March 31, 2007
Guns and Speech II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:05 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “I scarcely remember the details of the exchange, except that a few of us agreed that campus disruptions were more likely to be instigated by left-wing activists than by right-wing activists.” I still await learning of a single instance where a campus speech, discussion, poster, or newspaper was disrupted, systematically defaced, or destroyed by right-wing students. These sorts of actions seem to be exclusively, not “more likely,” the province of left-wing students. I suspect part of the reason for that is that right-wing students know that the college administration would come down on them like a ton of bricks for such behavior while left-wing students equally know they will get a free pass, as they did at Columbia. Mr. Zeitz says such behavior should be “appropriately disciplined.” I wonder if he thinks that is what happened in this case and, if not, what discipline they should have received. Had it been up to me, I would have suspended the students involved for a year and announced that anyone—of the right, left, or center—who trampled in such a way in the future on the free-speech rights of others would be summarily expelled. Moving on to guns and speech, let me say that I am not an Second Amendment absolutist. But, then, neither am I a First Amendment absolutist. I try to be a common sense absolutist. I think individuals have a right “to keep and bear arms.” But I have no problem whatever with reasonable restrictions on that right. I think all firearms should be registered, that age limits can be imposed, that certain areas (such as schools, courthouses, and—pace, Senator Webb—the United States Capitol) can be properly required to be gun-free, and that individuals can forfeit their right to keep and bear arms if they misbehave seriously enough, just as they can lose their right to vote. Equally, I think a person has a right to peacefully speak his mind on any and all subjects. But I don’t think a person has a First Amendment right to incite to riot, to stand up in the middle of a play and start telling the rest of the audience his political opinions, or to libel or slander someone. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said (I’m quoting from memory), “the right of free speech is like the right to swing one’s arm: It is absolute only until it comes in contact with someone else’s nose.” In other words, the right of free speech, important as it is, does not trump all other rights. I find the two cases Mr. Zeitz mentioned very interesting but quite different. In the Alaska case, while the incident took place off school property, the boy (now an adult—I believe he’s teaching in China at the moment) was still subject to school discipline as the school was acting in loco parentis. So the question is, did the school exceed its powers to control student behavior? As far as I understand it, the boy was deliberately trying to provoke a reaction, although I doubt he foresaw in his wildest dreams that the reaction he provoked would end up in the United States Supreme Court. The “speech”—involving a sign saying “Bong Hits for Jesus,” unfurled as the Olympic torch went by in a parade—is essentially meaningless, intended solely to get a reaction, in much the same way that “your mother wears combat boots” is. There was no idea or opinion related to the real world being offered. In retrospect, the school should have ignored the sign and, later, called the boy into the principal’s office for a dressing down for being a jerk. And the court of first instance should have dismissed the case under the doctrine of de minimis non curat lex. There was no real-world First Amendment issue here. Claiming one, and the courts taking the claim seriously, just because “words” are involved is, at best, silly. But do students have First-Amendment rights in school? The answer, I think, is both, yes, of course they do, and no, they don’t. Students are in school to learn. They are, quite properly, expected to listen, not talk, except when called upon to do so and then to respond appropriately. “Joshua, what is the past tense of donner?” is not a license to give one’s opinions on the war in Iraq. It’s exactly the same as a member of a jury. He does not lose his First Amendment rights by entering the jury box, but he may not talk while he is in it and he may not discuss the case outside of it until it is over. Would any judge allow a jury member to unfurl a banner saying “Bong Hits for Jesus” in the middle of a trial? I would certainly hope not. On the other hand, if a teacher asks a student what he thinks about X, the student has every right to honestly state what that opinion is and why he thinks so, regardless of how unpopular that opinion may be. And that is why I think the principal in Wilton, Connecticut, was dead wrong in banning the student-written play about the Iraq War. Assuming the New York Times description was an accurate one, the students, under the guidance of a teacher, had produced a genuine and worthwhile play on a painful subject. To ban it because it might “offend” someone is, to me, deeply offensive. Free speech—real free speech, not faux free speech like “Bong Hits for Jesus”—has suffered grievously in this country, especially on college campuses, because of the notion that selected groups have an absolute right not to be offended and an absolute, unappealable right to decide what is offensive to them. The trivial Alaska case got as far as it did because self-proclaimed defenders of the First Amendment have pushed the idea, with far too much success, that every noise issuing from a human being, regardless of both circumstances and content, is sacred. In the substantive Wilton case, the right of any person not to be “offended”—and a principal’s understandable if unacceptable reluctance to face their displeasure—caused what sounds like a very worthwhile project to be cancelled after a good deal of hard work. The students have every right to feel wronged.
