In this matter Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers turned out to be a pillar stone. Instead of pointing fingers and placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of one or two nations, as has been done over the last century — and at some point or another, every nation that had participated in the war has been pointed to as the culprit — Clark basically says, “it’s complicated”.

One begins to understand how complicated as one dives into the weeks between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, and the outbreak of the war roughly one month later. The picture that emerges is one of a series of many, many decisions by the dozens of main protagonists in Austria, France, Russia, Germany, and England where nearly everybody felt his hand was “forced by destiny” and that he “had no alternative”. Had any one of these steps not been taken the war might have been averted. But in hindsight, one always knows better.

Also, while some voices mused about a “great war”, for Emperor Franz Joseph the ultimatum that started the domino pieces toppling was always and squarely a “Balkan thing”. Austria could have gained nothing by a war, say, against Russia. They wanted to settle a long-standing outstanding bill with Serbia and swiftly punish them for the act of killing the heir to the throne right on Austria-Hungarian territory.

That ultimatum may seem tame compared to some others from today. But there should be no doubt that its

original aim was for the Serbs not to accept it and, thus, give the Austrian-Hungarian army an excuse to attack. The crazy thing is that Serbia — which was, of course, totally enmeshed in the conspiracy to kill Franz Ferdinand — was on the brink of accepting the ultimatum when a telegram from Russia arrived. Russian Foreign Minister Sasonov, who had been discussing for days with his French ally Raymond Poincaré, encouraged the Serbs to be strong. Then the Russians set forth a very swift mobilization, not only against Austria but also against Germany. This, in turn, sent the German generals into a panic, since they hadn’t really counted on such a strong reaction and weren’t really prepared. Then Germany invaded Belgium, which made the British join in.

The domino pieces thus began to tumble and everybody — like sleepwalkers — simply watched as a World War emerged that killed millions and changed the landscape of Europe forever.

So whose fault was it in the end? Everybody’s, in a way.

Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph has to carry a part of the burden — as do all the other protagonists. But at least he only ever wanted to retaliate against Serbia — and, furthermore, he consulted with his government. He carried part of the responsibility for the First World War, but he was not “the culprit”. Nor were the foreign ministers of France, Russia or England, each of whom acted pretty much on their own without consulting parliaments or monarchs, or the German Kaiser.

What are the lessons to be learned from the catastrophe of 1914-1918?

There is a very old Habsburg virtue which helped the family survive as rulers for seven centuries. It can be summed up in the sentence: “When in heavy crisis, don’t act”. Had Franz Joseph followed this rule and fought for peace in 1914 by not acting — that is, by not delivering the ultimatum — everything could have been averted.

His short-lived successor on the throne, Blessed Emperor Charles, did everything in his power from the first minute of his reign to attain peace. And it is said that the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 didn’t end up in a nuclear shoot-out because President Kennedy had just finished The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman about the crisis of July 1914.

If anything, this is a sign of hope. We can learn from history.

Dr. Habsburg is writer and spokesman to an Austrian bishop. He also serves as communications manager of the Habsburg family in Austria.

Eduard Habsburg

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Sarajevo & a Century of TerrorRobin Harris

It is hard enough in London properly to commemorate the outbreak of the First World War. But how to do it in Sarajevo, where the first shots — those that killed the archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, on Sunday June 28, 1914 — were actually fired?

Sarajevo has other, more pressing problems, which stem from the bloody and destructive wars of Yugoslav succession. It is today the seat of a dysfunctional government, paralysed by incompetence and corruption. The economy depends almost entirely on foreign handouts and remittances. Returning after a few years’ absence, one is struck not by progress but by regression. True, not everything is stagnating. There is development out of town. A magnificent, new, state of the art, shining white building, set in in the leafy old Austrian spa of Ilidža, houses the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology. It is a private university, where only English is spoken, where the Margaret Thatcher Lecture Auditorium has just been opened, and which works in partnership with the University of Buckingham. But the venture is untypical.

In old Sarajevo, showcased public buildings may give the impression of progress. But it is an illusion. The city centre is unswept, decaying, unrepaired, and with serious investment deterred by unresolved disputes of title.

Sarajevo remains a city of extraordinary charm, a romantic mix of the Middle East and Central Europe. Ancient minarets and secessionist-style blocks stand side by side. The muezzin calls and the angelus rings. Baščaršija market’s kebab houses pour enticing fatty fumes and spice scents into the shopping mall. And, typically on a winter’s morning, but whenever the wind changes, everything can be plunged into thick mist descending from the chalet-studded, tree-lined, snow-topped mountains.

Sarajevo is good for nostalgia but bad for depression. It is not just the overfilled cemeteries that give the place its indefinable sense of morbidity. The weight of memory is too great.

In the Balkans, history sometimes promotes wars, but always provokes an argument. Indisputably, however, a century ago this summer, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was brutally assassinated, along with his wife, by a young Serb, Gavrilo Princip, standing in front of Schiller’s delicatessen near Sarajevo’s Latin Bridge. Six potential assassins had been deployed along the route. Nothing was left to chance, though chance, as usual, stole the show. An earlier attempt that morning failed. Nedeljko Čabrinović threw a bomb which bounced off the lead car and exploded under the following one. He then swallowed a suicide pill, which failed to work. Čabrinović jumped into the Miljacka River, which was too low to drown but not to stun him. He was pulled out, beaten by the crowd, and detained.

The royal couple, meanwhile, continued to the town hall. The archduke interrupted a flowery speech of welcome, objecting that he had not expected to be

greeted with bombs. But he regained his composure. Lunch followed. Sophie met local Muslim women. Franz Ferdinand dictated a telegram to tell the emperor he was safe. They then returned along the Appel Quay.

The intention was to visit those injured in the earlier explosion, at the hospital. It was decided to avoid the city centre. But the driver had not been told. He turned right into Franz Josef Street, and was then angrily admonished. The magnificent Gräf und Stift open-topped coupé stopped. Princip stood forward and fired at close range. The couple were dead by the time the car got them back to the Konak palace, across the bridge. Franz Ferdinand’s final words were: “Sophie, Sophie, don’t die, stay alive for our children!”

The archduke was not much loved. He was stiff, pompous and short-tempered. But he was no fool. He wanted to reform the dual monarchy’s structure, in which power was wielded from Vienna and Budapest, and in which the Slavs felt they had no voice. Had he done so, it would have cut the ground from under Serbia’s claim to be the South Slavs’ champion. It was another good reason for him to die.

It was a shocking crime. Today one can imagine the media impact. All sympathy would be with the victims, all enmity levelled against the assassin and his backers. But, that summer in Britain, it was hardly noticed, partly because Ulster was threatening civil war, and partly because the focus quickly fell on Germany’s sinister intentions. The imaginative lacuna remains. The murders in Sarajevo appear still as a picturesque incident, all but unconnected from what followed. Little attention is paid to the wider conflict’s Balkan origins. The First World War thus seems a kind of dry run for the Second, with a similar cast of villains, heroes and story lines. But, as Christopher Clark demonstrates in his superb and authoritative account, The Sleepwalkers, this is misleading.

Germany did want an early war with Russia — though not necessarily in 1914 — because the generals thought war was inevitable, and the longer it was postponed, the more disadvantageous would be the odds. But it was Russia that mobilised first. Russian interest was firmly focused on the Balkans. France, too, was player not simply victim. Unreconciled to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, convinced that another round with Germany was required, French leaders reckoned that Germany could only be beaten if Russia were brought in. They understood that a Balkan inception was most likely to do it. Serbia’s actions towards Austria at this juncture reflected confidence that French financial and Russian political support were forthcoming.

Austria was, formally at least, the initiator. Its focus was on the Balkans too. The war party in Vienna had determined to crush Serbia for good. It seemed the only alternative to losing Bosnia and with it influence in south-east Europe.

So, all things considered, Sarajevo is not a bad place to consider what the Great War was about. But don’t expect the

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regularly rewritten local accounts to tell you. Where Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen once sold its sausage, the modest Museum of Sarajevo now stands. The building’s name has changed over the intervening years, as have its fortunes. It used to be devoted to the short, sad life of Princip. Now it houses a little-visited exhibition, Sarajevo 1878-1918. Just outside on the wall is a plaque. It reads: “From this place on June 28, 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Heir to the Austro-Hungarian Throne Franz Ferdinand and his Wife Sofia”. The plaque is new. So is the subdued tone, the exhausted outcome of much polemic.

The first (royal) Yugoslavia felt it had to commemorate the event. But it couldn’t find the safest option. The longer it waited, the more difficult it became. Finally, when in 1930 a memorial was erected, it was to loud international protests at the glorification of political murder. The authorities sought to portray the monument as a private initiative. Terrorism was again too close to home. Two years before, in the Belgrade parliament, the leading Croatian politicians had been gunned down by a Serb nationalist. The disorder was used by King Alexander to establish a dictatorship. But Alexander himself was assassinated, along with the French foreign minister, on a visit to Marseille in 1934, at the behest of the fascist, expatriate Croat Ustaša movement.

In April 1941, the Germans crushed Yugoslavia and entered Sarajevo. The Princip memorial was now removed. The plaque was presented to the Austrian-born Führer as a 52nd birthday present. But with the arrival of Tito’s partisans in 1945 Princip was a hero once more — as a proto-Communist revolutionary. A fresh plaque was erected. The inscription was still in Cyrillic script, to emphasise the assassin’s Serbian credentials. It now read: “From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip with his shooting expressed the people’s protest against tyranny and the centuries-long aspiration of our peoples for freedom”. (“Peoples” was a subtle nod in the direction of the non-Serbs in socialist Yugoslavia.) Beneath the plaque was set a pair of concrete footprints, representing Princip’s. Tourists liked to be photographed there. It was all a bit of a joke.

But then things became serious again. In the early Nineties, the Bosnian Serbs began shelling Sarajevo from the hills. During a four-year siege, 10,000 Bosnian soldiers and civilians died. New plaques to the fallen were erected. In the pockmarked streets “Sarajevo roses” (red resin poured into shell scars) indicate where people were killed. Nobody needed to have the historic connections pointed out. The Gavrilo Princip museum was shut. The concrete footprints were removed. Eventually, today’s anodyne replacement plaque appeared.

Time, though, never stands still. Sometimes it just goes backwards. There are discussions about displaying an earlier monument — the original one. This was raised by the Austrian authorities on June 28, 1917 at the entrance to the bridge — a large, sombre stone construct, consisting of stout pillars and a pietà. It was soon taken down, in

1918. But the material was too valuable to destroy. The central bronze medallion, depicting Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, is in good condition and stored in the cellars of the National Museum. These memorabilia have wider significance.

The effort is still made, particularly on the European Left, to place a liberal gloss on the bloody act of June 28. That effort is misplaced. One can speculate on what the rather naïve young men who lined up to kill the archduke thought they were going to achieve. Their accounts are detailed but ambiguous. But their controllers understood perfectly well. The object was the overthrow of Austrian power in favour of a Greater Serbia.

The politicians in Belgrade did not themselves plan or authorise it. Not even the Austrians suggested they had. Nikola Pašić, the Serbian prime minister, incompetently and unspecifically tipped off the Austrian authorities beforehand, but the latter, even more incompetently, ignored the tip. Nevertheless, the assassination was made in Serbia. It was planned by the “Black Hand” which, in the person of “Apis”, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, coincided at this juncture with Serbian military intelligence.

Apis had form. He and his fellow conspirator officers were behind the gory despatch of the Obrenović dynasty in 1903 in favour of the restored Karadjordjevićs — the Obrenović having proved too pliant towards Austria.

Apis was by 1914 persona non grata to Nikola Pašić, because he was out of control. That is why he was executed on trumped-up charges three years later. But in 1914 it was Apis’s agents who directed, trained and armed the gang of assassins. Most importantly, the whole Serbian state apparatus, within which — then and since — one must include prominent intellectuals and key elements in the Serbian Orthodox Church, was fully behind the broader strategy of “liberating” the South Slavs to include them within what amounted to a Greater Serbia (by whatever name). In that regard, the Austrian authorities were fully justified in blaming Serbia.

Viewed from the angle of Belgrade — rather than perspectives more familiar in London, Paris, or even Berlin — the conflict that began in 1914 was a Third Balkan War. The First Balkan War (1912) against the Ottoman Empire saw Serbia gain control of Kosovo, while the Second (1913) against Bulgaria saw it gain much of Macedonia. These two wars left the Serbs as the most powerful Balkan state. They also fed the violent, aggressive aspects of a deep-rooted and enduring Greater Serbian ideology. Belgrade began to feel strong enough, with Russian support, to take on its larger Austrian neighbour. And, especially since the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, Serbian state policy regarded Vienna as the principal obstacle to its ambitions.

In terms of regional state interests it was entirely appropriate that the starting point for a new Balkan War, which just happened to become the First World War, should be Sarajevo. But there is another sense too,

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A faded map of old Europe, 1871-1914.

for Sarajevo became the epicentre of a wider ideological struggle with profound implications for the shape of Europe. That entailed a clash between the forces of radical nationalism and conservative imperialism. The debate over which Sarajevo monument is more appropriate to mark the murders of June 28, 1914 — a pietà for the victims or a plaque for the assassin — is ultimately one about systems and values, and it has implications for the way in which the Great War is viewed as a whole.

Princip and his controllers certainly wanted to liberate Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Habsburg Empire. But did the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina wish to be liberated? And even if Serbs living there wanted it, could and did it benefit non-Serbs? Did it, in particular, benefit Sarajevo? Here the answer is both clear and revealing — no, it did not.

Sarajevo is the work of two empires, the Ottoman and the Austrian. Their cultural imprint is everywhere. The Ottomans chose the site and erected the city. Their vakufs — religious or charitable endowments — funded the institutions of education and welfare. The Ottoman city was divided into mahalas — residential neighbourhoods, each built around a mosque or other place of worship, for three or four mahalas were non-Muslim. One was Jewish, originally populated by Sephardim expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th century, joined in the 18th century by Ashkenazim. But in early times, one of the largest was the Catholic mahala — it is still the Catholic (Croat) quarter, Bistrik. This was based on people from Ragusa (Dubrovnik). The Ragusans, tributaries of the sultan but maintaining on the Adriatic an exclusively Catholic mini-

state, had no scruples about helping to build Sarajevo’s imposing mosques. It is a microcosm of a contradictory yet harmonious system. Without overlooking the unspeakable cruelties visited on those who sought to throw off Ottoman domination, one can otherwise admire the order, sophistication, diversity and tolerance that the Porte, at the height of its powers, sustained in this, its regional capital.

The population of Sarajevo appreciated it too, at least when confronted with the alternative. Hence the fierce armed resistance offered to Austrian troops, who arrived in 1878 under the terms of the Treaty of Berlin, which granted Austria the right to occupy and govern, but not to own, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The new rulers had, in fact, no intention of wiping clean the cultural slate. To the contrary, not just Orthodox Serbs but Catholic Croats, whose hopes had been raised, loudly complained that they were pushed aside in favour of the traditional Muslim elite. What the Austrians did bring to Sarajevo, and to Bosnia generally, was progress and prosperity.

From 1878, and with greater urgency after formal annexation in 1908, the Austrians dragged Sarajevo and Bosnia a long way into the modern world. They built roads, and not just for military purposes. They built narrow-gauge railways across the province and Sarajevo flourished as a centre of railway building. Trams began to circulate. The Austrians cautiously promoted the role of religious leaders to dampen the role of secular nationalisms, but they also later encouraged cultural organisations from which parties emerged. A Bosnian parliament was established, albeit with restricted franchise and seats effectively allocated on confessional grounds.

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The EU & the Habsburg MonarchyRobert Cooper

The Habsburg Monarchy lasted five centuries. It was both solid and flexible; it aroused genuine affection among its citizens. But it vanished in a puff of smoke. Should we expect the European Union, shallow in history and unloved by those it serves, to do better?

To be fair, it was more than a puff of smoke. The bullets from Gavrilo Princip’s revolver killed the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia. What killed the Habsburg Monarchy was the four years of pounding by artillery that followed. This brought death and ruin to the old Europe; in Russia it brought revolution and tyranny,

and in Germany regime change accompanied by failed revolution, then inflation and depression, and finally world war and genocide.

What arose from the ashes? The answer is: the European Union and NATO. It is the EU and its resemblance to the Habsburg Monarchy that is the subject of this essay, but something needs first to be said about NATO which was and is its indispensable partner.

NATO and the presence of US forces in Europe have given European countries the assurance that the US would defend them against the Soviet Union. But almost more important, NATO also turned defence into a collective enterprise. Without this, each country would have had to

The authorities strongly emphasised education. In fact, they were too successful, because it was among students that radical opposition developed. Multi-confessional schools were founded. An elementary school solely for Muslim girls was opened, but it met resistance. Industrialisation and commerce were encouraged. Brick, tobacco and textile factories, sawmills, a reservoir and (in 1910) electricity generation transformed work and life in the city. Naturally, breweries appeared in the wake of Austrian officials and soldiers. The oldest of these, the Sarajevo Brewery, still in its old premises in Bistrik, produces the best dark beer in the region.

