Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (58 page)

The real problem lay less with the new Right than with the crisis of post-war conservatism. The weakness of the Gaullist Right in France, cleverly exploited by Mitterrand, was what allowed the National Front its opportunity. Where conservative parties were stronger, radical anti-immigrant parties found it more difficult to make headway. Where weak, the conservatives themselves often flirted with the same rhetoric: in Vienna, for instance, the ÖVP slogan of “Vienna for the
Viennese” was hardly less inflammatory than the FPÖ version. In the UK, the Major government toyed briefly with the anti-immigrant card: “We must not be wide open to all comers just because Rome, Paris and London are more attractive than Bombay or Algiers,” Major told the 1991 Conservative Party conference. The Gaullist Chirac conjured up “an overcrowded family with the father, three or four wives and twenty or so kids, who receives 50,000 francs in social security payments, obviously without working … not to mention the noise and the smell.” From this point of view, the significance of Le Pen and Haider lay in the extent to which they were able to take the mainstream Right hostage.
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Citizenship itself was clearly at the heart of the immigration debate. At the same time as entry was becoming harder, some countries were loosening their citizenship procedures in order to ease social tensions. The rise of the welfare state and the decline of the militarized state meant that citizenship was now understood in terms of costs and benefits rather than political rights (voting) and duties (defending the nation-state). This was why the immigration issue was so often used by the Right as a peg for other concerns—unemployment, the equity of tax burdens and job insecurity. It was also why some commentators argued the need for a new “post-national model of membership” in Western society. After all, foreigners already partook of some of the traditional attributes of citizenship such as paying tax and national insurance, or claiming certain benefits. In that sense they were already citizens, even if they lacked the right to vote or to enter the civil service.
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Overall, the character of European attitudes towards ethnic minorities is becoming clearer. Europe is not an American “melting-pot” (but then neither is the USA any longer), and assimilation as a goal has had its day; post-war immigrant communities have become permanent, but often remain culturally distinct and in some cases “foreign.” In many countries they remain excluded from full citizenship rights, and even in the UK, where this is less true, they are pushed to the margins in more informal ways. They are not necessarily better off in a country like France whose secular republican assimilationism allows little space for cultural and religious diversity than they are in Germany or Greece, where nationalism is more exclusive
but also more inclined to accept difference. For many reasons—historical, ethical, economic—deportation is no longer acceptable to mainstream opinion, yet the development of a new kind of civic identity which can encompass cultural diversity seems unlikely to emerge in much of Europe, where national insecurities prevail, religion remains a powerful marker of belonging and where multiracial coexistence is a very recent phenomenon. The experience of British society—for all its hesitancies in this area—does suggest that such an evolution is possible even in the context of the nation-state. But then British nationalism is itself a hybrid and is not inclined to fetishize purity.

What is certain is that the effort to stabilize the current situation through a twin policy of “assimilation” and barriers to further immigration is doomed to fail. Societies will not cease to be multicultural just because politicians—or even their voters—declare that they are against it. European capitalism still requires cheap workers, especially as its ageing wealthy societies draw on more youthful, poorer pools of labour to work for them and generate the taxes to pay their pensions. Geography makes Fortress Europe impossible to police, particularly on its porous southern and eastern borders, and as smuggling people in becomes big business, numbers may grow from the currently estimated 300,000–500,000 illegal entrants annually. In recent years, would-be illegal immigrants have drowned in the Aegean, frozen to death in the holds of international airliners and been thrown overboard by Ukrainian sailors in the Atlantic. Such cases rarely make the headlines, but they indicate the scale of this traffic. International disparities in wealth and political stability will continue to propel people into Europe whatever the wishes of the state authorities.

INDIVIDUALISM TRIUMPHANT?

In the mid-1980s the Italian Socialist Gianni De Michelis looked back on 1968 as “the ‘twilight of the Gods,’ the last great collective moment in Italian history, the end of all dreams of a new era.” The decline of class struggle coincided with the crisis of Keynesianism and, more generally, of optimism in social planning. The “Requiem for large-scale planning models,” which appeared in the
Journal of the American Institute of Planners
in 1973, seemed to refer to a far broader phenomenon than urban management.
Small is Beautiful
was the new gospel. From the mid-1970s, the era of collective political mobilization was superseded by more fragmented forms of politics.
Adieu au prolétariat
was one French intellectual’s summing up; more ambitious colleagues turned their disappointment into something grander. For the former Leftist Jean-François Lyotard, the 1970s ushered in no less than the end of “modernity.”
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The idea of social progress as a collective project based on the accumulation of goods had lost its charm. Economic growth and material prosperity were no longer unchallenged blessings.
The Limits to Growth
—the 1972 manifesto of the Club of Rome—sold ten million copies, marking a new environmental and conservationist consciousness. Therborn notes the striking changes in mood between the forward-looking scientific confidence of Expo 1958 in Brussels—with its focus on the atom—and the retrograde nostalgia of Expo 92 in Seville. It seemed fitting that the theme in that year of supposed Euro-optimism should be the discovery of a New World five hundred years earlier. The only New Worlds still to be discovered in the 1990s lay in the past.
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Science and technology were also losing their allure; they were seen less as means of liberation from drudgery than as sources of pollution, discomfort and even death. Sociologists talked about the new “risk society” which overwhelmed individuals with threats over which they had no control and limited information. While politicians berated the “whining cultural pessimism” that resulted from “the fear of life, fear of technology, and fear of the future,” the proportion of West Germans who saw technology as a blessing dropped from 72 per cent in 1966 to 30 per cent in 1981.
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Behind their disaffection lay the realities of daily life. The Great Car Economy of Mrs Thatcher’s dreams seemed less and less attractive as traffic jams lengthened and respiratory illnesses multiplied. In 1974 the president of the German Automotive Industry Association had talked of “the automobile as another bit of freedom”; less than a decade later advertisers were featuring “the man who travels slowly because he gets where he’s going faster, who has enough personality to do without horsepower, who saves energy and gains strength.” In
fact between 1975 and 1994 people walked and cycled on average 20–30 per cent less and spent 50 per cent more time in cars, increasing anonymity and insecurity, and turning communal spaces into parking lots and race tracks.
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Ecological movements were the natural expression of this disaffection. Galvanized by the oil crises, they were boosted in the 1980s by the debate over cruise missiles and nuclear power. In West Germany, the new Green Party drew on a longer tradition of anti-materialism, as well as new concern at the “death of the forests,” and became a small but important presence in the Bundestag, able to force through environmental measures out of all proportion to its strength. Elsewhere, environmental mobilization occurred less through political parties than via campaigning movements such as Greenpeace and Survival International. Single-issue organizations of this kind, dependent upon a large membership for their existence, became more and more important instruments for bringing issues to the public.