March 30, 2007
Algeria, Vietnam, and Iraq II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST At John Steele Gordon’s advice, I took a look at Arthur Herman’s article “How to Win the War in Iraq.” Mr. Gordon is correct that it’s worth reading, even if you disagree with its gist (which I do). On the question of the French occupation of Algeria, I’ll defer to Fred Smoler, who knows a great deal about European military history. But I’ll try to take issue with Herman’s argument about Vietnam. On the subject of America’s war in Southeast Asia, Herman wrote: “By 1972, the American military there had broken the back of the Viet Cong insurgency, had fought the North Vietnamese army to a standstill, and had forced the government in Hanoi to the bargaining table. Here at home, meanwhile, the end of the military draft had removed the domestic antiwar movement’s most powerful wedge issue. Nevertheless, reorganizing itself, the movement began to lobby Congress vigorously to cut off support for the pro-American governments in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The refrain, exactly as in the Algerian case, was that this would both bring the killing and suffering to an end and allow the Vietnamese and Cambodians to ‘find their own solutions to their problems.’ Once Watergate destroyed the Nixon presidency, and ‘peace’ Democrats took control of Congress in the 1974 midterm elections, funding to keep South Vietnam free from communist control evaporated. Victory was turned into defeat; the ‘solution’ advanced by the antiwar Left turned out to be the crushing and disappearance of the country of South Vietnam.” A few problems stand out. First, Herman’s timeline is remarkably pat. War was won by 1972, lost by 1974. Really? The United States managed to break the back of the NLF and North Vietnamese Army, but enemy forces were able to rebound within one year (1974–75) of the cessation of American military aid to Saigon? I don’t think most historians would agree that the NLF/North Vietnamese insurgency was a dead letter by 1972. Under Nixon, American troop levels declined from over half a million in late 1968 to 24,200 in late 1972. At the same time, the administration helped build up the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN), increasing its troop levels from 850,000 to more than 1 million soldiers, providing it with over a million M-16 rifles, 12,000 M-60 machine guns, 40,000 M-79 grenade launchers, and an endless supply of planes, helicopters, and tanks. By the early 1970s South Vietnamese military academies were training 100,000 cadets each year. Taken in sum, these measures helped the government in Saigon double the portion of the South Vietnamese countryside that it controlled. But how effective was all of this? It certainly didn’t help South Vietnam withstand an invasion in 1975. In fact, Vietnamization was never as successful as its architects claimed. ARVN’s forces were larger on paper than in reality, due to the prevalence of “ghosting,” a process by which officers kept dead, wounded, and deserted soldiers on their rosters and pocketed their pay, while at the same time corruption continued to run rampant in the civilian government, thus undermining President Nguyen Van Thieu’s hold on the countryside. Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam’s chief negotiator, once asked Henry Kissinger how, if America could not drive the Communists out of South Vietnam with more than a half million well-trained combat troops, it would “succeed when you let your puppet troops do the fighting?” It was a pretty good question. Moreover, Herman is wrong to suggest that the prolonged engagement forced Hanoi to the negotiating table. After all, the U.S. had been negotiating with Hanoi since at least 1968. The terms that Nixon and Kissinger signed in early 1973 were nearly identical to what that North Vietnam had placed on the table over four years earlier. North Vietnam was in a war of attrition with the United States. While Herman’s article is provocative, one could just as easily draw the opposite conclusion: After four additional years of war, and over 20,000 more American servicemen killed, Richard Nixon got the same deal he could have accepted in early 1969.
