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| The 11 candidates for French President. Only the top 2 will survive to Round 2. |
It’s no surprise that the terrorism of recent years
will be a major factor in this weekend’s French elections. French citizens have reacted not only to the
violence itself, but to the questions it raises about many pressing public
issues: immigration, open borders, unemployment, free trade, religious
integration, national identity, equality, globalization, and even the very idea
of Europe.
Of course the French are not alone. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump both
represented responses to the same questions.
I decided it would be timely to ask French people about the situation as
they see it.
I interviewed more than a dozen people in six
different locations: retired couples, former small business people, a
pharmacist, a notary, artists, young professionals. I heard many differing ideas, but on one
question--the idea of Europe--there was near consensus. And this consensus should be of interest to
Americans in general, and especially to American Catholics.
I began describing my own perspective. As a student in Paris in the late 1960s, I was
tutored by several people instrumental in promoting the young “Common Market,”
which eventually became the European Union.
The consistent message to me was that the movement underway in the 1960s
to create an economic union did not have, as its primary goal, the advancement
of prosperity or the enhanced wealth of any particular class. Rather, the notion was that economic union, using
free trade to promote greater prosperity, was but the preamble to a second
movement toward political confederation.
And the goal of political confederation was peace in Europe.
It may be difficult for Americans to appreciate what this
goal meant to post-War Europeans. They had just endured the second of two major
continental conflicts that caused tens of millions of deaths, decimated whole
generations, and left entire national economies in ruins.
But that was not all.
These wars were seen by Europeans as merely the latest
episode in a centuries-long history of repeated and recurring warfare among the
nations of Western Europe. No European
could remember an extended period peace--in fact, no European going back a
dozen generations had any such memory.
So the “idea of Europe” was nothing less than a
massive project to eliminate war on the European continent. This at a time when the continent itself was
still divided by an “Iron Curtain” symbolic of both the war just concluded and the Cold War currently underway.
Realists would have said the project was impossible. Only visionaries would believe in it.
I asked my interviewees if, in fact, this had been the
popular understanding of what was going, on beginning with the treaty of Rome in
1957, whose anniversary was just celebrated last month. Most of my interviewees are either old enough
to remember this history, or had read about it in school.
All of them, except for one retired businessman,
emphatically agreed with the key notions that (1) the Common Market’s trade
union was simply an economic preparation for political federation and (2) the
ultimate goal of federation was peace itself.
One person cited Winston Churchill’s opinion that the
future would bring a “United States of Europe.” (This reminded me of my own
seminar-related field trip to Common Market headquarters in Brussels in 1969,
where I expressed the hope of returning in 20 years to find just such a United
States of Europe).
Another person responded by saying, “But of course it
was always about ‘Jamais Plus’…”
(”Never More”). She was citing the slogan of the post-WWI French pacifist anti-militarist
movement. Pope Pius VI made the slogan famous in his 1965 address to the UN General
Assembly, when he cried out, in French, “Never more--war never again!”
All this implied that, for supporters of this idea of Europe,
many economic and political concerns became secondary. They knew, for example, that free trade would
lead to labor dislocations as the old protectionist systems fell away and
businesses and their workers were forced to compete directly across
borders. They knew as well that a
political confederation could not be accomplished without some sacrifice of
national sovereignty. Those who studied US
history, for example, knew that the question of states’ rights has been
controversial since the adoption of the US Constitution created the Federal
government.
The same challenge would be true for Europe--except
that Europe is not a continent of English speaking citizens from similar
backgrounds and cultures, like the US at its founding. Few places on earth cram as many different
languages, cultures, peoples, and histories into the small space of
Europe.
But if this makes European unity especially
challenging, it is precisely why building peace in Europe required deliberate
institutions: so many people crammed so close together cannot coexist peaceably
by accident.
But coexist peaceably is exactly Western Europe HAS
done since World War II. For more than
70 years, no Western European nation has battled another. Such peace is nearly without precedent in the
last 1000 years.
Almost all of my interviewees agree that such peace
was the product of the idea of Europe, and the one who disagreed could not
explain peace any other way.
But interestingly, my interviewees all pointed out
that the younger generation--those under 35, the strongest supporters of the
far right’s Marine Le Pen--is not even conscious of this accomplishment. My interviewees were unanimous: young people
simply cannot imagine Germans fighting French or Dutch fighting Spanish or
Italians fighting anybody.