The public spaces of Sarajevo were entirely reordered. Amid new parks and squares, fine public or semi-public (religious) buildings arose, influenced in conception by Vienna but carefully reflecting the historic past and cultural realities. These included the Catholic cathedral, an Orthodox seminary, the Regional Government (now Presidency) Building, the Muslim Reading Society Hall, a Turkish-style bath, and the Regional Museum. The dominant style can be criticised for its “Orientalism”, an artificial blend of East and West, but it was highly appropriate and often — as with the town hall (bombed in the recent war, but now restored and reopened) — quite magnificent.

The system which Apis, Princip and the rest wanted to overthrow had proved itself in every sphere — except, perhaps, adaptability. But what empire can adapt to revolution? In any case, the immediate verdict of Sarajevo on the assassination was clear. The population rioted. During the evening of Sunday, June 28 and for most of Monday the city was in chaos as the Muslims and Croats attacked Serb shops, houses and meeting places. Two Serbs were killed. The riots were spontaneous and they were then checked with difficulty by the authorities.

Meanwhile, the mildness exercised towards the plotters and perpetrators is extraordinary, a notable contrast with the revenge and repression which might have been expected. No forced confessions, no Viennese equivalent of water-boarding, just plodding and methodical questioning, which eventually uncovered most of the culprits. Princip’s age was investigated and since he was

found to be just short of 20, he was spared execution, and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. He died of typhus in April 1918 in Theresienstadt.

By then the war was drawing to its end, and so was the Habsburg Empire. Many Bosnian Serbs had volunteered to join the Serbian forces. But the majority of Bosnian Muslims and Croats had contributed enthusiastically to the Austrian cause. Bosnians came to be reckoned as among the empire’s elite forces. The four Bosnian regiments — the first drawn from Sarajevo — won a total of 27,243 medals for bravery. These are not the actions of an enslaved or intimidated people.

The First World War was not, of course, as Woodrow Wilson naively suggested, the “war to end all wars”. It was not even the war to end all empires. But it did transform the world — as Wilson wanted — by destroying three hereditary monarchical European empires, the Habsburg, Romanov and (parvenu) Hohenzollern dynasties, and substituting for them states based on nationality and populist ideology. Whether this is relevant to the debatable “justice” or otherwise of the war, itself, is a matter of definition. Quite clearly it has no bearing upon, and cannot detract from, the sacrifice made by those who died in it.

But the political question remains. Were states based upon Communism (the Soviet Union), or Nazism (the Third Reich), or the various extreme and exclusionary kinds of nationalism that came to prominence after the Great War an improvement on the system that preceded them? The turbulent and bloody experience of Sarajevo since that double murder on the Latin Bridge should confirm our doubts. Princip’s bullets tore through Europe’s heart.

Dr. Harris served during as adviser at the UK Treasury and Home Office, Director of the Conservative Party Research Department, and was as a member of Prime Minister Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. He is the author of Dubrovnik: A History (2003), and other books. This articles originally appeared in the July/August 2014 edition of Standpoint magazine. It is published here with the kind permission of both the author and Standpoint. For more information about Standpoint, please visit: www.standpoint.co.uk

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make its own provision against the Soviet threat; some might have felt compelled to create massive armies; some might have gone for bilateral alliances. Whatever the result, Europe would have been back to the old, failed games of balance of power and arms race. NATO also created an incentive to free riding on US military capabilities. This has been criticized by the US ever since; but paradoxically it is also a notable achievement that European countries have felt able to keep defence spending down: this shows that NATO has generated a sense of collective security in the best meaning of those words; security issues which for centuries have divided Europe at last unified it. And out of this the European Union was born. And the EU itself, by creating a collective identity outside the field of security, and without the US, has contributed to NATO’s longevity by demonstrating that the US presence is an enabler of cooperation rather than an instrument of domination.

In any event, it is striking that after the unhappy interval of the 1930s and World War II, Europe — or rather Western Europe — found itself with a body that in many ways resembles the Habsburg Monarchy. Like the Habsburg Monarchy, the EU is not a nation state but a complex confection of states, nations, centralised bureaucracy and local autonomy. Both have grown by voluntary accession (in the old days it was called dynastic marriage) rather than by conquest. The EU is partly bound together, as the Habsburg Monarchy was, by transnational elites: in the Habsburg case it was the officer corps and the civil service; for the EU it is business elites and civil servants, both national and European.

Above all, both the Habsburg Monarchy and the EU have provided a home for the small nations of Europe who would have difficulty surviving alone: in the 19th century, their need was to avoid being at the mercy of the less liberal German and Russian Empires. In the 20th, belonging to a larger framework has brought both political and economic security. Had it not been for the catastrophe of war, the Habsburg Monarchy would have continued to develop in its haphazard way, no doubt giving more autonomy to those who wanted it but still providing the smaller states with things that mattered a lot to them.

These also included roads, railways, laws, police to enforce them, courts, parliaments, education, and a centralized bureaucracy to manage it all. The Habsburg Monarchy liberated its serfs some twenty years before Russia and America, and introduced universal male suffrage early in the twentieth century. All these were useful and helped bring modernization to many parts of the Empire; but the peoples of central Europe could have got them from Germany and maybe even from Russia one day. What was unique in the Habsburg zone was that it enabled the small nationalities to survive, keep their culture, some level of autonomy, and even to thrive with it. The security it provided was political; but was backed — for this was the nineteenth century — by military force.

A further curious resemblance to the European Union is that the Monarchy was (as Robert Kann puts it) a power without a name; or rather a power with several names, none of them quite right: Habsburg Empire?

Austro-Hungarian Empire? Habsburg Monarchy? None quite expresses its nature, because, like the European Union, it was complicated and did not fit into any convenient category. For Europe today, Common Market and European Economic Community are too little; European Union is too much: the EU is not a union in the sense that the United States or the United Kingdom is. This last name is an aspiration; but what is the use of an aspiration if nobody knows what it amounts to?

There are, however, two important differences. First, the EU (as, for want of better, we continue to call it) is not a state and the Habsburg Monarchy, for all its quirkiness, was. That meant it was sovereign and it had a sovereign whose picture could appear on banknotes and on prints to be found in the humble huts of peasants in far corners of the Empire. And it had an army. And when the crisis came, it was the Monarchy that was in charge. One of the ways in which we know that, in spite of flag and anthem, the EU is not a state is that in the crisis of the Eurozone, power quickly returns to its source in the member states — just as it would also in a security crisis. Because the Monarchy was a state, its components were nations with limited autonomy. Because the EU is not a state, it is made up of states: sovereign, equal, and ultimately its masters.

The second important difference is that, although the EU and the Habsburg Monarchy both enable the small to survive by providing the benefits of scale, they do it in different fields. Over the five centuries of the Habsburg Monarchy, its key contribution was the security that it provided against threats from outside, to begin with from the Ottoman Empire, later from nation states, against whose deadlier dynamism it was less successful. Thanks to NATO and to the end of the Cold War, security is no longer the big issue. Instead, the most visible benefit of scale that the EU brings is the prosperity it has provided through a Europe without borders; the invisible benefit — perhaps more important — has been the security of good political relations. These come from joint enterprise of making the laws that govern Europe’s borderless space. The practice of cooperation may be tedious and time consuming but it creates relationships with neighbours such as no country has ever had before. So successful has the EU been in creating an environment in which small states can live comfortably, that the temptation for Flanders, Scotland, Catalonia and no doubt many others to enjoy the luxury of their own state may become a pattern of the future.

This should not be a surprise since, for most purposes, small states are better than big states: more intimate, more cohesive, closer to the citizen. Only two things make big states desirable: the security of a big army and the prosperity of a big market. The Habsburg Monarchy provided the first while allowing diverse nationalities to flourish; the EU has provided the second while enabling small states to flourish and to have a voice in making the rules to run it.

The Habsburg Monarchy was threatened first by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which brought it physically too close to Russia, and in consequence also became politically too dependent on Germany. Long before the Great War it had begun to lose its multi-national character

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 9

(visible in the use of German as the official language of the Empire). And then it was destroyed by the War itself and by its manifest inability to provide physical protection for its people and political protection for its nations.

These were then awarded self-determination by the victorious nation states. This turned out to be a poisoned gift, since they were left naked in the face of powerful neighbours and their own weak political culture. That they have regained their freedom and re-established democracy within the European Union is their credit, and also that of the EU and of NATO.

In contrast to the world at the beginning of the last century, the geopolitical environment in Europe today is benign. The Middle East and the Mediterranean are disturbed, but no worse than usual; the Cold War is over and Russia is preoccupied with making money, a peaceful activity; even the Balkans makes halting progress. No one is thinking of war.

But the threat that the EU now faces is, in its way, as deadly as the one that confronted the Habsburg Monarchy a hundred years ago. Instead of the uncontrolled expansion of armies and navies of the early twentieth century, when few understood the implications of the new military technology, we live today in a world of uncontrolled global financial markets dealing in instruments that few comprehend. And the crisis strikes at the heart of the EU. If the EU ceases to be a bringer of prosperity but becomes instead a cause of impoverishment, it too will collapse. Because, unlike the Habsburg Monarchy, the EU is not a state but a community of states, its collapse will not begin at the centre, but at the edges. If it ever dies, it will do so with a whimper, rather than a bang. This fish rots from the tail, not the head. The explosion will come not in Brussels but on the streets of Athens, Rome, or Madrid. Perhaps we are seeing the first signs. And if the explosion comes, it will bring down with it the open borders, the single market, the practice of cooperative relations with others, the collaboration in many fields, and at its centre the good political relations that have

delivered peace and a sense of community over fifty-five years.

At the beginning of The Struggle for the Mastery of Europe, his great book describing the diplomacy that led to World War I, A.J.P. Taylor wrote: “In the state of nature which Hobbes imagined, violence was the only law, and life was “nasty brutish and short”. Though individuals never lived in this state of nature the Great Powers of Europe have always done so”. Taylor, strangely, omitted Hobbes’ first two adjectives. The original says: “and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Hobbes is writing about man’s life outside society. But Taylor’s analogy with states works even more powerfully if we include these two adjectives: it is the solitary nature of states that has made them both poor and dangerous. States, like men, live better in communities. Our greatest achievement is that the Great Powers of Europe no longer live by the rules (or the lack of them) that Hobbes evokes. If Europe loses that, it will lose again everything that was lost with the Habsburg Monarchy.

The stakes in the Euro-game are high: monetary union was meant to bring prosperity (and to bind Germany closer!). If the result is penury and political instability, then the EU will share the fate of the Habsburg Monarchy.

This is not inevitable. Unlike war, there are no winners when financial markets collapse (no, not even George Soros). If we fail, it will be by errors in our economics or mis-judgments of our politics or through collective stupidity. Getting it right does not need a miracle. It requires only open debate, open minds, a readiness to listen and to learn. Intellectual clarity and human sympathy is all that we need, plus some understanding of what we stand to lose.

Mr. Cooper is a former British diplomat who for the last ten years worked for the EU High Representative. Recently retired, he remains a Special Adviser to the High Representative on Burma/Myanmar. This piece originally appeared in 2012 in the German-language journal Transit: Europäische Revue. It is published with the permission of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna.

Detail of “Returning to the Trenches”, a 1916 pencil study of marching troops by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946). Courtesy of Bonhams Auctions.

Summer 201410

Chronicles of a French EarthquakeCharles Adhémar

“Séisme” (Le Figaro). “Terremoto in Francia” (La Repubblica). “Wahl-Schock in Frankreich” (Bild). “Le Pen’s Earthquake” (The Financial Times). All around Europe, the victory of the Front National (FN) at the European Parliament elections in May got banner headlines across the front page of many newspapers, using the lexicon of seismology.

In truth, the FN polled 24.85% of the electorate and had a sharp edge over the other parties (20.8% for the ‘right-wing’ UMP — Union pour un Mouvement Populaire — and 13.98% for the PS or Parti Socialiste). The FN was in the lead in 24,401 of 36,812 municipalities, in 71 of 101 départements, and in five of eight electoral regions. That’s why Marine Le Pen proclaimed the FN “first party of France”. Although everybody had been dazed by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s 18% result during the presidential election of 2002, his daughter’s victory was indisputably an unprecedented event.

As expected, the victory of the sovereign and unabashedly patriotic FN was quickly considered a threat to democracy by many commentators and politicians who dismissively denounced the party as a ‘fascist’ menace. But how can we rightly explain the Front National’s good showing? Does their result really represent an ‘earthquake’?

First, it is important to emphasize that the electoral returns should not be considered an astounding occurrence. The FN had been in the lead in the polls for many months and was considered the odds-on favourite to win. And Marine Le Pen and her running mates — including her father, now 86 years old — ran an active, energetic campaign, successfully working the crowds.

We should also note that only 43% of the electorate turned out at the polls (with an astonishing 73% of 18-35 year olds choosing to abstain from voting), this amid a climate of general disenchantment with politics as usual.

The run-up to the elections had been quite unremarkable. Political exchanges between the established parties was almost insignificant; and the chief candidates for both the UMP and the PS were either ‘losers’ from French political life or, worse, plain and insipid technocrats. Generally speaking, what was at stake in the elections was quite distant from the everyday concerns of most French people.

Moreover, the results obviously can be ascribed to the considerable failure of the ruling Socialist government. As we previously explained (cf. “The Defeat of the French Right”, The European Conservative, Winter 2013), François Hollande is practically a President by default. Weak and indecisive, the policies he has pursued have been purposeless and generally harmful. Two years after his election, his unpopularity

has far exceeded the worst rates seen during the Fifth Republic. With only 18% of the people still trusting him, he seems to have condemned his government to inaction and passivity.

Since Hollande came into office, the Socialists have lost on all fronts. That’s why the rout in May was fully expected by so many observers. In the last local elections, many municipalities swung from the Left to the Right and many major political names were unseated.

Hollande’s policies have been a huge disappointment, even for his most loyal supporters. Aside from exhibiting great creativity in proposing new repressive taxes and making foolish societal reforms, he has hardly gotten any results — and this in a context of economic gloom and against a background of many political scandals (and some cases of corruption). Carrying out ineffective policies, unable either to reform or lead, the French Left has been wrecked — and it won’t recover for a long, long time.

However — and this is perhaps the most surprising fact — the parliamentary Right is unable to profit from this situation. Although the Left has been damaged like never before, none of it is of any use to the opposition in parliament, which is saddled with its own internal problems. The UMP is currently divided between a Europhile wing and a nationalistic, patriotic one. This division correlates with the perspectives of the two main former parties — the UDF (Union pour la Démocratie Française) on the centre-right and RPR (Rassemblement pour la République) on the Right — which merged in 2002 to create the UMP. That said, the current ‘apparatchiks’ of the UMP are mainly found among the Europhile-centrist wing.

This internal party division appeared quite crudely during this European Parliament elections. For instance, at one point, Nicolas Sarkozy’s former special advisor and deputy Henri Guaino said he wouldn’t vote for the Europhile (“euro-blissful”, in his words) technocrat, Alain Lamassoure, who was the chief candidate for the region of Paris. In reaction, former

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Prime Minister Alain Juppé immediately issued a call to ‘purge’ him from the party, a call that was supported by the President of the UMP, Jean-François Copé.

Moreover, the UMP is now steeped in a huge and staggering financial scandal, which has focused on the campaign finances of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2012 presidential race. The allegations of fraud involve forged invoices and favouritism, which has prompted most of the UMP’s top staff to resign (most of them are now being sued). In addition, Jean-François Copé has been dismissed from his duties by the political bureau of the party and a triumvirate of three former Prime Ministers is now guiding the UMP until the next party congress in October. But until then, the Right faces profound uncertainty: What is the future of the party? Is it condemned to fall apart? Will Nicolas Sarkozy come back?

In any case, we can be sure that this pathetic political sideshow will continue for a while, since party operatives are gleefully preoccupied with the settling of scores, relying on outright lies and engaging in fratricidal war.

Meanwhile, as the UMP flounders, the FN is determined to wield power. The political dynamics on the ground and at the grass roots is clearly on the side of Marine Le Pen. She has proven her political savvy and demonstrated her talent at statecraft. And when her father chose to concentrate on his own presidential ambitions, showcasing his talents as a fiery and provocative orator, she very ably led two successful campaigns for municipal and European elections.

More importantly, the FN’s evolution from fringe party to successful political movement is based on a set of key factors: simple but strong convictions, persuasive vote-garnering arguments, intense mobilization, and energetic and enthusiastic young volunteers. (In fact, 30% of voters 18-35 years old voted for the FN.) But the FN vote was also sustained by other important issues: a rejection of multiculturalism, attachment to the ‘homeland’ and to traditional values, fear of moving one step down the social ladder (which is quite a new phenomenon), and a willingness to preserve the “French social model” (which is seen as having provided a firm base for the FN among the French working-class).

The other parties cannot respond to the FN’s agenda: Both of the other parties lack leadership and are mired in scandals. They also suffer from massive demobilization among their volunteers and their programs are, frankly speaking, tasteless and colourless. That’s why they had to resort to crude mud-singling and expressions of deep contempt in the media toward FN candidates and voters.