March 30, 2007
Guns and Speech Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:35 PM EST A long while back, we American Heritage.com contributors debated whether violations of free speech were the special preserve of the left or something that activists on both the left and right were guilty of. I scarcely remember the details of the exchange, except that a few of us agreed that campus disruptions were more likely to be instigated by left-wing activists than by right-wing activists. I see little to gain in belaboring my original point—to wit, that very few extremists on either side of the political spectrum respect the free speech rights of their opponents. Instead, I’ll just agree with Mr. Gordon that people who disrupt a campus talk should be appropriately disciplined, and move on from there. This month saw two very interesting free-speech cases come to public light. In one instance, a high school student in Alaska was suspended for hoisting a banner that read “Bong Hits for Jesus” during an Olympic torch procession. Though the student was not standing on school property (he was on a public sidewalk), administrators claimed that his message undermined the school’s legitimate interest in promoting a drug-free environment. Moreover, he was still on school time. A federal appellate court disagreed, finding that the school violated the student’s constitutional rights, and the case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Many miles away, in Wilton, Connecticut, a public school principal barred students from performing an original play about the Iraq War. Written under the direction of the school’s drama teacher, and drawing on the diaries, oral histories, and letters of current soldiers and marines, the script, entitled Voices in Conflict, attempts to convey the challenges faced by young servicemen in Iraq. From the description in The New York Times, the play sounds neither prowar nor antiwar but just thoughtful, provocative, and challenging. Nevertheless, Timothy H. Canty, the school principal, explained that the show must not go on, because it might offend local families “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak.” Last week this blog hosted a brief discussion of the Second Amendment. We noted that many liberal legal scholars concede that while the amendment may originally have been intended to protect state militias from a tyrannical central state, the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868) changed the nature of the Second Amendment by effectively conferring on individuals the right to bear arms. Liberal scholars like Lawrence Tribe and Akhil Reed Amar are willing to concede this point, because they wish to be consistent. If the Reconstruction-era process of constitutional revision greatly expanded the individual liberties enjoyed by U.S. citizens, this expansion must apply to the entire Bill of Rights, and not just to the Second Amendment. When Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, it did so largely to countermand “black codes” enacted by Southern states. These statutes sharply restricted the rights of freed slaves to own guns and to assemble and speak freely. If the Fourteenth Amendment rendered the Second Amendment more powerful, by the same logic, it gave new muscle to the First Amendment. The question is, will conservatives who insist on a constitutional right to carry a concealed semiautomatic weapon also stand up for students in Juneau, Alaska, and Walton, Connecticut? (Ignore for a moment the terrible irony here. The good people of Walton pay their school principal to discourage students from writing original work about the most pressing social and political question of their time. Bravo for public education.) Will Second Amendment absolutists defend the rights of teenagers to say what they want on public streets and in the school auditorium? Can we expect Wayne LaPierre to file a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of these young people? Will conservatives of the libertarian persuasion be consistent?
March 30, 2007
Columbia University and Free Speech (for Selected People Only, of Course—We’re a University) Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST Last fall a group of Columbia University student thugs violently prevented a speaker from the Minutemen, a group concerned with illegal immigration, from finishing a talk that he had been invited to give by a campus organization. They invaded the auditorium and forced him off the stage. You can see the video of the incident here. Quite a lively discussion followed on this blog when I brought the subject up. I wrote that as far as I knew this sort of behavior on the nation’s campuses was exclusively the province of the left. At least I could think of no incident where right-leaning students had prevented a speaker from peacefully having his say at a campus event. Neither could any other contributor to this blog. After a five-month investigation (it took five months to investigate an incident that lasted five minutes?), Columbia has finally punished the perpetrators of this outrage against free speech and academic inquiry. Their punishment? According to the student newspaper, “they were charged with simple violations of the University’s Rules of Conduct. The resulting warnings . . . will be notated on students’ transcripts and remain there until the end of 2008.” Boy, that’ll teach ’em not to commit the intellectual equivalent of armed robbery. One wonders what they would have gotten if they had simply shot the speaker in order to shut him up. A two-week suspension, perhaps? If you think the punishment does not exactly fit the crime, the students involved entirely agree: “It’s a light punishment, it’s a slap on the wrist,” said one of them, Monique Dols, a graduate student. “It’s a victory for free speech and anti-racism.” No punishment at all for the violent suppression of free speech at an institution supposedly dedicated to it is a victory for free speech? George Orwell, call your office. Perhaps the reason this sort of behavior is exclusively a province of the left is that the campus authorities encourage it by their reaction, or rather non-reaction, to it. Does anyone think that, had the Columbia Republicans (the group that had sponsored the Minutemen talk) violently disrupted a speech by, say, Cindy Sheehan, this would have been the only result?
