History is Fundamentally Tragic

Friday, January 15th, 2016

“We have forgotten,” French prime minister Manuel Valls let slip to foreign-newspaper reporters, “that history is fundamentally tragic.”

Such fatalism is extremely rare among modern European politicians. Ever since the European movement began, in the 1940s, spearheaded by Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, the basic operating principle of the project and its leaders has been an almost cultish optimism. For at least two generations, Europe’s highly educated, Financial Times-reading mandarins assumed they could inoculate the Continent against every possible contingency with ingenious layers of bureaucracy and legislation.

But Valls came right out with it: history cannot be defied by rules and regulations, or by institutionalized wishful thinking. His implication, I believe, was that France and its European Union partners needed to think anew, and act anew.

It is worth recalling the original optimism of the European movement after World War II, here articulated in the spring of 1948:

We must proclaim the mission and design of a United Europe, whose moral conception will win the respect and gratitude of mankind and whose physical strength will be such that none will dare molest her tranquil sway … I hope to see a Europe where men and women of every country will think of being European as of belonging to their native land, and wherever they go in this wide domain will truly feel “here I am at home.”

These were the words of Winston Churchill speaking at the inaugural Congress of Europe in The Hague, and they may surprise his Euro-skeptic heirs in the British Conservative Party, some of whom favor what is known as “Brexit” — Britain’s exit from the E.U., in order to reclaim control over laws made in Brussels and to end the right of people from E.U. member states to work in the U.K.

Comments

  1. Graham says:

    I’m going to assume the author is unaware that Churchill did not expect Britain to be part of that Europe, at least not as part of some sort of federal union. He’d have had to give up his empire or turn it over to collective administration.

    Now as a tradition-minded Briton and Englishman of the upper class, Churchill also knew that his country was a part of European civilization and took pride in it, but that is a distinction the Euroclass cannot seem to understand at all.

    Note that reference to Europe’s ‘tranquil sway’. Churchill said all that at a time when, even in ruins, Europe still had a large position in the world and in which its overawing rivals were both [troublesome] offshoots of European civilization. I doubt he envisioned a Chinese hegemony, the current troubles of Islam, the demographic waves therefrom, the population of Africa, or the demographic collapse of Europe.

  2. Slovenian Guest says:

    This made me think of Peter Thiel, who said:

    “The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.”

    He is quite fatalistic even: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

    Fun fact, the official slogan of the European Union is “united in diversity,” which is of course an oxymoron. It should be corrected to “divide et impera”.

  3. Candide III says:

    It’s a bit rich for Valls to say that history is fundamentally tragic after his ilk has done so much to create the tragedy.

Leave a Reply