When I ask why, the response was unanimous: young
people simply take peace in Europe for granted. I was reminded of the John Sebastian singing “Younger
Generations”: “All I’ve learned my kid assumes.” The postwar generation of
Europeans had to learn how to construct peace; their grandchildren enjoy it as
a given, and are ready to scrap the structure that made it possible.
So then I posed the question to my interviewees:
doesn’t this mean that the idea of Europe was a success? The response was unanimous: absolutely. The idea of Europe is a success. It has
brought peace.
As a test, I offered an analogy with the experience of
the Christian world since Vatican Council II.
The ecumenical movement, reaching full speed in the 1960s, aimed to end
conflict and hostility among the various Christian churches (Which, in Europe and especially in France, included several scandalous “Wars of Religion”).
I noted that in my youth we tended to think
of “the Catholic religion” and “the Protestant religion” as if we had inherited
two different belief traditions. And
often the isolation and hostility across denominational lines even infected family
relations.
But today, thanks to the ecumenical movement, baptized
Christians have a different sense of identity: I belong to the Catholic Church,
but my religion is Christianity--and I share that religion with Protestants. Thus
I am a Christian of the Catholic variety. My
identity is changed.
They found my analogy fit their experience—one older
gentleman could even remember how in boyhood his Catholic playmates would
attack and insult the Protestant kids in the neighborhood. He could not imagine that sort of conflict
happening today. (I recall two Boston
examples: Nat Hentoff describing the Catholic gangs from South Boston attacking
his Jewish playmates on Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester, and a Catholic priest
who in boyhood always referred “Jew Hill Avenue.”)
Has something like this happened to the political identity of
Europeans, I asked? Do French people now
think of themselves as “Europeans of the French variety,” enjoying common bonds
with other Europeans?
“Of course!” my interviewees replied (again with one
exception). “Our identity is not what it once was.”
The interesting part of the analogy for me is that both
examples confirm the same point: creating a wider identity enhances bonds
that promote Peaceable relations, whereas tightly defined identities and
boundaries do the opposite.
This is important in France, which tends to have a
very tight definition of what it means to be French. Many French at some level still agree that
“France is for the French”--which can mean that France is not for Jews, not for
Arabs, not for Muslims, or for gays, not for anyone who does not assimilate
smoothly into the mainstream of French Life.
In short, France is not designed to be a fully pluralist culture. My interviewees were shocked to know, as they
approach their own elections this Sunday, that American ballots are often
multilingual.
During my stay I also watched the televised presidential
debate, which included all 11 candidates. One the section concerned the
question of Europe itself. Three of the
candidates, including far right politician Marine Le Pen, want out of Europe
(“Frexit”). The other eight all want to stay.
This was not a surprise, nor was it surprising that not a single one of
the eight defended the European Union as it currently operates. All of these eight called for a variety of
reforms that would make the European Union more democratic, more accountable to
its national members, more committed to economic equality, lest technocratic
and bureaucratic, fairer to workers and poor member-states, etc.
But it was crystal clear that all eight made a
critical distinction between the actual functioning
of the European Union and the idea of
Europe that it embodies. Much as we Catholics
say that we profess loyalty to a sinful Church, all eight of these candidates
found flaws in the European Union but remained firmly committed to the idea of Europe.
To use a US analogy: they proposed changes akin to constitutional amendments,
rather than proposing to scrap the Constitution itself.
On Sunday’s election, it is likely that Marine Le Pen
and one of these eight will finish among the top two candidates in the first
round. It is generally expected that
whoever goes through to the second round against Le Pen will gather the others’
votes and become president. If so, the new
French presidential election will reaffirm the idea of Europe as something
supported by the vast majority of French people.
It’s worth noting that the Roman Catholic Church has
been a longtime supporter of the idea of Europe. All the French clergy I know are champions of
the European Union despite its flaws, since they truly see it as the vehicle for
peace.
Young French voters may not even realize, when they
vote, that their choice either supports or rejects the vision of the postwar
generation who believed that a peaceful future could only be built on
international cooperation, beginning with economic union and moving to
political federation. As Americans, we
should be flattered that their elders took the United States as a model. If we are skeptical, we might ask ourselves:
“Why should Europe not enjoy the benefits of federation that we have enjoyed?” And as Catholics, we can see that what they
have accomplished in the last 60 years is much like what our Church, and our
sister churches, have accomplished by pursuing unity amid all our flaws
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2017