In general, political activism increasingly revolved not around class but around issues of “identity.” At some point in the 1970s this term was borrowed from social psychology and applied with abandon to societies, nations and groups. By the 1980s, a debate on “national,” “cultural,” “gender” identity had begun which shows no signs of abating. The prominent social theorist Anthony Giddens talked about the emergence of what he called “life politics,” which dealt with a range of biological, emotional and existential concerns “repressed” by more traditional conceptions of politics, in which “self and body become the sites of a variety of new life-style options.”
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While the advance of the working class was checked, new groups progressed. First and foremost, the women’s movement won real gains. It is true that mass unemployment, the feminization of poverty and growing job segregation in a time of economic crisis all undermined women’s position in European labour markets. “Glass ceilings” were hard to break through and professional, industrial and administrative elites remained overwhelmingly male. Attitudes were slow to change: as late as 1983 Kohl tried to attract women voters by remarking that “our pretty women are one of Germany’s natural resources.”
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Nevertheless, the rethinking of gender roles which had begun in the 1960s achieved its greatest legislative impact in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Catholic and Orthodox Europe. Divorce laws were liberalized, and the legal equality of husbands and wives was reaffirmed. The 1977 West German Marriage Law did away with the clause which permitted a wife to work only with her husband’s permission. In the 1980s civil marriage was legalized in Greece, and women gained new rights as Spain and Portugal emerged from dictatorship. The movement for gay and lesbian rights also gathered momentum during the 1970s, and despite the persistence of entrenched homophobia, which surfaced especially during the start of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, public attitudes and state policies were changing. The criminalization and medicalization of “deviant” sexual behaviour were increasingly regarded as anachronisms: yet the age of consent for gays was still higher in most countries than for heterosexuals.

These dramatic changes led some commentators to herald the decline of the family. But it was rather a question of the way the goals, meaning and attractiveness of this fundamental social institution were being transformed. Marriage itself was turning into a choice rather than a duty. Sexual pleasure, love and affection between partners were demanded, scrutinized and the subject of expert advice, with helplines for those unable to cope. While marriage itself only slowly lost popularity, divorce (and remarriage) rates shot up. “Living in sin” turned into “cohabitation,” and by 1981 even Debrett’s
Etiquette and Modern Manners
felt it necessary to advise upper-class hostesses how to deal with “live-in lovers.” By the early 1990s, it was no longer safe to assume that children in north-western Europe would live with two married natural parents. Southern and Catholic Europe was slower to change, but even there cohabitation and divorce were becoming more common. Extramarital birth rates doubled between 1970 and 1990 in West Germany, Portugal, Greece and Austria; they more than trebled in the UK, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and France.
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Medical technology introduced further challenges to traditional morality. Reproductive medicine now allowed single women and infertile couples the chance to become parents. Contraceptive technologies
were more and more accessible; so too was abortion, now widely legalized and available on demand through the welfare state in much of Europe. Sperm banks and frozen embryos posed new moral dilemmas for doctors and society at large. Bearing children was still widely regarded as the main goal of marriage, but it could be made on an increasingly individualistic basis, with timing and to some extent quantity (though not yet quality) arranged to suit the would-be parent(s).

From one point of view, the responsibility for sexual order was shifting from the public to the private domain, and becoming almost another aspect of consumption. Yet at the same time, the state’s role was expanding—through its interpretation of legal rights, and its provision of health, educational and welfare services. Hence there was no diminution in the public debate over issues of sexuality and reproduction. The difference with earlier periods, and particularly with the inter-war era, was that these issues were debated in terms of the ethics of individual choice and not of the collective politico-military needs of the ethnically pure nation-state. But the lack of any common basis upon which to reach agreement—apart from the shaky one of cost—has rendered most of these debates inconclusive. What was striking was that there was no replay of the pre-war scares of population decline, despite the resumption of similarly falling birth rates.

“Identity politics” was also being offered on a very different basis by an increasingly rampant consumer culture. “New Colonial or Savile Row?”
The Guardian
clothes column asked its male readers in 1987. Neither pop nor fashion was offering (if they ever had) anything as simple as
one
alternative to the dominant cultural norm. The “teenager” of the 1950s and 1960s was dead, a fashion journalist gleefully announced in 1986: youth culture had dissolved into a fizz of alternative styles. So, too, had culture generally. Rock and pop might occasionally claim to offer an anti-politics, but even punk’s anarchism was suspect, the creation of art-school fashion entrepreneurs like Malcolm McLaren: for punk politics you went to
A Clockwork Orange
not the Sex Pistols. The very distinction between “high” and “low” culture was itself looking increasingly shaky, a product of an earlier era of elite intellectual self-confidence and benevolent moral superiority.
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