Nevertheless, it seems that such tactics are no longer effective. Although cadres of trained activists organized massive demonstrations against the so-called

“rise of fascism” and the threat posed by the FN, as they did in 2002; but such efforts failed miserably. French citizens can see through such tactics. They are no longer as easily fooled as they were in, say, the 1930s with the rhetoric of “¡No pasarán!” used by the Communist anti-fascists.

What is worrying is the growing distance between the people and the French political elites who are supposed to represent them. The rupture between the majority of the French population and the intelligentsia, which has the power to act and to speak out (that is, politicians, journalists, experts, senior officials, etc.) seems deeper than ever.

Furthermore, a growing homogeneity in the composition of these elites has created a cloistered endogamous political class. It is a situation that Vilfredo Pareto, in his Trattato di sociologia générale (1916), described as signalling the end of an era: an aging and fading generation clinging to power, stubbornly fixated on its own former certainties and moral superiority. The establishment mind in France operates from just such a moralistic view of the world. In short, the French people no longer want to support what Tacitus called tristis arrogantia — the sad arrogance of the moralists. In his last book, Les nouveaux bien-pensants, sociologist Michel Maffesoli even speaks of a secessio plebis (withdrawal of the commoners), as occurred during the Roman Empire.

Concerning the European elections, the rift seen in May between the official speeches of the mainstream parties and the real concerns of the average voter — over ongoing economic problems, massive immigration, and increasing insecurity — was clear. Official European concerns involved nothing more than “a balanced budget” for the UMP, while for the PS they involved nothing more than “the right to abortion”. (Obviously, for both of them, “peace” was also an important mantra.)

But many French people hold the EU directly responsible for their problems, and many cite the numerous state intrusions into people’s lives, as well as the abstruse regulations, the obsession with equality,

A celebratory Marine Le Pen. Courtesy of The Latest.

Summer 201412

Hungary’s Parliamentary ElectionsKálmán Pócza

It can be quite difficult for conservatives outside of Hungary to understand what is going on in this Central European country and what has happened over the last four years. It is far easier to be a liberal or left-wing activist and worry about the decay of Hungarian democracy and the authoritarian turn of the government. Such a position would certainly make life easier — since one only has to accept the reports and analyses of the international media, which will undoubtedly be consistent with one’s own worldview.

But being a conservative means being painfully aware of the liberal bias of the global media. Ambivalent emotions might emerge when conservatives read the reports of the international media and often one cannot fully believe the claims made in these reports. Nevertheless, it is understandable that some of the claims made might make conservatives a bit suspicious about developments in Hungary.

How can we better understand the situation in Hungary? In order to make recent events and developments in Hungary comprehensible, we first have to distinguish the features and outlines of two competing and mutually exclusive narratives. Then, only after we have understood this conflict in visions, can we summarize and explain the results of the latest parliamentary elections in Hungary, held April 6, which gave victory to the conservative Fidesz (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége or Alliance of Young Democrats).

Two Competing NarrativesIf one relies solely on either the liberal or left-

wing Hungarian media or the international media outlets (whether liberal or conservative), then one is left with

the impression that Hungarian democracy has departed from the Western democratic model. This ‘liberal narrative’ gives the impression of a failed democracy by using keywords like: ‘dictatorship’ and ‘authoritarianism’, ‘dangerous nationalism’, ‘oppressed media’, ‘electoral fraud’, ‘increasing anti-Semitism’, and ‘anti-Roma hostilities’ at the state level. Such accounts also claim that there is a relativizing of any historical responsibility for the Holocaust; nostalgia for the feudal Hungary of the inter-war years; government by oligarchy and loyal party apparatchiks; a wholesale breakdown of checks and balances (through alleged limits on the competences of the Constitutional Courts and the creation of new institutions directly accountable to the government); re-nationalization of various private companies and a return to a centrally-planned economy; and, to top it all off, a total disregard for the interest of the poorest social classes, and a blatant disregard for human and social rights.

If one looks at the other points of view that exist and tries to understand the perspective of the government of Viktor Orbán, then one will get a totally different narrative. It is one that uses the following keyphrases: ‘struggle for national sovereignty’; ‘breaking the post-Communist networks of liberals and socialists’; ‘counter-balancing the liberal dominance of the media’; ‘value-oriented governance’, ‘political constitutionalism’, and ‘leadership democracy’. It emphasises renewing of spiritual and cultural ties with Hungarians abroad; securing energy resources by correcting the mistakes made in early privatizations of public utilities; supporting the middle class by implementing a flat tax and abolishing income taxes for families with at least three children; reducing household utility prices in order to help citizens with the worst living standards; building a ‘work-fare’

the loss of human dignity in the name of social justice, etc. But what has certainly increased popular resentment against the established political parties has been the inordinate emphasis placed on Europe’s purely institutional and bureaucratic aspects — at the expense of a European culture and identity.

The UMP, in the meantime, continues to be ideologically subjugated by the Left, a result of its own cowardice and conformism. Its main leaders dare not to go against current ‘taboos’ and the ideology of ‘political correctness’. They effectively end up betraying the ideals of the Right in order to assuage the ‘dictatorship of the intellectuals’. The common sense of the average French citizen, however, appears still to be resistant to such pressure — as last year’s huge mobilizations against gay marriage seemed to confirm.

That is why, as the FN talks to the ‘suffering France’ — the working poor, the rural folk, and those too long ignored by the media and ostracized by

France’s upper classes and elites — they continue to gain support. The FN’s leaders have been courageous enough to confront a media establishment and a political class that seem more and more disconnected from the concerns of the average French person — and in doing so, they have demonstrated courage and leadership, qualities in short supply in the other parties.

For these reasons, we can assert that the showdown between the FN and the establishment during the European elections in May was truly an important landmark. It was not, however, unpredictable. And now, this so-called “earthquake” will surely be followed by numerous aftershocks. The so-called “elites” should be ready.

Mr. Adhémar is a Paris-based writer. He graduated from the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, with a B.A. in political science and an M.A. in public affairs, and is a member of the Institut de Formation Politique (IFP).

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 13

state by linking social benefits to participation in public employment programs; balancing rights and duties, and emphasizing personal responsibility towards children and parents; defending the Jewish and Roma minorities against extreme right-wing assaults, and supporting these minorities through different financial programs; and, finally, giving real meaning to a non-offensive patriotism.

These two narratives seem to be completely incompatible. But are they really irreconcilable? The most important question is: Which of these narratives prevails or proves to be most true?

While I cannot, in the space of this article, give a comprehensive answer to this question, nor can I offer a synthesis of all the policy issues which have been either heavily criticized or defended during the last four years. This will be the aim of a volume of essays, edited by John O’Sullivan and myself, to be titled Orbán Viktor’s Second Term: Beyond Prejudices and Enthusiasm, to be published later this year by the Social Affairs Unit in London. But what I can do here is to present the principal facts surrounding the 2014 elections and offer an explanation for why the majority of Hungarians voted for the Fidesz government — in spite of an allegedly decayed or failed democracy, ongoing economic difficulties, and growing social pressures caused by the financial crisis.

The 2014 Parliamentary ElectionsWith a voter turnout of 62%, Fidesz won 44.54%

of the votes during Hungary’s 2014 parliamentary elections. The joint party list of the left-wing parties (Unity and Összefogás) only got 25.99% of the votes. The radical right-wing party Jobbik got 20.54%, which was to some extent disappointing for its leaders because they expected to be the second biggest party of the country. And even though voter turnout was the second lowest since 1990, the difference between the moderate right-wing Fidesz and the left-wing opposition was almost one million votes (Fidesz: 2,135,891; Unity: 1,246,465; Jobbik: 985,029).

The party landscape hasn’t changed much compared to that of the 2010 elections. Even the Green party (known as Lehet Más a Politika or Politics Can Be Different) crossed the 5% threshold required for representation in the Hungarian Parliament. And while Fidesz lost around 700,000 voters, they still managed to keep together a huge voter base of more than 2 million people. In light of the conflictive government of the Orbán government, such results might be regarded as an absolute success — even more so when one notes that the left-wing opposition could not even attract the vast majority of voters who left the ranks of Fidesz. They

won over only about 170,000 of them, while the Jobbik got only 120,000.

Most critics of Hungary’s 2014 parliamentary elections say there was a terrible disproportion between the votes cast and the seats won — a consequence, they claim, of the 2011 changes to the electoral system, which increased the relative weight of parliamentary seats won in a single member constituency. To be sure, with only 44.54% of the votes, Fidesz still won 66.83% of the seats, a narrow two-thirds majority, for the second time. But despite what critics claim, the electoral system has not radically changed: The system remains a ‘mixed system’ with only a slight shift towards a more majoritarian model.

On the other hand, the number of parliamentary seats was also reduced. This required the re-drawing

of constituencies. Thus, accusations of gerry-mandering might have some validity; but the extent of this might not be more serious than what has been commonly experienced in the US during the last 10 years. Furthermore, the enormous difference between the votes on the proportional side of the electoral system (‘party lists’) provides a huge legitimacy for the victory of the right-wing government. Fidesz has one million more

voters than the left-wing opposition all together. In a country with around eight million voters, a difference of one million is more than considerable.

When considering criticisms of the new electoral system, two facts are worth keeping in mind: First, in 1994 — well before the changes — the Hungarian Socialist Party won an absolute majority of 54% of the parliamentary seats with only 31% of the votes. Second, even if we compare the votes received and seats won by the Hungarian Socialist Party and its coalition partner at the time, Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége (Alliance of Free Democrats), we see similar results in 1994: A liberal/left-wing coalition won 71.77% of the seats with only 48.89% of the votes. This is not much different from the British or the French electoral systems where parties with only about 30% of the votes can win 60% or 70% of the seats in parliament.

Furthermore, the overall legitimacy of the Fidesz government was solidly confirmed during the elections for European Parliament, held on May 25, where Fidesz won almost 52% of the votes. The three main left-wing parties, which this time ran separately, won altogether 28% (Hungarian Socialist Party: 10.9%; Democratic Coalition: 9.75%; Together 2014/Dialogue for Hungary: 7.25%). In contrast to the Hungarian parliamentary election, the European Parliament election was held under a proportional electoral system. But even in this

Viktor Mihály Orbán is the Prime Minister of Hungary and President of Fidesz. Courtesy of Hungarian Ambiance.

Summer 201414

case, Fidesz won an absolute majority of the votes. All in all, there is no reason to contest the legitimacy

and the success of Fidesz, or of the new Fundamental Law adopted in 2011. Voters had an opportunity to protest against the new constitutional order and the country’s new, more conservative social policies, by voting against Fidesz. They didn’t. Instead, they decided to give it further legitimacy.

Understanding the factsThe question that remains is how to read these

facts? Are Hungarian voters not aware of the terrible changes depicted in the liberal/left-wing narrative? Are they aware of them but simply don’t care about them? Or are they aware of them but, instead of rejecting the “terrible destruction of the Hungarian democracy”, they support it? Or is the liberal narrative a misleading exaggeration which most Hungarian voters have rejected?

To better understand the results of the elections, two facts must be noted: first, the dismal performance of previous left-wing governments in reducing poverty and closing the huge gap in living standards between Hungarians (especially the rural poor) and Western European nations; and, second, Fidesz offered something not only to middle-class voters but also to those with depressed economic prospects.

A key motivation of Viktor Orbán’s government was to strengthen the middle class, even if this meant using the state to do so (if there is no other possibility). But winning an election in Hungary with a programme that focuses only on the middle class would probably not be successful. This was the most important lesson of his first term in office (1998-2002). One cannot be successful with a distinct middle class focus; one also has to offer something to citizens in the most disadvantaged positions. So a key element of the success story of

the Fidesz government is that they were aware of and addressed this political reality.

Nevertheless, being aware of this and developing a programme — as well as constructing a narrative — which could include economic and social policies for the middle class, while also offering something for the poorest sectors of society are two different things. Viktor Orbán and Fidesz found the key to this difficulty with their election programme: simply reducing household utility prices.

On the other hand, it was the left-wing opposition which helped Orbán stay in power. And the left-wing opposition could not give any signs of revival or rejuvenation. The three most important figures of the left-wing opposition during the election campaign in 2014 were former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, who was totally discredited in the eyes of the electorate due to his government’s terrible economic and moral performance; Gordon Bajnai, who was Minister of National Development and Economy in Ferenc Gyurcsány’s cabinet; and Attila Mesterházy, who was elected as chairman of the Hungarian Socialist Party in 2009 (prior to that he was the deputy leader of the Socialist’s parliamentary group).

The inability of the left-wing to stage a revival, in combination with the special mixture of Fidesz politics, which mingle elements of middle-class protectionism and subsidies for the poorest members of society, made it possible for Hungary’s moderate right-wing to win the 2014 elections with an enormous majority. May the Hungarian Left continue to slide into irrelevancy so that others may govern.

Mr. Pócza is the Academic Director of the Danube Institute in Budapest. For more information about the Institute, visit: www.danubeinstitute.hu

A New Faith in Spain?Filip Mazurczak

Like Quebec, Ireland, or Boston, Spain has epitomized the fading of Catholic faith. In the twentieth century, religious practice in Spain fell sharply, especially as the country transitioned to democracy and resentment of the Church’s support for Franco’s dictatorship surfaced.

Recently, however, the downward trend has stopped and is recovering. According to Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), the proportion of Spaniards attending Mass has increased from 12.1 to 15 percent between 2011 and 2012. In absolute terms, the number of Spanish Catholics attending Mass weekly grew by an astonishing further 23 percent between 2012 and 2013, according to CIS. Meanwhile, between 2007 and 2013 the number of Spaniards contributing part of their taxes to the Church rose

from eight to nine million.Not only are Spaniards attending Mass more

frequently, but also youths are rediscovering the priesthood and religious life. In 2013–2014, the number of Spanish diocesan seminarians increased for a third consecutive year to 1321, a steady growth from 1227 in 2010–2011. Active female religious orders are also vibrant — each year, about 400 Spanish girls become non-cloistered sisters, a slowly increasing number. The number of women at the Poor Clares Convent of the Ascension in Lerma has surged from 28 in 1994 to 134 in 2009. One of the Lerma nuns, Sister Verónica, created her own community, Jesu Communio. The Vatican approved the rapidly growing order, known as the “sisters in jeans” because they wear denim habits, in 2010.

Immigration cannot explain this growth in monastic and priestly vocations. Today, young Spaniards

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 15

are leaving the country for the more prosperous parts of Latin America (especially Chile) and for Germany and Britain. Considering Spain’s massive youth emigration and the fact that the country has one of Europe’s lowest birth rates, Spain’s youth population is shrinking, so this vocations rebound is more impressive.

Perhaps no one puts a more attractive face on Spain’s return to Catholicism than Olalla Oliveros. Last month, the 36-year-old Spanish model stunned Spanish society by becoming a nun of the semi-cloistered Order of Saint Michael. Perhaps Oliveros did this out of frustration? On the contrary, she was at the height of her career and was recently offered a lead role in a big-budget film. Oliveros experienced a conversion several years back and made her decision after much thought.

Some would dismiss these recent developments as resulting from the economic crisis. Currently, unemployment in Spain is almost 27 percent; in the European Union, only Greece suffers from a worse jobless rate. Spain plunged into recession in 2008, with anemic GDP growth in recent quarters. Perhaps Spaniards are rediscovering the pews and seminaries because economic hardship is leading them to look for a last resort in religion?

There are several reasons why this is not the case. First, economic hardship is nothing new to Spain. In the early 1990s, Spain also suffered from severe recession and unemployment reached 23 percent in 1993, nearly the current rate. Yet throughout the 1990s rates of religious observance and vocations to the priesthood and religious life declined.

A more dramatic example is the Great Depression, the worst recession in Europe in a century. The 1930s did not revive Spanish religiosity. On the contrary, anticlericalism then arguably reached its climax in Spain’s history. In 1931, Prime Minister Manuel Azaña declared that “Spain has ceased to be Catholic” and purged Spanish public life of anything Christian. Meanwhile, during the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War anticlerical, communist-sympathizing Republicans murdered 7,000 priests, nuns, and seminarians with extreme brutality. In his 1938 Homage to Catalonia George Orwell was astonished by how quickly Catalonian society was discarding its Catholic identity.

Furthermore, Spain is not only experiencing a religious revival of its society, but its public sphere is also turning away from the moral relativism of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s government (2004–2011). In 2005, Zapatero legalized same-sex “marriage” and the adoption of children by homosexual couples. In 2010 Zapatero’s government legalized abortion on demand. Also, Zapatero made “express divorce” legal, ended

mandatory religious education in schools and removed crucifixes from public buildings.

However, today’s government of Mariano Rajoy is challenging Zapatero’s revolution. Currently, it is pushing a bill banning abortion except when

the pregnancy results from rape or threatens the mother’s health or life. The bill would make Spanish legislation as pro-life as it has been since 1985. Spanish elites feel that Zapatero went too far in de-Christianization.

