The gravity of this crisis has long been hidden by what we like to call the construction of Europe. The energies of our political class have been devoted to buttressing the authority of an enterprise that delegitimizes the nation and promises a new way of bringing humans together. As national political life becomes less and less satisfying, citizens and government officials look elsewhere. The people, unhappy with government, and the government, unhappy with the people, both turn their faces toward the promised land of Europe, a new, post-political way of being, in which each would finally be rid of the other.
These sweet hopes have become less and less plausible. Those who govern and those who are governed remain prisoners of each other. And both are prisoners of a European Union that is now just one more insoluble problem. Neither the institutions of Europe, nor the government of France, nor what is called civil society have enough strength or credibility to claim the attention or fix the hopes of citizens. As rich as we still are in material and intellectual resources, we are politically weak. Nothing seems to have the power to gather us toward the common action we all feel necessary. Faced with crises such as Greek default and the attacks of radical Islamists, we are capable only of offering technical fixes or hollow platitudes. Real political leadership of the kind that calls on our deepest loyalties and highest capacities is nowhere to be seen.
This political weakness has not escaped the attention of those who now attack us. To be sure, when men have at each other, they do not precisely calculate the power ratios, and it sometimes happens that the weaker attacks the stronger. Still, it would be a mistake to look at things this way. When some of our citizens take up arms against us so brazenly and implacably, this means that not only our state, our government, and our political body but we ourselves have lost the capacity to gather and direct our powers, to give our common life form and force….
Read it all (emphasis mine).
When Europe gave up its Christian basis, it set itself adrift in a turbulent sea. The attack on the church in France makes very clear, to those who will look, the foundational anti-Christian nature of Islam. Where does Europe, and where do Europeans, stand with relation to Christ?
There is much here that is thought-provoking, although I lost his train of argument where he began saying that the Catholic Church alone can create a space of hospitality for other religions in France today. I do not think he showed this nor that I agree. However, it was at points like someone reading my secret thoughts. I found myself wondering recently about the whole concept of human rights, which has done so much to free people and yet has also dissolved ancient ties that bind us together, at the same time eroding any common ethic. The liberal position is that we must agree to differ and (this is the crucial part) that the state mediates between any differences. But the state in a climate that prizes human rights above all else will always legislate for the individual. Pierre Manent gives us further reason to think along these lines by arguing there that there is now nothing between the individual and the state, with all real associations being depreciated and undermined.
Who knows what was in the minds of the 17+ million voters who chose here in the UK to leave the EU? I doubt if they would have articulated it the way it is expressed in this article. But I suspect that deep inside they shared the same fears and frustrations described here, the same feeling that things fall apart, the centre cannot hold and that our gilded elites see no problem in this. Incidentally, the institutional pressure on us to vote otherwise was huge – the Treasury, the BBC, the Prime Minister, the official position of the political parties, many, perhaps most of the leading economists, etc. Without this bias, the majority would have been even larger. Or so I think.
Forgive another bite at the cherry.
I forgot to add to the list of those wheeled in to intimidate us was the POTUS.
Since the referendum voices have been heard in the EU leadership saying that British exit shows there is a problem in the EU and the only way to solve it is … by further renunciations of state sovereignty and making EU governance even more centralised. Which would only further alienate the Western European populace. Like the Bourbons after the French revolution, it can be said that th Eurocratic elite have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.