March 29, 2007
Algeria, Vietnam, and Iraq Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:20 PM EST Arthur Herman, a well-known historian (his latest book is To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, has written what I think is a most interesting and perceptive essay comparing the Algerian War of the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Vietnam War, and the current struggle in Iraq. He looks at the tactics that proved highly successful against insurgents (and that now, having been adopted very late in the game, seem to be showing good results in Iraq) and yet how the first two wars were nonetheless lost on the home front, thanks to an intelligentsia and media that were only too willing to put moral posturing above reality and forgive the enemy every atrocity while forgiving the Western power nothing. The results, in the cases of Algeria and Southeast Asia, were horrendous for the people of those areas and disastrous for the cause of freedom everywhere. It is well worth reading, even if you find yourself disagreeing with parts (or all) of it. Originally published in Commentary, it can be found here.
March 29, 2007
Weisberg, Roberts, and George W. Bush Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:50 PM EST American Heritage today links to a Slate piece by Jacob Weisberg on Andrew Roberts’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. I should declare an interest and a disability: I know Andrew Roberts, and I looked over a very few pages of a draft of a portion of his book, but I have not read the book, nor do I know if its author took any of the advice I offered. I have disagreed with many things Andrew Roberts has written and said in other contexts, but Jacob Weisberg’s review is so mechanically and effortlessly snide that it sets my teeth on edge, probably because Weisberg, generally an intelligent man, seems eerily careless in this effusion of easy contempt. For example, consider one terse little dismissal: Roberts is scorned because “that Bush has brought ‘full democracy’ to Iraq is stated as unequivocal fact.” But if full democracy means majority rule achieved via pretty honest elections with full adult suffrage, which is precisely what it is often taken to mean, Bush has indeed brought full democracy to Iraq; that is part of the tragedy. The Shiites, perhaps 55 percent of the Iraqi population, have voted in a government in an election boycotted by many Sunni Arab Iraqis, who correctly surmised that majority rule meant, among other things, the loss of their formerly privileged position. Right now, that elected government is menaced by a terrorist insurgency, and if the Iraqi government (and American troops who are there with its consent) ever crushes that insurgency and leaves the confessional and ethnic majority in control of a centralized state, there may well be very bad outcomes for many Iraqis, Kurds, secularists, non-Islamist women, and a lot of others. But the problem is with democracy, not with the false implication that Bush has failed to bring it to Iraq. There is much to be said against the Maliki government—but it is, for better and for worse, a democracy. Or how about this one: Roberts is patronized for having his “own idiosyncratic definition of English-speaking countries, which includes New Zealand but not Bermuda, Canada but not Ireland, and Australia but not India or South Africa.” Is it absurdly idiosyncratic to exclude Ireland from an analytic category denoting a number of English-speaking countries which are assumed to share a political culture? Maybe, although I’d guess Roberts was remembering that Ireland was proudly neutral during the Second World War, during which de Valera sent official regrets on the news of Hitler’s death, a courtesy I believe he omitted when hearing of Roosevelt’s. Maybe Irish political culture was not, over the entire course of the last century, quite as committed to what Roberts thinks of as the Anglosphere’s achievements as was, say, Canada. You could make a case that leaving out India was the worse mistake: Indians may not speak English as a first language, but they are a billion-strong parliamentary democracy, a political form they inherited from the British Empire Weisberg elsewhere sneers at. If the “Anglosphere” is “a natural alliance among the English-speaking former colonies of Great Britain that spreads higher civilization in the form of democracy and capitalism,” then India has a fair claim to membership, even if English is not most Indians’ first language. Is