Ireland, too, has also suffered economically. However, Irish Catholicism remains in the doldrums since the economic collapse; no trends similar to the Spanish ones can be observed there. The number of Irish youths entering seminary remains depressingly low; many Irish parishes are closing; popular and political pressure to embrace same-sex “marriage” and abortion are mounting; Mass attendance in Dublin is fast approaching the single digits with no end in sight. Ireland demonstrates that economic depression does not necessarily cause religious revival.

What, then, accounts for this surprising turnaround in the state of Spanish Catholicism? Perhaps it can be partially attributed to Pope Benedict XVI, sometimes criticized by some for excessively focusing on the re-evangelization of Western societies, being a Don Quixote trying to resurrect Christendom where it is obviously dead. Yet Spain mattered to Benedict. He visited the country three times, attracting some of the largest crowds of his pontificate.

Spain’s slight retreat from secularization can’t simply be chalked up to economic difficulties. Something else is at play, whether a response to Benedict’s summoning of Europe to return to its roots, a rediscovery of the beauty of religious life, weariness with Zapatero’s secularist aggression, or something else entirely.

For some time, many had predicted that Spanish Catholicism would share the fate of the woolly mammoth and that its Gothic churches would be turned into pizzerias and discotheques. However, Spanish Catholicism is regaining a vibrancy it has not seen in decades. When Pope Francis visits Spain next year, he will find a struggling local Church, but one where Catholic culture is being visibly reborn.

Mr. Mazurczak has published in First Things, New Eastern Europe, and List Katolicki Miesięcznik. He studied history and Latin American literature at Creighton University, and has an M.A. in international relations from George Washington University. This article originally appeared in the June 2014 edition of First Things. It appears here by kind permission.

Olalla Oliveros gave up a lucrative modelling career for the Faith — and

became a nun.

Summer 201416

EU Parental Rights Under AttackRoger Kiska

Parental rights in Europe are clearly and unequivocally under attack. States have seized the reigns of parental authority and seek to control how our children are brought up and what they are to believe in an unprecedented way. Some egregious example include the following:

• In Salzkotten, Germany, 14 Christian parents were imprisoned, some for more than 40 days and most on multiple occasions, simply for opting-out their nine and ten-year-old children from two days of mandatory “sexual education” classes.

• Also in Germany, a 15-year-old girl was placed in a mental institution for wishing to be home educated. The reason for her police detention and subsequent committal to the Nuremberg mental facility was the false diagnosis by a single practitioner that the young girl in question had “schoolphobia”.

• In Sweden, a seven-year old boy was taken off of an airplane bound for Sweden by police and social services simply for being home educated. The family was relocating to India to do missionary work with orphanages. The police had no warrant and the family was accused of committing no crimes when young Domenic Johansson was taken from his parents nearly four years ago.

• In Spain, the Zapatero government initiated mandatory classes known as “education for citizenship”, which indoctrinated young children with a bombardment of material promoting homosexual behavior, hypersexual behavior, communism and which aggressively mocked the Catholic Church. What was perhaps even more shocking was that the government refused all requests for parental opt-outs of the classes despite more than 50,000 complaints from parents, hundreds of lawsuits and ultimately a class action style law suit at the European Court of Human Rights.

The forces behind the oppression of parental rights and the ideological indoctrination of children have but one goal in mind: to steal the hearts and minds of this generation despite the parents’ best attempts to the contrary.

A quote from a Charles F. Potter, prominent humanist in the 1930s, set out this goal in a most straightforward manner: “Education is thus our most powerful ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?”

When the State becomes the arbiter of acceptable child-rearing, it becomes the dictator of public opinion and social direction, thereby defrauding democracy. This is not, mind you, an issue of child

abuse or neglect; rather, it is a matter of conscience, belief, preference, and ideology. If the State asserts a right to determine which beliefs a parent can or cannot instill in his or her own children, it infringes upon a fundamental liberty upon which the social order is established. Liberty, rightly understood, cannot be vested in the State itself, for it thus can lead to tyranny or fascism. The State’s role is to recognize, respect, and protect liberty: the liberty of the individual, the family, and the people at large.

This legal trend — with the State taking over parents’ role as the custodians and guardians for their children’s development — threatens religious liberty and the freedoms of conscience, belief, and even speech. For if the State can dictate what a child believes, it can control the limits of speech in society at large. In effect, the State can gain a monopoly on socially acceptable principles and dialogue, and exclude from the public sphere any dialogue on issues they label as “fundamentalist” or “abnormal”. This is not through direct regulation — at least not yet — but through regulating the family, which is the foundation of society and the seedbed of future citizens.

Numerous international documents confirm that parents are and ought to be the primary and principal educators of their children. By that fact alone, parents have the greatest rights and the greatest responsibility in the education of their children. State institutions should assist them in this task; but schools must seek the cooperation of parents and should not in any case artificially displace the rights of children and the rights of parents by imposing on the children an education contrary to the one they receive from their parents.

Article 26(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “[p]arents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children”. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in Article 5, clearly states that among the most important rights of the child, besides the right to life, are precisely the right to parental love and the right to education. The Convention also explicitly notes, in Article 18, that the rights of parents are not juxtaposed to the rights of children. Moreover, the parents, being the ones who love their children most, are those most called upon to decide on the education of their children.

Equally pertinent is Article 18(4) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which states that “[t]he States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions”.

Furthermore, the Convention against Discrimination in Education holds in Article 5(1)(b)

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that it is essential that States “respect the liberty of parents and, where applicable, of legal guardians, firstly to choose for their children institutions other than those maintained by the public authorities but conforming to such minimum educational standards as may be laid down or approved by the competent authorities and, secondly, to ensure in a manner consistent with the procedures followed in the State for the application of its legislation, the religious and moral education of the children in conformity with their own convictions; and no person or group of persons should be compelled to receive religious instruction inconsistent with his or their conviction”.

And finally, a clause in the European Convention of Human Rights, Protocol 1, Article 2, mirrors this same idea: “In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions”. The term ‘philosophical convictions’ are interpreted by the European Convention of Human Rights as a whole and extend to include pedagogical beliefs; those being the parents’ beliefs as to the best way of educating their children.

Undoubtedly, therefore, parents must be at the centre of the decision-making process when it comes to curricula which deeply affect the value system of the child. The school systems should therefore work on harmonizing institutional education with parental upbringing.

Thirty-six years ago, the European Court of Human Rights in the Kjeldsen decision, affirmed to parents the right under Protocol 1, Article 2 of the Convention to opt their children out of classes which were objectionably indoctrinating. While these opt-outs were denied to the applicants in the Kjeldsen case, the guarantee nonetheless became a seminal part of the Strasbourg Court’s case law.

Later, in the Folgerø case of 2007, the Grand Chamber upheld the opt-out for parents who wished not to have their children attend religious education classes. The progeny of Folgerø have continued to promote the freedom of parents to take their children out of religious education. From Kjeldsen to Folgerø, this Court has continued to hold that the right to opt-outs holds equally to all subjects and not just religious education.

While opt-outs should always be made available for themes as controversial as “sexual education”, the State also has a duty to provide options for parents in how they want their children to be educated about moral issues. After all, the safeguarding of the possibility of pluralism in education is essential for the preservation of a democratic society.

Furthermore, parents must be able to choose their children’s schools, whether public or private.

The right to establish confessional schools is guaranteed in international law. Alternative forums for education, such as home schooling, must also be recognized as falling within the weighty protections afforded to parental rights within the corpus of international law.

As the Council of Europe has recently stated: “history has proven that violations of academic freedom … have always resulted in intellectual relapse, and consequently in social and economic stagnation”.

Whereas the Left in Europe is aggressively seeking to define educational choices and curriculum in their own terms, excluding any chance of parental choice, brave parents continue to fight. The battle for the hearts and minds of our children is one of the defining issues of this generation — and the European branch of Alliance Defending Freedom will continue to be at the forefront of many of these important battles.

The silent majority can no longer afford to stand idly by while the freedom of parents — and, ultimately, their children — are so provocatively trod upon. For as Benjamin Franklin so brilliantly observed at the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence, we must “all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately”.

Mr. Kiska is Senior Legal Counsel and Director of Alliance Defending Freedom’s European operations. He has acted in more than 30 cases at the European Court of Human Rights and provided expert testimony to several national parliaments in Europe, the European Parliament and the United States Congress. He has served as an elected member of the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency. Kiska has also published a number of scholarly articles on religious freedoms issues.

Summer 201418

What is Right?Roger Scruton

In the writings of the left the concept of freedom looms large: emancipation is both the individual purpose and the great social cause. And yet the nature of this freedom is rarely analysed, and the institutions needed to secure it still more rarely discussed. ‘Socialist relations of production’ are by definition free. And if a state exists in which freedom is not a reality, then by definition it cannot — yet — be socialist, even when founded on the theories, aims and methods which socialists defend.

Power and DominationThis identification of socialism and freedom

results, in part, from an obsession with power, and a confusion between questions of freedom and questions of power. Everywhere about him the radical sees domination: of man over man, of group over group, and of class over class. He envisages a future without domination, in which there is no power to secure obedience from the powerless. And he imagines that this condition is not only possible, but also a state of universal freedom. In other words, he sees equality and freedom as deeply compatible, and achievable together by the destruction of power.

This yearning for a ‘powerless’ world — which finds its most eloquent expression in the writings of Foucault — is incoherent. The condition of society is essentially a condition of domination, in which people are bound to each other by emotions and loyalties, and distinguished by rivalries and powers. There is no society that dispenses with these human realities, nor should we wish for one, since it is from these basic components that our worldly satisfactions are composed. But where there is loyalty there is power; and where there is rivalry there is the need for government. As Kenneth Minogue has put it: “the worm of domination lies at the heart of what it is to be human, and the conclusion faces us that the attempt to overthrow domination, as that idea is metaphysically understood in ideology, is the attempt to destroy humanity”.

Our concern as political beings should be, not to abolish these powers that bind society together, but to ensure that they are not also used to sunder it. We should aim, not for a world without power, but for a world where power is peacefully exercised and where conflicts are resolved according to a conception of justice acceptable to those engaged in them.

The radical is impatient with this ‘natural justice’, which lies dormant within human social intercourse. Either he discards it, like the Marxist, as a figment of ‘bourgeois ideology’, or else he diverts it from its natural course, insisting that priority be given to the underdog and the fruits of adjudication removed

from the hands of his ‘oppressor’. This second stance — illustrated at its most subtle in the work of Dworkin — is anti-revolutionary in its methods but revolutionary in its aims. The American liberal is as convinced of the evil of domination as is the Parisian gauchiste. He is distinguished by his recognition that institutions are, in the end, necessary to his purpose, and that ideology is no substitute for the patient work of law.

Community and InstitutionsThe New Left has not generally shared

that laudable respect for institutions. Its fervent denunciation of power has therefore been accompanied by no description of the institutions of the future. The goal is for a society without institutions: a society in which people spontaneously group together in life-affirming globules, and from which the dead shell of law, procedure and established custom has fallen away. This ‘groupe en fusion’ as Sartre calls it, is another version of the fascia of the early Italian socialists: a collective entity in which individual energies are pooled in a common purpose and whose actions are governed by a ‘general will’. When others proclaim this ideal the leftist denounces them (quite rightly) as fascists. Yet it is precisely his own ideal that angers him, when it stands before him armed in a doctrine that is not his own.

Institutions are the necessary inheritance of civilized society. But they are vulnerable to the ‘armed doctrine’ (as Burke described it) of the revolutionary, who looks to society not for the natural and imperfect solaces of human contact but for a personal salvation. He seeks a society that will be totally fraternal, and also totally free. He can therefore be content with no merely negotiated relation with his neighbours. For the institutions of negotiation are also the instruments of power.

In pursuit of a world without power the leftist finds himself plagued not only by real institutions but also by hidden devils. Power is everywhere about him, and also within him, implanted by the alien ideas of a dominating order. Such a vision fuels the paranoid fantasies of Laing and Esterson, and also the more sober methodical suspicions of Sartre and Galbraith. Everywhere, without and within, are the marks of power, and only a leap of faith — a leap into the ‘totality’ — brings freedom.

At the heart of the New Left thinking lies a paradox. The desire for total community accompanies a fear of ‘others’, who are the true source of social power. At the same time, no society can have the powerless character which the New Left requires. The attempt to achieve a social order without domination inevitably leads to a new kind of domination, more sinister by far than the one deposed.

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Civil Society and StateUnderlying the New Left vision of society

are two deep and contestable assumptions: first, that wherever there is power there is coercion; second, that classes are not the products of social interaction but the agents which control it. Those two assumptions arise from a kind of moral impatience, a need, faced with the ocean of human misery, to discover the culprit who turned on the tap. From the same impatience arises the political science of the New Left, which dismisses or ignores the concepts necessary to the defence of ‘capitalist’ society and which, by aiming always for the ‘deep’ explanation, misses the surface (and the truth) of social action.

Consider the distinction between civil society and state. It was Hegel who first gave this distinction currency, and it was Marx’s attack on Hegel that first threatened to overthrow it. In Gramsci’s theory of hegemony (and Althusser’s derived idea of the ‘ideological state apparatus’) the Marxian enterprise obtains canonical utterance. All powers within civil society — even though exercised by free association, autonomous institutions and corporations limited by law — are ascribed to the state (and to the ‘ruling class’ which controls it). They are as much part of the state, for the follower of Gramsci, as are the army, the judiciary, the police and parliament.

Someone who accepts that theory can no longer perceive the destruction of autonomous institutions by the state as a radical and innovatory departure. For the New Left, there is no significant difference between the control exercised by a triumphant communist or socialist party and that exercised through the ‘hegemony’ of a ‘ruling class’. Once again, therefore, a true achievement of ‘capitalist’ politics — the effective separation of society and state — is rendered imperceivable, and the reality of totalitarian dictatorship clouded in euphemism and apology.

This is not to say that the distinction between state and society is either easy to characterize or easy to defend. It is, indeed, one of the lasting problems of political philosophy how the two might best be related. We should understand their ideal relation in terms of a human analogy. The human person is neither identical with his body nor distinct from it, but joined to it in a metaphysical knot that philosophers labour fruitlessly to untie. When treating someone

as a person, we address ourselves to his rational and decision-making part: when treating him as a body (when he is ill or incapacitated) we study the anatomical functions which lie outside his will.

Civil society is like the human body: it is the substance which composes the state but whose movement and functions arise by an ‘invisible hand’. And the state is like the human person: it is the supreme forum of decision-making, in which reason and responsibility are the only authoritative guides. State and society are inseparable but nevertheless

distinct, and the attempt to absorb the one into the other is the sure path to a stunted, crippled and pain-wracked body politic.

It is hardly a distinguishing fault of the New Left that it has relied so heavily on shoddy rhetoric in its discussion of this issue. The same goes for thinkers of every persuasion, and no theory yet provided — from the ‘dialectical’ analysis of Hegel to Hayek’s conception of ‘spontaneous order’ — does justice to the extreme complexity of political realities. Nevertheless, it is characteristic of the New Left to be easily contented with theories that fuel its angry sentiment. When so much is at stake, this ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’ is far from innocent.

Left and RightWere we to define the

right as the force which leans from the left in an opposite direction, then we should have succumbed to the most dangerous feature of leftist rhetoric. We too should be seeing politics as a ‘struggle’ between opposing forces an ‘either/or’, poised between two equally absolute and equally final goals. Nevertheless, the labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ are inevitably forced on us, and we must venture a description — however partial and however brief — of the ‘right-wing’ attitude. The Right believes in responsible rather than impersonal government; in the autonomy and personality of institutions; and in the rule of law. It recognizes a distinction between state and civil society, and believes that the second should arise, in general, from the unforced interaction of freely contracting individuals, moderated by custom, tradition and a respect for authority and law. Power, for the Right, is an evil only when abused. For power arises naturally from human intercourse, and is merely the unobjectionable consequence of an arrangement whose virtue lies elsewhere.

Portrait of G.W.F. Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger (1792-1855) located in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

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Corporate PersonalityPerhaps the simplest way to indicate the theoretical

base and practical effect of this ‘right-wing’ politics is through an idea which von Gierke and Maitland have argued to be essential to the understanding of European politics: the idea of corporate personality.

Roman Law, the Genossenschaftsrecht of medieval Germany, the English law of trusts and corporations — all such legal systems recognize that the features of individual human beings, whereby we are moved to praise or blame them, to accord to them rights and liabilities, to oppose them and to ally ourselves with them, can be displayed by collective entities. Such systems also recognize that collective agency is a danger, until brought before the law as a composite person, equal to the individual whom it threatens to oppress. A university, a trading company, a club, an institution, even the state itself: all may be endowed with ‘legal personality’, and so made answerable before the law. (Hence the existence of ‘unincorporated associations’ is regarded as a legal problem.) A trading company can perform actions which are the actions of no individual. It has reasons for what it does. It may behave rationally and irrationally in pursuit of its goals. It has rights in law: rights of ownership, trade and action; rights of way, light and air; rights of usufruct and interest. It also has duties and liabilities: duties according to the law of contract, tort and crime. The factory which pollutes a river can therefore be compelled to compensate those who suffer. It can also be charged with a crime, and fined to the point of bankruptcy. By this device of corporate liability, the ‘capitalist’ world has ensured that, wherever there is agency, there is also liability.

