V. D. Hanson
Bulba!
Western liberalism proving to be only idea left standing
By Victor Davis Hanson
The French and Dutch rebuffs of the European Union constitution will
soon be followed by other rejections. Millions of proud, educated
Europeans are tired of being told by unelected grandees that the mess
they see is really abstract art.
The E.U. constitution ? and its promise of a new Europe ? supposedly
offered a corrective to the Anglo-American strain of Western
civilization. More government, higher taxes, richer entitlements,
pacifism, statism and atheism would make a more humane and powerful
new continent of over 400 million to outpace a retrograde United
States.
Instead, Europe faces a declining population, unassimilated
minorities, low growth, high unemployment and an inability to defend
itself, either militarily or morally. Somehow the directorate of the
European Union has figured out how to have too few citizens while
having too many of them out of work.
The only question that remains is just how low will the 100,000
bureaucrats of the European Union go in shrieking to their defiant
electorates as they stampede for the exits.
In fact, 2005 is a culmination of dying ideas. Despite the boasts and
threats, almost every political alternative to Western liberalism over
the last quarter-century is crashing or already in flames.
China's red-hot economy ? something like America's of 1870, before
unionization, environmentalism and federal regulation ? shows just how
dead communism is. Will Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba go out with a
bang or a whimper? If North Korea's nutty communiqués, Hugo Chavez's
shouting about oil boycotts and Castro's harangues sound desperate,
it's because they all are.
Fascism has long vacated its birthplace in Europe. The fragments of
the former Soviet autocracy are democratizing. The caudillos are gone
from Latin America. The last enclave of dictators is the Middle East.
Yet after Saddam's capture in a cesspool, their hold is slipping, too.
There will probably not be an Assad III or a second Mubarak.
The real suspense is whether the Gulf royals can make good on their
promises of reform and elections. Will they end up like pampered
Windsors or go the ignominious way of the Shah? In desperation, the
apparatchik journalists in the state-controlled Arab press are damming
the United States, the avatar of change. Syria breaks all relations
with America, even as it leaves Lebanon and is terrified of the Iraqi
experiment.
Then there is bankrupt Islamic fundamentalism. The zealots can always
tape a beheading or turn out a few thousand to burn an American flag.
But the Taliban are gone from power. Iran is facing popular disgust at
home, while its desperate nuclear plots are waking up even a comatose
Europe. And the promise of a return to the 8th century has always had
an appeal limited to a few thousand pampered elites, like bin Laden,
Dr. Zawahiri or Zarqawi. These losers figured they might become
Saladins if they convinced an Arab populace that the Jews and America,
not their own corrupt regimes, kept them poor. Now they are reduced to
ranting about the evils of freedom and democracy.
Oil, terror, anti-Semitism and hating America gave the fundamentalists
some resonance, but there were never any ideas. The Islamicists
offered nothing to galvanize the Arab masses other than nihilism. That
doctrine feeds or employs no one. Instead, we witness the creepy
threats and the pyrotechnics of a lunatic ideology going the way of
bushido and the kamikazes.
Why all these upheavals?
Global communications now reveal hourly to people abroad how much
better life is in Europe than in the Middle East and Asia ? and how in
America, Australia and Britain the standard of living is even better
than in most of Europe.
The removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and their replacement
with democracies proved that the United States after 9/11 was neither
weak nor cynical. In fact, it was the utopian United Nations, with its
oil-for-food, snoozing in Darfur and scandals about peacekeepers, that
proved corrupt and unreliable.
The mass mourning of the pope's death revealed a renewed desire for
spirituality. Two billion in India and China quietly keep copying the
West. Car bombs, fist-shaking mobs and beheadings dispel all the old
romance about the Third-World postcolonial "other."
What are we left with then?
Democracy, open markets, personal freedom, individual rights, pride in
national traditions, worry about big government ? about what we see in
the United States, Britain, Australia and their allies in Japan and
the breakaway countries in Europe. Elections in Ethiopia, France,
Iraq, Lebanon and Ukraine all point to a desire for more freedom from
central state control.
Embers of communism, fascism, theocracy and socialism, of course, will
always flare up should we become complacent or arrogant. Wounded
beasts like Iran, North Korea and bin Laden are most dangerous before
they expire. Expect discredited E.U. bureaucrats to conjure up the
specter of the American bogeyman before they pension out.
Still, the racket and clamor from all these anti-democratic ideas in
2005 are not birth pangs, but the bitter death throes of those whose
time is about past.
--
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible
exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The
Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships
that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well
and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere
that there wasn't really any point in being there.