The Rule of LawConvinced of the absolute evil of domination, the

leftist sees his task as the abolition of power. He is therefore impatient with those institutions which have the limitation, rather than the abolition, of power as their primary object. Because these institutions stand in the way of power, and because the violent overthrow of the old order requires a greater power than that upon which it rested, the leftist inevitably sanctions the destruction of limiting institutions. And once destroyed, they are never resurrected, except as instruments of oppression. They are never again turned against the power that the leftist himself installed, but only against the power of his ancestral enemy, the ‘bourgeois’, who for some reason continues to survive in the hidden crevices of the new social order.

Our European systems of law, patiently constructed upon the established results of Roman Law, Canon Law and the common laws of the European nations, embody centuries of minute reflection upon the realities of human conflict. Such legal systems have tried to define and to limit the activities of every important social power, and to install in the heart of the ‘capitalist’ order a principle of answerability which no agent can escape.

The rule of law is no simple achievement, to be weighed against the competing benefits of some rival social scheme and renounced in their favour. On the contrary, it is definitive of our social condition and represents the high point of European political achievement. There is a rule of law, however, only where every power, however large, is subject to the law and limited by it.

Politics of the RightIt is against the reality of

totalitarian governments, I believe, that our own laws and institutions should be judged, and the ‘right’ point of view defended. The matter could be put simply: our inherited forms of government, founded upon representation, law and autonomous institutions which mediate between the individual and the state, are also

forms of personal government. The state as we know it is not a thing but a person. This is true not only in the legal sense but in a deeper sense, once captured in the institution of monarchy but displayed more widely and more discreetly through the rule of law. Like every person, the state is answerable to other persons: to the individual subject, to the corporations and to other states. It is also answerable to the law. It has rights against the individual and duties towards him; it is tutor and companion of society, the butt of our jokes and the recipient of our anger. It stands to us in a human relation, and this relation is upheld and vindicated by the law, before which it comes as one person among others, on equal footing with its own subjects.

Such a state can compromise and bargain. It is disposed to recognize that it must respect persons, not as means only but as ends in themselves. It tries not to liquidate opposition but to accommodate it. The socialist too may influence this state, and provided that he recognizes that no change, not even change in his favoured direction, is or can be ‘irreversible’, he presents no threat to its durability.

The immense human achievement represented by such a state is neither respected nor even noticed by the New Left radical. Bent on a labour of destruction,

German philosopher and sociologist Otto von Gierke (1841-1921). Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.

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he sees behind the mask of every institution the hideous machinery of power. For him there is, in the end, no real difference between the impersonal, abstract power of, say, a Marxist regime, and the personal, mediated and concrete power of the ‘bourgeois democracies’. By demoting law and politics to epiphenomena, and by seeing all states as ‘systems’ based on structures of economic organization and control, the New Left radical effectively removes from his perception all the real distinctions between the world of representative government and the world of left-wing ideology. He sees, not the personal face of Western government, but the skull beneath the skin. He compares societies as an anatomist compares bodies: recognizing the similarity in function and structure and failing to see the person, whose rights, duties, reasons and motives are the true objects of our concern.

ConclusionThe inhuman politics of communist governments

and totalitarian regimes is the objective realisation of the Marxist vision of society, which sees true politics as no more than a mendacious covering placed over the realities of power. For such a vision, political systems can no longer be judged as persons — by their virtues and vices and by the movement of their intrinsic life — but only by their goals.

The excuses that used to be made for the Soviet Union originated, not in a love of tyranny, but in the failure to perceive tyranny when its goal is also one’s own. Whatever ‘errors’ had been committed in the name of communism, it was supposed, they had been the work of individuals, such as Stalin, who perverted the system from its true and humanising purpose. (It is an important fact about religion — illustrated by Boccaccio’s story of Jeahannot and Abraham — that, for the faithful, it is not refuted but rather confirmed by the actions of its bad practitioners.)

Despite this devotion to goals — a devotion which is in itself at variance with the spirit of European law and government — the radical is extremely loath to tell us what he is aiming at. As soon as the question of the ‘New Society’ arises, he diverts our attention back to the actual world, so as to renew the energy of hatred. In a moment of doubt about the socialist record, E.J. Hobsbawm wrote: “If the left may have to think more seriously about the new society, that does not make it any the less desirable or necessary or the case against the present one any less compelling”.

There, in a nutshell, is the sum of the New Left’s commitment: We know nothing of the socialist future, save only that it is both necessary and desirable. Our concern is with the ‘compelling’ case against the present that leads us to destroy what we lack the knowledge to replace. A blind faith drags the radical from ‘struggle’ to ‘struggle’, reassuring him that everything done in the name of ‘social justice’ is well done and that all destruction of existing power will lead him towards his goal. He desires to leap from the tainted world that surrounds him into the pure but unknowable realm of human emancipation. This leap

into the Kingdom of Ends is a leap of thought, which can never be mirrored in reality. ‘Revolutionary praxis’ therefore confines itself to the work of destruction, having neither the power nor the desire to perceive, in concrete terms, the end towards which it labours. By an inevitable transition, therefore, the ‘armed doctrine’ of the revolutionary, released in pursuit of an ideal freedom, produces a world of real enslavement, whose brutal arrangements are incongruously described in the language of emancipation: ‘liberation’, ‘democracy’, ‘equality’, ‘progress’ and ‘peace’ — words which no prisoner of ‘actual socialism’ can now hear uttered without a pained, sardonic smile.

So much is perhaps obvious to those who have not succumbed to the ideological temptation of the left. But the consequence is not always accepted. The ‘right’ — which in this context means those who defend personal government, autonomous institutions and the rule of law — does not, after all, bear the onus of justification. It is not for us to defend a reality which, for all its faults, has the undeniable merit of existence. Nor is it for us to show that the consensual politics of Western government is somehow closer to human nature and more conducive to man’s fulfilment than the ideal world of socialist emancipation. Nevertheless, nothing is more striking to a reader of the New Left than the constant assumption that it is the ‘right’ which bears the burden and that it is sufficient to adopt the aims of socialism in order to have virtue on one’s side.

This assumption of a priori correctness, added to the turgid prose and the sheer intellectual incompetence of much New Left writing, presents a formidable challenge to the reader’s patience. No doubt I have frequently been driven, in my exasperation, to lapse from accepted standards of literary politeness. But what of that? Politeness is no more than a ‘bourgeois’ virtue, a pale reflection of the rule of law which is the guarantee of bourgeois domination. In engaging with the left one engages not with a disputant but with a self-declared enemy.

Nobody has perceived more clearly than the reformed totalitarian Plato that argument changes its character when the onus is transferred from the man who would change things to the man who would keep them secure: “How is one to argue on behalf of the existence of the gods without passion? For we needs must be vexed and indignant with the men who have been, and still are, responsible for laying on us this burden of argument”. Like Plato’s wise Athenian, I have tried to pass the burden back to the one who created it.

Prof. Scruton is currently a fellow and visiting professor at Blackfriar’s Hall, Oxford; a visiting professor in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews; and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC. His book, Thinkers of the New Left, from which this significantly abridged article is drawn, was originally published in 1985. A new and expanded edition is being prepared for publication in 2015.

Summer 201422

The Politics of NostalgiaEdmund Waldstein

The history of liberalism in the last century is one of extraordinary triumph. After being widely questioned in the early part of the century it triumphed over its totalitarian rivals. Today it surrounds us like the air we breathe, so that many of its ideas seem to people to be self-evident truisms.

One example of this is the idea that democracy is the best form of government. To most people, it is the only reasonable form of government — indeed, even the only legitimate form of government. Democracy has become almost a synonym for legitimate government, for the rule of law. And “undemocratic” has become a synonym for “tyrannical”, for a regime unconcerned with the good of the people.

Even those who are weary of the hypocrisy, vulgarity, and pettiness of democratic politics — that is, the short-sightedness and divisiveness of politicians, the manipulation of the political process — cannot conceive of an un-democratic alternative. Thus, the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States could only propose a different model of democracy — a more direct, Athenian style, democracy — as a means to promote the common welfare. They never dared to state the apparent implication of their criticism of the status quo: that democracy itself is part of the problem.

On a very different part of the ideological map one finds political strongmen such as Vladimir Putin. Fed up with the democratic chaos of the Yeltsin years, and the extraordinary loss of Russian power and prestige that they caused, Putin has established an autocratic rule. And yet despite his evident contempt for democracy he thinks it necessary to go through democratic rituals of legitimation.

So why is it that even the enemies of democracy — American anarchists and Russian autocrats — have to pay lip-service to this form of governance?

It was not always so. The greatest philosophers of antiquity — Plato and Aristotle — both considered democracy a rather inferior form of political life. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates claim that democratic citizens are dominated by licentious passion rather than reason: “[T]hey call insolence good education; anarchy, freedom; wastefulness, magnificence; and shamelessness, courage”. He says that democracy is the sort of regime favoured by children and women — i.e. those in whom reason is weak. Aristotle, in turn, distinguishes between good forms of government, in which the rulers have the common good of the whole city as their goal, and bad ones, in which they rule for their own private interests. In the Politics, he gives the name “democracy” to one of the bad regimes: that in which the poor rule for the private advantage of their own class.

Later, in the Christian Middle Ages, monarchy rather than democracy was the most common form of government, and to many medieval thinkers this seemed perfectly reasonable.

The great transformation that brought the modern world into being changed many things; but this transformation took many centuries and many resisted it — especially Catholics. When revolutionaries killed King Louis XVI of France, Pope Pius VI commented in Quare Lacrymae as follows: “The most Christian King, Louis XVI, was condemned to death by an impious conspiracy and this judgement was carried out. We shall recall to you in a few words the ordering and motives of this sentence. The National Assembly had no right or authority to pronounce it. After abolishing the monarchy,

Image courtesy of Pablo Soham at Everystockphoto.

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the best form of government, it had transferred the civil power in its entirety to the people, which acts neither by reason nor by good counsel, which does not conform itself in any way to just ideas, which evaluates few matters in accordance with truth and a great number in accordance with opinion; which is always inconsistent, can easily be deceived and drawn to every excess, and is ungrateful, arrogant and cruel; which rejoices in slaughter and in the shedding of human blood, and draws pleasure from watching the sufferings which precede the last breath, just as men in former times used to go to watch gladiators die in the ancient amphitheatres”.

At the time, his reaction was by no means extraordinary. But why is it that today most people think about democracy and monarchy so differently from Pius VI? It’s hardly likely that there will be a restoration of the monarchy here in Central Europe any time soon, and it is unclear how one could work for such a thing, if at all. Nevertheless, there are practical consequences — and while it may not feasible to work directly for a restoration, one can work toward a more authentic realization of the common good.

The Purpose of GovernmentClassical Greek political philosophy was deeply

marked by the experience of the war with Persia. In Herodotus’ Histories the Greek Demaratus tells Xerxes, the Persian tyrant, that the Greeks will win, despite having many fewer men than the Persians: “They are free, yet not wholly free: law is their master, whom they fear much more than your men fear you. They do whatever it bids; and its bidding is always the same, that they must never flee from the battle before any multitude of men, but must abide at their post and there conquer or die”.

The reason why the Greeks win is that unlike the Persians they are not the slaves of passion; they are the “slaves” of law. To be ruled by law is to be ruled by reason, since law is a decision based on reason. And this will become the Greek notion of freedom: the rule of reason. To be ruled by reason means to be free because it means understanding what is really good, what is really desirable, and not being moved by a passing feeling. The achievement of the true good is happiness and since everyone wants to be happy, a law which “forces” one to do good and to avoid evil does not limit freedom but rather makes the one who follows it free — able to achieve what he really, deep down, wants.

This conception of law presupposes that there is really an objective good that is knowable by human reason. Socrates argues this point with the sophists of his day. They hold that in fact there is no true good: “Justice is the advantage of the stronger”. That is to say, what people

happen to desire they call ‘good’; and if they are strong enough they force everyone to submit to their desire and they call this ‘justice’. But Socrates argues against this, saying that there is indeed an objective good. The good is indeed what we desire, but it is not good because we desire it; on the contrary, we desire it because it is good. Desire is awakened by the good when we recognize it.

So why doesn’t everyone desire what is really good? The problem is that there are different powers in the human soul. There are the senses and then there is reason. The senses know a limited kind of goodness, and from this kind of knowledge come certain passions such as hunger, thirst and lust. Only reason knows the complete good, wherein happiness really lies, and understands it as good. Thus, reason has to order and moderate the passions.

Unfortunately, most people are like the Persian soldiers: There is disorder in the soul with the passions dominating reason. So man has to be educated and habituated to act in an orderly way so that reason will rule over the passions. On this account, law has an educative task: It is meant to train the human soul, to order it, to help produce a harmony among its different parts, in which reason has

the first place. This harmony is called virtue.Virtue in the soul is more than a merely useful thing.

It is not as though virtue is merely a means of getting the good. Virtue is itself good and it is a participation in a higher good. As Socrates says in the Republic: “For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being ... his eye is ever directed towards things fixed and immutable, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and to these he will, as far as he can, conform himself. ... And the philosopher holding converse with the divine order, becomes orderly and divine, as far as the nature of man allows ... And if a necessity be laid upon him of fashioning, not only himself, but human nature generally, whether in States or individuals, into that which he beholds elsewhere, will he, think you, be an unskilful artificer of justice, temperance, and every civil virtue? ... And if the world perceives that what we are saying about him is the truth, will they be angry with philosophy? Will they disbelieve us, when we tell them that no State can be happy which is not designed by artists who imitate the heavenly pattern?”

This is one of the profoundest insights of Platonic philosophy: The human good is a participation in a higher, divine good. Thus our good exists not principally in our selves but principally in the divine realm and secondarily in ourselves. The divine good is more our own good than the good which exists in our own souls.

This Platonic insight was developed by St.

15th century portrait of Dante Alighieri by unknown miniaturist.

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Augustine and then further developed by St. Thomas who synthesized it with Aristotle’s account of the common good. Note the importance of order in Plato’s text. The divine order (harmony, beauty) is reflected in the order of the eternal forms, this is reflected in the visible cosmos, in the order of the virtuous soul, and in the order of the just political community. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that order is what God principally intends in creation. Every individual creature reflects some aspect of God’s glory, but it is the order, the harmony, the beauty of their unity, that most perfectly reflects the creator: “The multitude and distinction of things has been planned by the divine mind and has been instituted in the real world so that created things would represent the divine goodness in various ways and diverse beings would participate in it in different degrees, so that out of the order of diverse beings a certain beauty would arise in things”.

At the beginning of Dante’s Paradiso Beatrice makes the same point: “e cominciò: Le cose tutte quante / hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è forma / che l’universo a Dio fa simigliante”. (And she began: All things whate’er they be / Have order among themselves, and this is form, / That makes the universe resemble God.)

The order of the whole of creation is what Charles De Koninck calls “the good of the universe” and “God’s manifestation outside Himself”. Man as a micro-cosmos can reflect this order in his own person through virtue. This is why virtue can be identified with happiness — because virtue is a participation in that order which is the greatest image of the divine beauty and goodness. And the order in a community is an even greater participation in the universal order. This is what Augustine shows with his analysis of the praises of “peace” in Psalm 137: “If I forget you, O City of Peace, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!”

This is also how St. Thomas understands Aristotle’s teaching on the primacy of the common good. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, writes the following: “Even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worthwhile to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or for city-states”.

It is good for man to realize the order of the universe in his own soul but it is more godlike for him to realize it in the state. St Thomas takes this more godlike aspect very

literally: The community of men reflects God more than an individual man just as the universe reflects Him more perfectly than any one creature. The common good of order or peace is common in fullest sense of the word: All the members of the community share it without it being divided or lessened by this sharing. Thus the common good is not merely a useful good; it is not merely the conditions that enable individuals to get what they want. It is the best good that individuals can have; it is that in which they find their happiness.

So the conception of politics that began with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and that was developed by

the great Christian thinkers, sees man as having an objective good — which is a participation in the divine good and consists primarily in the unity of order or harmony. This unity of order exists in the individual soul through virtue and in the community through peace. And law is ordered to producing this unity of order, both in the individual soul, and more especially in the community. Thus St. Thomas defines law as follows: “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated”.

Law thus derives its legitimacy from the good to which it is ordered; if it is ordered to the true common good then it is binding on all its subjects — not in a way that enslaves them but in a way

that makes them free. Similarly the ruler, who makes and administers the law, has his authority from the common good; to the extent that he serves the authentic common good he has legitimate authority and is not imposing on anyone. Legitimacy on this view does not depend on the “consent of the governed” given through democratic rituals, but rather it depends on the objective good.

The Form of GovernmentSince the purpose of government is to produce an

order in the community which is an imitation of a higher order, it is necessary to determine where that higher order is to be found, how it is to be known, and in what way the political order is to imitate it. For many of the Ancients that order was visible in the stars, which they thought of as eternal, immutable, living beings. But they were wrong about the stars. In Plato the divine order is found principally in the ideal forms, which are not visible to the senses, but can be apprehended by the intellect. But Plato’s application of this order to the city is never presented in a straightforward way.

Detail of stained glass window at SS. Peter and Paul’s Church in Ireland. Courtesy of Andreas Borchert.

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 25

In Christian thought the model for the “divine” order is the “city of God”, the spiritual community composed principally of the hierarchies of the angels to whom the saints are then joined. The “order of the universe” is principally an order of persons, related in a hierarchy of governance and subordination. St. Thomas Aquinas is called the “Angelic” Doctor because of the clarity with which he investigated that order.

But how is the model of the heavenly city to be applied to the earthly city? Dante’s Commedia is one of the finest examples of how this is done. The “dark woods” at the beginning of the Inferno is the loss of order both in Dante’s soul (the loss of virtue) and in Italy as a whole (the loss of political peace). Dante’s journey through the divine order manifested in the punishment of the damned, the purification of the suffering, and the glory of the angels and saints, is the means not only to recovering virtue in his own soul but also to showing Italy the solution to its woes.

One thing Dante learns is that a monarch is necessary for good political order. This is shown in the Commedia, but Dante also argued for it more pedantically in the De Monarchia. This latter work is principally about the necessity for a universal monarchy. But his argument can also be used to show why a monarchy is preferable to a polyarchy in a particular state.

Dante gives a number of arguments, but the most illuminating are those that proceed from the idea of imitating the divine order. He argues that God makes everything to “represent the divine likeness in so far as their peculiar nature is able to receive it”, but the human race is most like him when it is one and it is most one when it has one ruler. He further says that humanity imitates the heavens (meaning presumably the stars, but the angelic hierarchies could have been taken as the middle term instead). Now, since the heavens are moved by a single mover, men should be ruled by a single monarch. These arguments are applied to the order that humanity as a whole ought to seek, but they are even more applicable to a particular state where a more closely knit community is possible.

Dante’s arguments are very similar to those presented by St. Thomas Aquinas in the De Regno, where he argues that monarchy is the best form of government since that which is itself one is better able to cause unity. But unity is the primary purpose of government because government is for the sake of the common good and the common good consists in a kind of unity (namely a unity of order that reflects the divine beauty).

Of course, there are different forms of monarchy. The kind favoured by St. Thomas is not a pure monarchy but one that is moderated by aristocratic and democratic

elements to preserve the monarch from falling into tyranny, and to keep him in contact with different parts of society. St. Thomas proposes that the aristocratic element be elected by and from the people, thus providing for a democratic element.

Here I disagree with St. Thomas. Most people are ruled by passion, and it requires education to acquire virtue and responsibility. Experience teaches that a hereditary aristocracy, in which members are raised with a sense of responsibility and noblesse oblige, is better able to bring to the fore a virtuous elite than popular election, which tends to bring ambitious liars to the top. Reginald Garigou-

Lagrange, the great Thomist theologian, writes: “Any regime which favours the ambition of demagogues which flatters the people in order to arrive at power, leads to political pharisaism and to ruin, for there is no durable union except in truth and justice”.

Lagrange thus proposes another way of including the aristocratic and democratic elements in a monarchy: the model of medieval France: “Under the ancien régime in France, the interests of the different classes of society and of the different regions were represented by the corporations and their delegates, by the provincial Estates, and by the Estates General: assembly of clergy, of the nobility, and of the third estate”.

Preventing the rise of ambitious demagogues is one reason I think a hereditary monarchy is superior to an elected monarchy. Another reason is that election of the monarch tends to cause faction among the people,

weakening their unity by causing enmity between the supporters of rival candidates. This is a grave disadvantage because the monarch ought to instantiate the unity of the whole community. As St. Thomas writes: “Since love looks to the good, there is a diversity of love according as there is a diversity of the good. There is, however, a certain good proper to each man considered as one person, and as far as loving this good is concerned, each one is the principal object of his own love. But there is a certain common good which pertains to this man or that man insofar as he is considered as part of a whole; thus there is a certain common good pertaining to a soldier considered as part of the army, or to a citizen as part of the state. As far as loving this common good is concerned, the principal object of love is that in which the good primarily exists; just as the good of the army is in the general, or the good of the state is in the king. Whence, it is the duty of a good soldier that he neglects even his own safety in order to save the good of his general”.

Robert Schuman, the father of the European Union, describes his own experience of this: “It is in Luxembourg that I acquired the first notions of patriotism. It was in 1890 under the Grand Ducal balcony.

A 1929 portrait of statesman Robert Schuman (1886-1963). Courtesy of the

Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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The people acclaimed Grand Duke Adolf who came to make his solemn entry into the capital. I was a little boy of four years old lost in the crowd. I was enflamed by its enthusiasm and taken up in its pride. … Henceforth I knew what it is to love one’s country, and the attachment to the sovereign who personifies and guarantees the unity, continuity and independence of the nation”. In other words, this function of the monarch is fulfilled much better if he is the descendent of the kings for whom one’s ancestors shed their blood than if he’s just some bloke elected by a party to which one doesn’t even belong.

An obvious objection to the hereditary system is that it often results in fools or evil men becoming kings. This is a great disadvantage. But as the libertarian philosopher and economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out, if one compares the record of hereditary monarchs to that of elected rulers, the hereditary monarchs actually number less total fools and villains.

The WastelandSo how was the classical conception

of politics replaced by the modern one? One way to explain this is by recognizing that freedom was disconnected from the good. Modern thought — beginning already in the late middle ages with nominalism, but more in Renaissance humanism, and then fully in the Enlightenment — begins to see freedom not as “slavery to the law” as Herodotus did but rather as deciding for oneself what to do, without any determination from without, not even determination by the objective good.

Freedom is seen as an arbitrary choice in nominalism. In humanism the very indeterminacy of this free choice begins to be seen as the root of man’s dignity. Man does not have dignity because he can understand what is truly good and attain it; rather man has dignity because he can decide for himself wherein he wants to find his good, his end. We see this view in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. Freedom thus comes to be seen as primarily freedom from any interference with free choice, freedom from any kind of coercion.

After the wars of religion that followed the Reformation this position was supported and aided by a similar but less radical view — namely the view that the objective good for man is too hard to know, too difficult to agree about, and that in order to avoid the bloodshed of religious wars, it is necessary to limit politics to the care of a bare minimum of peace necessary to allow for non-violent coexistence of persons with different views of what the true good is. For both of these views the end of politics came to be seen as the securing of rights — the prevention of interference with people’s freedom.

In early modern thinkers such as Hobbes, this view of politics was used to support a new kind of monarchy: absolutism. This was a corrupt form of monarchy that, instead of seeing the monarch as the principle of a beautiful harmony and order, saw him as the manager of huge bureaucratic machine that was set up to give people security and allow them to get what they wanted. (Later thinkers such as Locke came to see that the machine

didn’t need the sovereign at the top; it could run on its own.)

This view corresponded to a new cosmology, a new view of nature. It was this new cosmology that did most to make modern political philosophy plausible to people. The spectacular success of modern natural science and the technological developments that it enabled have had a profound effect on mentality; they have become inscribed in the very “material relations” of daily life through the industrial capitalist economy. It is the mechanistic mentality fostered by capitalism and reductive natural science that makes modern political views seem so obvious.

Modern natural science begins with the decision of thinkers such as Francis Bacon and René Descartes to find a way of looking at nature that will enable man to have power over nature, to dominate it. The

older, Aristotelian view had seen the purpose of science as understanding the world as it is. Thus, for Aristotelian

science the most important thing to study had been the good. (What is the good that nature tries to achieve? What is the goal that a particular natural thing strives for?) But in the new science such questions became irrelevant. If the purpose of science is power over nature, then the whole point is not to find the goals that nature herself pursues but to replace them with man’s individual goals. Modern natural science thus began to ignore any aspect of reality that did not fit with this project. This would not in itself be problematic as a limited method for particular purposes; but of course it became a total way of looking at nature. Nature came to be seen as a giant machine — moved not by the attraction of the good, but by blind, mathematically defined “forces”.

This view of nature inevitably affected the view of human nature. So we see, for example, that in psychology since Freud, human desire tends to be seen as kind of a blind force that randomly attaches itself to various objects — not as a something that is aroused by the objective goodness of things.

All this supports the idea of politics as ordered to allowing people the freedom to pursue whatever they happen to desire, without interference from anyone else. The older idea of an educative law, as that which orders

The incomparable Erik Maria von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909-1999) who described himself as a “liberal of the

extreme right”.

Anna Záborská, Slovak Member of the European

Parliament.

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 27

persons and peoples toward their true good, then appears as tyrannical, as against freedom.

Thus, the more radical idea of the separation of freedom and the good is becoming ever more dominant in our society. The Supreme Court of the United States explicitly stated this idea of freedom in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State”. On this account of freedom, if the state were to attempt to order its subjects to an authentic good it would be disrespecting their dignity as persons.

So we see one reason why democracy seems so plausible to our contemporaries: It gives people the illusion of being involved in making the laws. Thus, to obey the law is really to obey oneself. Speaking about the apparent futility of parliamentary institutions, George Santayana once said: “Those who spoke spoke badly, with imperfect knowledge of the matter in hand, and simply to air their prejudices. The rest hardly listened. If there was a vote, it revealed not the results of the debate, but the previous and settled sentiments of the voters. The uselessness and the poor quality of the whole performance were so evident that it surprised me to see that so many intelligent men — for they were intelligent when doing their special work — should tamely waste so much time in keeping up the farce. But parliamentary institutions have a secret function in the Anglo-Saxon world, like those important glands that seem useless to a superficial anatomy. There is an illusion of self-government, especially for members of the majority; there is a gregarious sense of safety and reassurance in being backed, or led, or even opposed by crowds of your equals under conventional safeguards and guarantees; and there is solace to the vague mind in letting an anonymous and irresponsible majority be responsible for everything. You grumble but you consent to put up with the course that things happen to take”.

Moreover, the democratic process itself fits with the mechanical view of the world as a system of blind forces. “We have now built an entire civilization on the separation of final causes from efficient causes”, writes philosopher Sean D. Collins. “Many noble souls still hope

that the good will still prevail, and they act accordingly. But if one assumes that the good is brought about as an epiphenomenon from agencies which are at bottom blind, tyranny and not freedom will inevitably be the result”.

The quantifying of mass opinion on which democracy depends is the fitting political expression of the view of the world as an arena of “force”. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn points out in Die rechtgestellten Weichen (1989) the contrast between this sort of politics and those of a hereditary monarchy: “Monarchy is not a ‘thought out’, artificial, arithmetical form of government, rather in the strictest sense of the word “natural”, proportioned to the nature of man. Begetting and birth are contrasted to

poster covered walls and nights at the computer after election battles”.

ConsequencesPolitical philosophy is a

practical science. But modern political ideas are so entrenched that it is hard to see what can be done at the level of practical politics. At the level of constitutional law there is a limited amount that can be done to encourage the monarchical element within a republican form. One can see the constitution of the French Fifth Republic as an improvement over that of the Fourth in this regard. But such reforms are largely beside the point. The primary focus of our political action should be to encourage respect for the primacy of the objective good, and the natural law that undergirds it, over “consensus values”. I admire people who try to do this in current politics — such as the great Slovak MEP Anna Záborská — but again, the amount of good that can be done in this way is limited by the nature of the system.

Perhaps more important than direct political action is education. To educate ourselves in the way of which Plato speaks: to look at the eternal and the divine, and to form our souls according to the order there — this is the most practical thing that we can do. And then we can form communities at the local level where that order can find some embodiment, where we can seek authentic common goods together.

A classic example of such a local form of community is the monastery, a way of embodying an alternative to the dominant model of authority, of community, and of economic life. That is why Alasdair MacIntyre at the end of After Virtue, his famous polemic against modernity, famously wrote that we are waiting

Alasdair MacIntyre speaking at a philosophy conference at University College Dublin in 2009.

Courtesy of Sean O’Connor.

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for a new St. Benedict: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict”.

In Praise of NostalgiaPeople like to dismiss my position

as nostalgic, as a kind of weak sentimental attachment to an idealized past. This is the accusation that is invariably brought against critics of modernity, and usually they think it necessary to protest that they are not in fact nostalgic. Thus, Alasdair MacIntyre in the Preface to the 3rd edition of After Virtue writes that there is “not a trace” of nostalgia in his book; another critic of modernity, Brad S. Gregory, concludes his latest polemic, The Unintended Reformation, with a section entitled “Against Nostalgia”. But I am not going to let myself be bullied out of my nostalgia. I reject the whole notion that nostalgia is

something bad. Contempt for nostalgia is a sign of the vulgar philistinism of the age of “progress”. Nostalgia is a deeply human sentiment. The greatest and most political

works of Western poetry are all nostalgic: Homer is nostalgic; Virgil is nostalgic; Dante is nostalgic.

Pope Francis is hardly a shirker of the burden of the present; but in a reflection (written before he became Pope) on the work of Luigi Giussani, he offered some reflections on nostalgia that are very relevant: “I am convinced that [Father Giussani’s] thought is profoundly human and reaches man’s innermost longings.

I dare say that this is the most profound, and at the same time understandable, phenomenology of nostalgia as a transcendental fact. There is a phenomenology of nostalgia, nóstos algos, a feeling called home, the experience of feeling attracted to what is most proper for us, most consonant with our being”.

Pater Edmund is a Cistercian priest at Stift Heiligenkreuz in Lower Austria. He received his undergraduate education at Thomas Aquinas College in California. He blogs at sancrucensis.wordpress.com. This article is an abridgement of a lecture he gave in Bratislava in April under the auspices of the Ladislav Hanus Fellowship. It is published with his kind permission.

Luigi Giussani (1922-2005), found-er of the international Catholic

movement Communion and Libera-tion. Courtesy of Paul Zalonski.

Pater Edmund Waldstein speaking at the Pistori Palace in Bratislava. Courtesy of Sancrucensis.

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 29

Briefly NotedMetamorphoses of the City: On the Western DynamicPierre ManentCambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013

This new book by one of France’s greatest living philosophers offers nothing less than a genealogy of the nation-state. Manent starts with a consideration of the Greek city-state, the polis, and recounts how human societies moved away from social organizations based on family and kin to ones based on a shared political vision. He also explains how cities evolved into empires (which became the Holy Roman Empire) and later were broke up into modern nation-states. Along the way, reflecting on the thought of Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Hobbes, Manent explores the different dynamics that have influenced the evolution of different political forms in the West — and argues that with the loss of authoritative character, the nation-state may be nearing its end.

The Soul of the WorldRoger ScrutonPrinceton: Princeton UP, 2014

In the British philosopher’s latest book, the experience of the sacred — whether through aesthetic beauty, encounters in nature, or human relationships — is defended against the increasingly atheistic attacks of modern-day scientific reductionism. Human experiences can have a profound transcendental dimension. Unfortunately, too many people today are either oblivious or uninterested in this. Worse, the emphasis on the contributions of science to understanding human experience has reduced our ability to understand the sacred in everyday life. The book is an extended meditation on the importance of the sacred to everyday life. We need, Scruton argues, to understand our humanity and acknowledge the reality of the sacred in order to be more fully alive.

Malaise de l’occident: Vers une révolution conservatrice?

Paul-François Paoli Paris: Pierre-Guillaume de Roux Editions, 2014

The author, a writer for Le Figaro, argues that the three concepts that undergird the French state — liberty, equality, fraternity — have lost their meaning. Liberty today knows no bounds; equality is used to attack merit, talent, and wealth; and the idea of fraternity has become a kind of “enforced promiscuity”. He wonders how such noble, humanist principles could have degenerated so much. He blames liberal democracy, with its “rootless, nomadic, and universalistic impulse” that has fundamentally undermined the idea of community and rewarded selfishness. Things must change. And he says “it is Europe that must stop civilizational decline”.

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Antonio Fontán: Un héroe de la libertad Agustín López Kindler Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 2013

The Spanish journalist Antonio Fontán (1923-2010) was widely respected for his life-long devotion to liberty, openness, tolerance, and dialogue. Although his newspaper, Madrid, was closed by the government of Franco and his building bombed, he consistently defended the importance of individual liberty and goodwill toward others. Fontán was also a professor, became President of the Senate, and eventually was Minister. Above all, as the author reminds us, he was a teacher and a humanist, continually defending the ethics of his profession, the dignity of work, and the importance of truth. López Kindler, a Roman Catholic priest and professor of languages and literature, demonstrates in this book why the International Press Institute chose to call him a “hero of liberty”.

Liberalismo, catolicismo y ley naturalFrancisco J. Contreras Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 2013

Contreras, professor of legal philosophy at the University of Sevilla, has gathered here a collection of seemingly disparate essays (and nearly 800 footnotes) all unified by a fierce polemical spirit. He speaks of secularism, the desacralization of society, and of the growing “Christophobia” among Europe’s political elites. He also looks at the West’s demographic implosion, Europe’s “cultural self-negation”, the spread of hedonism, and other symptoms of the modern crisis. Most interestingly, he examines the features of the liberal democratic political model — that is, limited government, human rights, and the free market — which, in combination with Christian natural law theory, have allowed the West to construct the “most habitable human societies in history”. This is a provocative and well-written collection of essays.

Unisex: La creazione dell’uomo senza identitàG. Marletta & E. Perucchietti

Bologna: Arianna Editrice, 2014

Attempts worldwide to redefine marriage and gender roles have been accompanied by efforts to impose a “uniform sexuality” in schools, institutions, and the media. This book bravely examines such attempts and explores the relationship between the lobby groups, social engineers, and bureaucrats who have been attempting “the establishment of a global gender ideology”. The authors say we face a “great cultural revolution” promoted by some of the West’s most powerful governments. They also document the funding provided to gay organizations by companies like Amazon, IBM, and Nike. These attempts to re-define human sexuality have the ultimate goal of creating a ‘new sex-free man’ — which is necessary for the creation of the ‘New World’.

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 31

Building a Centre-Right CoalitionGrover G. Norquist & Lorenzo Montanari

Twenty years ago, Joe Sobran described the American Left as “The Hive”, a seemingly seamless, frictionless structure that communicated to all members of the Left how to react to any threat or opportunity the way a beehive operates through instinct. Today it is the Left that glances longingly at the Right, pronouncing it a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” capable of anything. Ralph Nader requires his new staff to read an article in The Nation magazine that highlighted the Centre-Right coalition meeting held on Wednesdays at the Americans for Tax Reform offices in downtown Washington, D.C. Former Democrat House Leader Dick Gephardt told the press that he hoped to establish a liberal version of this “Wednesday meeting”.

What have conservatives learned in the past 20 years that has created a more unified, broad-based conservative movement?

First, the Wednesday meeting began as a coalition meeting of 20 conservative leaders. Today, 20 years later, the meetings number 150 to 180 attendees and last 90 minutes with 30 short presentations. People present on what they are doing. No whining is allowed. Forward-looking. Action-oriented. Always keeping in mind how to maintain, strengthen, and grow the entire Centre-Right movement.

In the United States “Centre-Right” means the 60% of Americans who voted for Ronald Reagan or would have if they were the right age. We are not building a vocal minority. We are building a governing majority as quickly as possible.

In addition to the national meeting, there are meetings in 45 State capitals and 11 meetings in “second cities” such as Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Over the past ten years, many free-market leaders from Europe, Latin America, and Asia have travelled to Washington, and attended and presented at the Wednesday meeting. A number of them decided to create similar meetings in their own nations. Today, there are 17 such meetings outside the United States.

The London meeting, organized by the Taxpayers’ Alliance, is the largest, with as many as 120 participants. Other successful meetings include: the Madrid meeting organized by HazteOir; the Copenhagen meeting organized by CEPOS; the Vienna meeting organized by the Hayek Institute; the Stockholm meeting organized by Timbro, and in Tokyo, a meeting organized by Japanese for Tax Reform. Meetings are now also up and running in Brussels, Rome, Belgrade, Sydney, Lima, Caracas, Santiago, Almaty (Kazakhstan), Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), and Ottawa and Calgary.

Back in Washington, groups focused on international issues have created the international coalition meeting organized by Americans for Tax Reform and co-chaired by Alex Chafuen of the

Atlas Economic Research Foundation. The goals of the international coalition meeting are to build and strengthen the existing network between American and international free-market activists, and to be a forum to discuss best practices for free-market think-tanks and activist groups across borders.

Why have the Centre-Right meetings been successful?

First, the movement and its meetings are majority-minded. The goal is not to bring together the ten most conservative activists in the nation or a state. That was fun in one’s school days. Now we are competing for real power. We must be focused on winning (not just on being ‘ideologically sound’). Proclaiming oneself the most hard-core person in the room and refusing to deal with those less than 100% pure is adolescent fun. But it is not the route to political power in a nation that requires 51% to win elections. The Wednesday meeting is organized so that if all the individuals and policy interests represented in the meeting showed up on Election Day, then we would garner 60% of the vote. (Sixty, not 51% because there is always erosion through voter fraud and citizens who should vote with us on issues but fail to do so for “irrational reasons” — e.g. the little old lady in Mississippi who agrees with Reagan on all the issues but votes Democratic because General Sherman was mean to Atlanta during the American Civil War.)

Second, this is the Centre-Right movement, not just the Right. Twenty years ago the limited government movement was to the Right. Today the majority of Americans agree with us. We are the natural governing majority if we communicate competently. We have not moved. The nation has.

Third, a successful coalition grows through identifying new potential allies. The modern Centre-Right coalition is composed of all Americans, who, on the issue that brings them to politics, wants one thing from the central government — to be left alone: taxpayers, homeowners, investors, home-schoolers, gun owners, or people of faith. We grow by asking who not yet in the room agrees with us (not, how can we change our principles to attract our enemies).

Fourth, meetings are forward-looking. What are we going to do? Whining about past failures is not the same thing as working towards a common goal.

Fifth, a useful meeting focuses on what we in the movement can and will accomplish. There is no use in complaining that an elected official has failed to enact our agenda. It is our job to create the political environment where it is easy — and eventually imperative — that elected officials cheerfully vote for our agenda. “If only the president would do X” is not a useful comment. We should be asking: “What will we do to make it possible/necessary for the president to act in accordance with our movement’s goals”?

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Sixth, this is the movement’s meeting. Meetings and movements should not become the property of one wing of the movement, or one elected official, or one candidate. The movement is larger than any one person, group, or issue.

Seventh, meetings are off-the-record and speakers at the meeting are the participants of the meeting itself with brief — very brief — presentations. If someone has a great deal of information to impart about a given issue, then a printed hand-out can convey lots of material without boring those in the coalition not focused on that particular issue.

Finally, meetings should develop a culture where all participants know that this is a ‘movement building and information-sharing’ meeting. It is not a debating society. It is not the time to argue about first principles. There is no statement of principles that all attendees sign. No votes are taken. The meeting in Washington grew slowly from 20 attendees to more than 150, and there is agreement on 90% of the issues 90% of the time. But a successful majority will have serious differences. We’ve learned to manage conflict. We don’t eliminate it. Successful coalition meetings develop a culture of cooperation not conflict: No whining, no cursing, and no indulging in individual grudges.

The Right has become stronger and more competent in the past twenty years. The success of

our coalition meetings reflects this. We are winning. They are losing. The only dark cloud on the horizon is that the Left is aware of this and, as Ed Feulner, former President of the Heritage Foundation, states in his third law: “Never assume that the opposition is standing still”.

Keys to Successful Coalition Meetings1. The movement and its meetings are majority-

minded.2. This is the Centre-Right movement — not just

the Right.3. A successful coalition grows through identifying

new potential allies.4. Meetings are forward-looking.5. A useful meeting focuses on what we in the

movement can and will accomplish. You join the meeting to share what you are doing and not to complain against someone or something.

6. This is the movement’s meeting.7. Meetings are off-the-record and the speakers at

the meeting are the participants of the meeting itself with brief presentations.

8. Successful coalition meetings develop a culture of cooperation, not conflict.

Mr. Norquist is President of Americans for Tax Reform. Mr. Montanari is International Programs Manager at Americans for Tax Reform.

10 Steps to Organize a Coalition Meeting1. Before setting up a coalition meeting, the leading organization should organize an explorative

meeting among the main representatives of the centre-right movement. A coalition meeting has to represent 60% of the centre-right movement in a country.

2. A coalition meeting should be organized by a free-market/conservative group willing to contribute to consolidating and expanding the centre-right movement.

3. A coalition meeting could have a co-chairman possibly from a different branch of the centre-right movement. However, this decision is up to the chairman.

4. A coalition meeting is an ‘inclusion’ meeting. The main goals are to build and organize coalitions, and explore how to reduce conflicts among the different branches of the centre-right movement.

5. A coalition meeting should be by invitation only and target the main actors of the centre-right movement—such as staffers from Congress, Congressmen, political activists, think-tank leaders, movement leaders, and business communities.

6. A coalition meeting should be off-the-record. Everyone has to be able to share information freely without being quoted.

7. A coalition meeting should last no more than one hour and a half, and it is best to schedule the meeting on the same day each month (or week) and at the same location. That makes it easiest for people to schedule and to join the meeting.

8. The presenters will speak at the meeting only to share what they are doing and not to complain about some issues (or about someone).

9. A coalition meeting could choose to have (or not have) special guests. However, even in this case, the tactical decision is up to the chairman.

10. A coalition meeting should be a multi-issue meeting. Participants at the end of the meeting should be able to understand what is currently happening politically and economically in the country.

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 33

What Europe Can Learn from AmericaThomas Spannring

A few years ago, I was on a business trip to one of the most admired, most fabled, and most famous cities in the world: Paris. After a long day of hard work at the office, a dear colleague and I decided to grab a quick bite to eat before going to our hotel for some well-deserved sleep. We found a petite restaurant near the Place de la Madeleine. I ordered for the two of us, much on the insistence of my colleague, using the embarrassing remnants of my school French. We would have the day’s special, Boeuf Stroganoff. And what would an authentic French dinner be without wine? This is when the trouble began.

I ordered a glass of the house red. The waiter nodded politely and turned to my colleague to take his order. “A glass of white wine”, he ordered, closing the menu and turning his head towards me. The waiter unexpectedly replied, “Non, non, non, Monsieur. I will not serve you white wine with my Boeuf. I will bring you a red wine”.

Surprised, my colleague turned to the waiter and calmly said he preferred white wine and that this is what he wanted. Unmoved, the waiter refused again and said that he should have red and that he would not serve white wine with his Boeuf. My friend, now getting slightly irritated, again insisted on having white wine and finally asked to speak to the manager, who reluctantly told the waiter to bring the white wine.

I can tell stories of similar experiences in Vienna, famous for its quaint cafes in which the Herr Ober rules over his guests with an iron fist; or about instances in London, Rome, or Madrid where the waiters unmistakably and without hesitation let me know who was in charge — not me the paying guest but they, the ‘service people’, for whom a customer’s sole purpose is to provide them with a payment at the end of services rendered.

The dismal level of customer experience in Europe is not confined to restaurants or bars; it is duplicated across the board wherever customer interaction takes place: in shops, at train stations, in theatres, you name it. It seems that the paying customer who wants to spend his hard-earned cash in Europe doesn’t have any influence or control over the level of service in the restaurants, bars, and shops that he patronises, and — what’s worse — most European customers seem resigned to this imbalance of power.

But do Europeans really enjoy this sad state of affairs? I am convinced they don’t. Nevertheless, European customers — well-trained by their masters in the

service industry — simply remain quiet, pay their bills, and include the customary tip at the end of a meal.

I have to say, what a different place the United States is! At lunch in a mid-western city recently, my waitress, after introducing herself (her name was ‘Candy’), promptly asked for our beverage order. When I asked if she could add cherry syrup to my Diet Coke, not only did she happily comply but, to top it off, when she brought me my drink, without me having asked, also included not one but two cocktail cherries!

The discerning reader might think: “What a poor simpleton Tom is to be pleased by such things”. But I can honestly say that, after having lived in Europe for nearly my entire life, I have had enough of bad customer service, low standards, and bad attitudes; and that I have had enough of the sense of entitlement that leads to pure neglect of the people who should be cared for: the bill-paying customers. This makes America, for me, a wonderful place and Europe, for lack of a better term, miserable.

As with many things, the disastrous state of the European customer service industry is only a symptom of a deep-seated illness that has plagued Europe for decades if not centuries. Across the continent, from Portugal to Russia, from Iceland to Greece, generations of Europeans have been indoctrinated with an ideology that is hostile to ‘being the best’, hostile to making money, and hostile to achievement.

Europeans eagerly evangelise to the world at every opportunity about the importance of sharing of wealth and the importance of everyone being entitled to everything. They insist that everyone deserves better — not because of their hard work but simply because they exist. And today, through the EU and national level governments, bureaucrats continue

Two women at a sidewalk café on Boulevard Saint-Michel, Paris. Courtesy of Zdenko Zivkovic.

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In Defence of Common SenseG. K. Montrose

In our last edition we saw T.E. Hulme (“War Notes, 11 November 1915”) dealing with the notion of ‘progress’, which liberals mistakenly hold to be “both inevitable and of necessity in one direction”. In his “War Notes, 9 December 1915” (re-printed on the opposite page), Hulme points his arrows at liberal intellectualism and its mental deficiencies.

Call a conservative an ‘intellectual’ and you will see his face fall. Benjamin Wiker aptly explains this by telling us that conservatives since the age of Aristotle “prefer experience to theory [and] cringe at utopian philosophical schemes which liberals tend to embrace because they vivify or justify their efforts at social engineering”. Just like Aristotle, Wiker says, “conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason — that is, reasoning divorced from experience”.

Hulme eloquently develops this antagonism

against the background of the ‘Conscription debate’ that existed in England in 1915. He introduces us to the world of the ‘Crude People’ and the ‘Superior People’:

“[T]he attention of the Crude is focussed on things, the attention of the Superior is focussed on the Crude”. While the Crude will offer at once their very crude opinions on the occurrence of any event, the Superior People are so bent on demonstrating that they immediately perceive the crudeness of these opinions that they entirely forget to take account of the events themselves.

Take a moment to sit down and drink in the wisdom of ‘North Staffs’. If this War Note does not immediately appear to you as a brilliant defence of common sense — which it undeniably is — it will certainly charm you with its sharper than Chestertonian wit.

Mr. Montrose is a philosopher and writer based in the Netherlands.

to spread this ideology with an ever-increasing flood of laws, legislation, and regulations, all enforced by additional government agencies, panels, and bodies, all financed by ever higher and newer taxes.

Nothing embodies the European hostility towards achievement more than the way European governments treat entrepreneurs. Frankly, if you start your own business in Europe, then you are automatically put on a ‘watch list’ by your peers; you become the number one suspect. After all, the thinking goes, why would you want to create something if it already exists or you can rely on the state to provide it?

Worse is the fact that European governments don’t even seem thrilled about having any new businesses created. Labour laws favouring a strong union presence, punitive bankruptcy laws that are too risky for young businesses, a society hostile to self-starters, and social protection laws with compulsory sky-high severance packages all drive potential venture capital away from the European continent.

According to the World Bank, high taxes and tax regulations are the top obstacles facing entrepreneurs in Europe. This is followed by financing, corruption, and inflation. It’s worth noting that the EU has created a number of programmes designed to make lives easier for the continent’s entrepreneurs, such as the 2008 Small Business Act for Europe; but its implementation has been slow and painful, and the administrative loops to which one needs to comply remain daunting.

Europe is failing to capitalise on its vast resources: an educated workforce, significant wealth

compared to neighbouring regions, a high level of education and sound infrastructure. As a result, European entrepreneurs are leaving the continent in droves! French President Holland’s February 2014 visit to the U.S. included a trip to California where currently an estimated 60,000 French nationals work and have created businesses. In discussions with top executives in Silicon Valley, Hollande was eager to learn how to bring these innovators ‘back home’.

I believe there is only one solution for us Europeans if we want to retain our economic strength: We must become more like the Americans. We must stand on our own feet, say goodbye to the European nanny state, and conquer the great world beyond our borders. We must realize that it is good to earn money. We must learn to appreciate the hard work that leads to achievement. And we must accept the fact that it is good to give a tip for excellent service — and that it is similarly good to receive a reward.

America understands the relationship between monetary incentives and good behaviour very well. It could teach Europe a thing or two. Unfortunately, Europe is still in the midst of a love affair with state entitlements and welfare benefits. And until this changes, it will remain a rather miserable place for the average client or customer.

Mr. Spannring holds a B.A. Honours Degree in politics and an M.A. in European political and economic integration from the University of Durham in the UK. He is currently a manager in the travel and tourism industry, and is based in Vienna and St. Louis.

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 35

War Notes, 9 December 1915North Staffs / T.E. Hulme

I want this week in these Notes to repeat and emphasise certain simple facts which are so simple that they can be called platitudes. I repeat them here, however, because my object in these notes is the purely practical one of convincing someone of the importance of this war.

There has been a meeting to protest against Conscription this week. The question discussed was not so much “what are the reasons which justify a man being compelled to serve in this war” as “what reasons are there why a man should voluntarily offer to fight”. If the question were asked me, I should answer, not being the least afraid of rhetoric, when it is a true rhetoric: “Because we are fighting to preserve the liberties of Europe; which are in fact in danger, and can only be preserved by fighting”.

The question as to whether this is true or not is entirely a matter for investigation into actual facts. I shall later on attempt to answer the question carefully. But in the notes this week I do not propose to offer an ounce of evidence on the matter. When the pacifist rejects this contention about liberty, he is moved, as a rule, by certain instinctive, almost a priori reasons, which precede any examination of the question of fact. I feel that I am justified myself in examining the nature of these instinctive reasons, and in leaving the question of fact in abeyance. That such actually is the procedure of the pacifists is shown by the fact that all the arguments they have used so far have been stock arguments, which one could have predicted long before this war actually came about. Every historical fact is to a certain extent a novelty, and an objective examination of that fact by the pacifists would have produced arguments which could not have been predicted beforehand, which would have had a certain freshness.

Most of these instinctive reasons are merely particular instances of a certain general phenomenon. The world of men can be divided into two fundamental types — Crude People and the Superior People. They stand to each other in a relation which the new logic would call transitive. While the attention of the Crude is focussed on things, the attention of the Superior is focussed on the Crude. The Crude People are perhaps then superior, in that their eyes are fixed, however crudely, on events. On the occurrence of any event they at once offer their Crude opinions upon it. The Superior People on the other hand are so eager to demonstrate at once, that they are clever enough to perceive the crudeness of these opinions, that they entirely forget to look at the events themselves.

Before the war extremely Crude Colonels in club armchairs and the editor of the National Review expressed very crude opinions on the German danger. This crudity so set the nerves of the Superior People on edge that, in their eagerness to demonstrate this, they entirely forgot to look at Germany itself. They probably in the end convinced themselves that the Germans were merely inventions of the Crude People. When the war actually came the same comedy continued. The Crude People began to explain

their conception of the fundamental cause of the war, of the fundamental difference between the English and the German character, and, being very crude, the antithesis came out to be something like the difference between white and black. The Superior People have been so eager to demonstrate that they are not taken in by this extremely simple reasoning that they have entirely forgotten to look at the actual facts.

To such people one can only make this kind of personal appeal: “I quite agree with you that the contrast between the justness of the Allies’ cause and that of Germany is not so simple as it is painted by Crude People. But pray do not get so excited about this fact as to omit to notice, or even to deny, that the difference really exists. It is true that this country is not pure white. We live in a grey world; but people who refuse to call Germany black because they know this country to be grey had better renounce action

altogether, for it is certain that if such principles had always prevailed nothing would ever have been accomplished in history. The dispute is between a grey and a very much blacker grey. It should be your business to look at the actual facts themselves in this spirit. Look at the actual complex facts themselves and not at them through an apparatus of ready-made pacifist clichés. Forget for a moment that you are sharp enough to point out that the spectacle of a pot calling a kettle black is a comic one, and look to see if this is in reality the nature of the conflict we are engaged in. After all the truth is important”.

This continual attempt of the Superior People to distinguish themselves from the Crude is, after all, a very human and understandable phenomenon. It is quite possible to understand a man so passionately engaged in this occupation that like the lover or the chess player he counts “the world well lost”. But in this case it is his duty to pull himself together. The man who continues to be more interested in his own superiority than in this war is a contemptible creature.

The instinctive reasons for which I said the pacifist would reject the assertion about liberty without troubling

T.E. Hulme’s grave at Koksijde Military Cemetary, Belgium. Courtesy of T.E. Hulme

Archive at Keele University in the UK.

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to examine it as a fact requiring investigation, are all of the type of this question: “But how can this irrational thing be so?” (to which the correct answer should always be “it just is so”).

Take the first example: “It is comic to suppose that we are fighting for the liberties of Europe, for we can see from their newspapers that the Germans say exactly the same thing about themselves.” This is very modern. It might legitimately be urged against the idea that God took sides in the conflict, for that is a subject on which completely objective evidence is difficult to obtain. It is entirely irrelevant when we are dealing with an essentially human thing like liberty. Here the facts are easily perceptible, and can be investigated in an entirely objective manner. The question as to whether the liberties of Europe would be increased or decreased by a German victory is a question of simple deduction from ascertainable facts and has nothing to do with a balancing of “claims.” If I am to believe certain German writers, this pacifist objection is typical of the reverse side of the English virtue of “toleration,” being the belief that truth itself in some way or other depends on a consensus of opinion. Only those things which all men agree on can be true — which is rubbish. If the whole German nation really believes that it is fighting for liberty then the whole German nation is wrong. At any rate the question as to whether it is right or wrong depends on an examination of facts; an examination which the pacifist as a rule never troubles to give. He can dismiss the matter for a priori reasons.

Another example of the “How can it possibly be so” argument is: “How can the aims of a nation of intelligent, kindly, and cultured people like the Germans in any way menace the liberties of Europe? The idea is in itself absurd and crude”. The answer is quite simple: “It may be absurd, but it just is SO’’.

In arguments about the causes of the war, one should be careful to keep closely to this way of putting it. The annoying thing about the war to many people at the commencement was that all the stupid people had been right and the intelligent people wrong. The club colonels and the Express had more sense than the intellectuals. This is perhaps because intellectuals have always considerable difficulty in grasping the fact that stupid things like war really do happen. They can perhaps only understand easily phenomena capable of a rational interpretation.

A secondary result of this is, that those intellectuals who have been enlightened by the event, proceed to falsify the real nature of the dispute by over-rationalising it. This is an error to be avoided. It is necessary to realise that we are fighting against a danger which is in the proper use of the word an accident, something which might not have been, but just is. In dealing with the causes of this war there is no necessity to drag in Froissart. We are not concerned with some eternal principle of the German nature which makes them eternally different from us and dangerous to us. We have to deal with quite ordinary people, who, as the result of a certain history and under the influence of certain ideas, form part of a mechanism

that, directed by certain hands, is at this given moment of time, capable of doing permanent injury to the liberties of Europe. We have to do with that entirely empirical phenomenon, a “Power,” and quite apart from what is a priori likely or what is reasonable, we have to recognise this fact as a fact and act accordingly, just as we should get out of the way of a train.

I see that the president of the “no conscription” meeting of last week was Mr. Clifford Allen, a specimen of that miserable type, the fussy undergraduate, who neglects work for the Workers, and leaves the river to address mass meetings of the girl-hands of the neighbouring jam factory, they being the nearest available specimens of the People. After an academic career of an entirely undistinguished kind — Mr. Allen obtained, if I remember rightly, a very second-class degree — these people often take up “the profession of thinking for the proletariat”.

At this meeting I see that conscription was denounced as a “violation of individuality”. That, of course, is quite beyond me. When it is described as “unjust”, a language is used which I can follow. I sincerely hope that conscription will not prove necessary; I have all our traditional feelings against it. It would be undoubtedly a tragedy in this country, where a man is entirely unprepared for it, that he should be suddenly in the middle of his life sent out to his death for a cause about which he has probably never before concerned himself. It is certainly sad, but is it unjust? It can only be unjust if man has an inalienable right to a happy and undisturbed life. If only the pacifists who talk in this way possessed the profound sense of their nonconformist ancestors, who recognised that this life was a “vale of tears”. The cause is a just one. Certain of your liberties are really at stake. Liberty is an achievement, not an inevitable constituent of the world. In being asked to fight for liberty then, you are not being asked to fight for the law of gravitation. It does not become you to sulk about the matter.

If ever conscription does become necessary, the authorities have nothing to fear from the “no-conscription fellowship”. They may be dealt with in a very simple way. In the voluntary recruiting effort all kinds of special battalions were formed. We have the “Clerks,” the “Bantams,” and the “Pals” battalions. All that is necessary here is to put all the pacifists together. Call them the “No Conscription” Battalion, 55th Royal Fusiliers. Let them talk on parade, and instead of regimental concerts, let Professor Pigou address them repeatedly. I would not send them into the trenches, for their overweening vanity, leading them to look at their own cessation of existence as not only a personal but a world catastrophe, would be an undue handicap to the courageous facing of death. But keep them in rest-billets and let them, under the Yellow Flag, sweep the roads and fill up latrines for their betters.

Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917) was an English literary critic and poet who wrote about art, literature, and politics. Hulme served with the Honourable Artillery Company and the Royal Marine Artillery during the First World War. He was killed by a shell in West Flanders four days after his thirty-fourth birthday.

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 37

Europe’s FathersAlvino-Mario Fantini

One of the new exhibitions this year at Vienna’s famed Kunsthistorisches Museum is surprisingly small, barely filling up two tiny, dark rooms on one side of the second level. Yet this seemingly negligible exhibition is actually quite spectacular, primarily because of its two central artefacts. What is on display are two of the most important items in the history of Western Civilization: the Gemma Augustae and the Vienna Coronation Gospels.

These two stunning artefacts — accompanied by a small number of small sculptures, Roman coins, and bejewelled cameos — have been brought together by the organizers to commemorate the deaths of two “fathers” of Europe: Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus (63 BC-14 AD), who died 2,000 years ago, and Emperor Charlemagne (ca. 742-814 AD), who died 1,200 years ago. Each of the items on display were chosen because they typify the splendour of the courts of both rulers, and illustrate their social, political, and intellectual worlds.

But the exhibition is really about the Gemma Augustae and the Coronation Gospels. Both are carefully displayed in a glass case under dimmed spotlights next to a copy of a painting of Charlemagne, after Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). The Director of the Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities, and the Curator of the Imperial Treasury both joined me recently to help me understand their profound historical significance.

The Gemma Augustae (Gem of Augustus) is considered the most important extant cameo from classical antiquity. Measuring 19 cm by 23 cm, it is described as a

low-relief cameo engraved gem cut out of a double-layered Arabian onyx stone. Most scholars agree that the gem-cutter who created it was probably Dioskurides, a famed jewellery maker (who is said to have been one of Augustus’ favourites) in the first few decades of the 1st century AD.

The curators explain that Emperor Augustus himself most likely once owned the Gemma. Although many scholars consider it simply a piece of imperial propaganda, this seems to miss the point: It was a powerful symbol of the absolute authority and power of the Emperor, both of which he needed to assert if he was to unify disparate groups, secure borders, create a professional army, and forge an Empire out of the decaying Roman Republic.

The Gemma shows two scenes in what specialists call “registers” or bands. The lower scene shows triumphant Roman soldiers just after a battle in the northern frontiers of the Empire. On the left, they construct a victory trophy while prisoners of war await their punishment. The upper scene depicts Augustus enthroned beside the goddess Roma, establishing his legitimacy. An eagle, which is said to personify him as Jupiter, sits below him. Together, the two scenes work as one, with the bottom scene of victory on the battlefield presaging the ‘triumphant and everlasting’ rule of Emperor Augustus.

Although the Gemma was lost for several centuries, it was eventually found and brought to Toulouse. It is apparently listed in an inventory dated 1246 of the treasury of the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse. It then came into the possession of King Francis I in 1533 and was finally brought to Vienna in 1619 by Emperor Rudolf II who purchased it in Venice for an estimated 12,000 Ducats.

Portrait of Augustus, marble, early 1st century AD. All images courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Detail of a portrait of Charlemagne (after Albrecht Dürer), oil on canvas, ca. 1600.

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The other major artefact on display, the Vienna Coronation Gospels, is a beautiful and exceedingly rare codex. It is on display for the first time since 1954. Produced privately for Emperor Charlemagne in Aachen in the late 8th century, it now belongs to the Imperial Treasury of the Hofburg Palace in Vienna.

Charlemagne — who, as King of the Franks, had so significantly extended his realm that he became known as “Europe’s Father” — became the first medieval ruler to assume the title, Imperator Augustus. This underscored his claim to be the one, rightful heir to the Western part

of the Roman Empire. (It was also a way to pay homage to the first Roman Emperor.) The title was subsequently used for all rulers of the Holy Roman Empire (until 1806).

Scholars believe that during his coronation on Christmas Day in 800 AD, Charlemagne took his oath while placing three fingers of his right hand on the first page of the Gospel of St. John in this codex. In subsequent centuries, particularly after Charlemagne’s canonization in 1165, the Coronation Gospels were revered as a relic and used at coronation ceremonies for later kings and emperors.

The codex is magnificent. It has parchment pages dyed dark royal purple and the text of the Gospels is written in gold. There are elaborate decorations and unusually refined illustrations, many showing what scholars believe to be the influence of classical painting. The curators informed me that such features make it one of the most important illuminated manuscripts in the history of European art. Its cover — a gorgeously elaborate relief made out of gold and precious stones — was made in the 1500s by Hans von Reutlingen.

This wonderful exhibition has been put together to remind us of two men who, out of the chaos and barbarism of their time, forged the community we today know as ‘Europe’. Although there are breath-taking things to see in treasuries, sacristies, and pinacotecas elsewhere, few artefacts are as moving or historically important as these two powerful symbols of the roots of European civilization. [Until September 21]

The fabled ‘Gemma Augustea’ on two-layered onyx, ca. 9-12 AD.

The Gospel of St. John the Evangelist in the Vienna Coronation Gospels, dyed parchment with gold and silver ink, ca. 795-800.

Vienna Coronation Gospels cover by Hans von Reutlingen (Aachen), gold and precious stones, ca. 1500. Courtesy of Andreas Praefeke.

The European ConservativeSummer 2014 39

Eugenio Corti (1921-2014)Thomas Fleming

With the death of Eugenio Corti on February 4, Italian literature has lost the last of its great masters. Born in 1921, Corti grew up in the rolling countryside south of Lago di Como known as the Brianza. His father was a textile manufacturer whose handsome brick factory in Besana had been converted into the villa in which Eugenio spent most of his life.

Besana is the fictional village of Nomentana in Corti’s masterpiece, Il cavallo rosso. When I used to visit him and his gracious wife, we would sit in the garden before dinner and watch his “pets”: an undomesticated rabbit and a wild tortoise, which lived with the family on friendly terms, without cages or any restraint except the gate, which had to be locked to keep out the village dogs. In the winter, we could look out beyond the back of the garden to see some of the ravages the 20th century had made on the beautiful Brianza, but for the most part, this little plot of green, with its trees and flowers and tame wild beasts, was a reflection both of Eugenio’s character and of the world he recreated in his novel.

Although he came from an industrial family in the most hard-working part of Italy, Corti’s mind was more than a little tinged by an agrarian spirit. This is difficult to convey in Italian, and when, in the course of a lecture, I put Corti in the context of the Southern Agrarians, I was taken to task for ignoring his very real affection for the little industries and their workers that are the foundation of the Lombard economy. My critic had a valid point, but he was also misled by my use of the word agrariano, which refers — as it should in English — to governmental land-redistribution projects that are part of the revolutionary agenda.

The author’s agrarian sympathies, nonetheless, are manifest in his great novel, which begins with an unforgettable portrayal of father and son sharpening their scythes and preparing to cut the hay, while at the same time talking about the war that is just about to break out. It is as perfect a beginning as I know, and when the author asked me to rewrite the rather flawed translation, I took especial care with the opening pages. I only wish I had had the time and the grasp of Italian to do as well on the rest of the book. I used to tell him that the only Italian I really knew was his, because I had studied every word of Il cavallo rosso in my feeble attempt to render his fine prose into at least readable English. People who have read both the translation and the original will appreciate how inadequate the English version is. But, as Chesterton advises us, if

something is worth doing at all, it is worth doing badly.The author’s unfailing kindness and conspicuous

bonhomie were, at least on the surface, undiminished by the horrors of war. Corti served as an artillery officer in World War II, and his experiences on the Russian front — for which he volunteered — were published in his diary, I più non ritornano (English translation published by the University of Missouri Press), and make up a large part of Il cavallo rosso.

Corti’s imagination rose above the horrors of war and the desolation of our civilization, and he cannot be understood properly except as a Christian, specifically Catholic, writer. I cannot think of another novelist since Manzoni who has so well captured the sturdy piety

of Lombardia, a region that has contributed such distinctive characters as Saint Ambrose, San Carlo Borromeo, and Manzoni himself to the Church.

I recall an evening when we arrived at a restaurant as a wedding party was breaking up. Eugenio graciously observed that we did not wish to make the wedding guests feel uncomfortable by taking a table, and he took me off to a village church that had been cobbled together with columns and materials from local Roman villas. The church was so packed that there was no place to sit, and standing room was at a premium. “What feast day is this?” I asked naively. It was no special day, he explained, just an ordinary Saturday-evening service. The church would be

just as crowded in the morning.There was no affection of holiness in the crowd,

only the unflinching sincerity that is the hallmark of good Lombards. Corti himself never put on pious airs or talked too much of religion, and yet he took his religion straight and literally. What other novelist would have dared to end his masterpiece with the hero and heroine being escorted to heaven by their guardian angels?

So much should be said of this great man, but I shall be content to say that the world of Italian letters has lost its brightest light, and those who are lucky to have known Eugenio Corti have been deprived of the best of friends.

Dr. Fleming is the president of the Rockford Institute and the Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is the author of The Politics of Human Nature, Montenegro: The Divided Land, and The Morality of Everyday Life. He is the co-author of The Conservative Movement and the editor of Immigration and the American Identity. He holds a Ph.D. in classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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Subscribe to The Salisbury Review — the quarterly magazine of conservative thought.

Launched in 1982, and originally edited by Roger Scruton, The Salisbury Review takes its inspiration from the great 19th century Conservative Prime Minister, the third Marquis of Salisbury — here caricatured by “Spy” for Vanity Fair:

The Salisbury Review is one of Britain’s few, not-for-profit, independent, political journals. In its 60 pages of political commentary, arts, cinema, theatre, music and book reviews, you will encounter a banquet of reactionary thought, undiluted by liberal cant, ‘progress’ philistinism, or the politics of ‘political correctness’.

If you enjoy the The Salisbury Review, then please consider a subscription. Subscriptions to Europe are GBP 27. Help keep free speech alive!

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