there no “natural alliance among the English-speaking former colonies of Great Britain”? Maybe not, although a fair number of French politicians have feared there was. That belief was one of the reasons for Mitterand’s attempt to preserve genocidal rule by Francophones in Rwanda, against the threat of English-speaking Tutsi putting a stop to the slaughter. On Roberts’s larger claims about the achievements of English-speaking democracies in the twentieth century, contemplating any hypothetical world run by the political regimes the “Anglosphere” defeated or outlasted may make Roberts’s alleged triumphalism sound less outrageous (again, I have not read the book). Some of my Polish, Czech, and for that matter German friends seem unfashionably grateful for the Anglosphere’s political and military achievements, and some of my Persian friends—the ones liable to execution by being buried alive or stoned to death—loudly regret the failure of the British Empire to incorporate Persia. They’re joking, at least to some degree—I think. My friends compare the current situation of their country to the current situation of India, so maybe I hear more joke than is intended. Here’s another much-too-easy sneer: “The fire-bombing of Dresden was ‘justified,’ the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki positive in various ways.” Some very capable modern scholarship, reviewed on this website, has endorsed both of those claims. Those defenses can be disputed with great vigor, although in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is harder to do so than nonspecialists tend to understand, and the most recent book on Dresden, by Frederick Taylor, concedes the horror but makes some powerful arguments about justification. In this case, Weisberg probably knows much less than he thinks he does, since he implies that both of Roberts’s claims are obvious absurdities, and they are anything but. I am sure that there are defects in Andrew Roberts’s book, of both tone and fact. I wonder if they are appreciably more grating than the defects in Weisberg’s smug little rant.
March 27, 2007
McCain-Feingold Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST McCain-Feingold, which was supposed to clean up American politics by taking away or at least greatly reducing the taint of money, is five years old today. Has it worked? Not that I can see. McCain-Feingold passed Congress because—whatever its allegedly high-minded purposes—it’s an incumbent’s protection act. In the nature of things, incumbents will always have an easier time raising money and getting media attention than challengers, so equally restrictive rules must always favor incumbents. And it hasn’t even reduced the amount of money campaigns cost. When the presidential candidates report first-quarter donations next month, no one expects them to be anything but new records (except, apparently, for John McCain himself, whose fund-raising is stumbling). Many of the major candidates have already opted out of voluntary restrictions under the pressure of necessity. Another purpose of McCain-Feingold was to reduce negative campaigning. As John Kerry found out with the Swift Boat Veterans ads, that purpose, as well, has been an abject failure. What McCain-Feingold has unequivocally done is to reduce free speech. One of its provisions forbids advertisements by citizens groups within 30 days of a primary and 60 days of an election. In other words, everyone except the candidates and the established media has to shut up before an election. Arthur Sulzberger’s opinions are fine, John Q. Public’s are not. The Supreme Court upheld this provision—to the astonishment of nearly everyone—in one of its more shameful recent decisions. One can only hope it will see the error of its ways soon. Fortunately technology is making McCain-Feingold increasingly irrelevant. Only in the 2004 election did the Internet begin to exert a powerful, and so-far unregulated, influence on politics. It will have a much more powerful effect next year. And it won’t be restricted to the well-heeled, as television is. The spoof of the classic Apple Computer 1984 ad, targeting Hillary Clinton, that was all over YouTube last week and then spilled over into television as a news story, was cooked up by an individual on his own time. Thanks to the Internet, one needs increasingly only to be clever to get wide public attention. Many argued five years ago, correctly it appears, that there is no way to fairly and successfully regulate the flow of money into politics in a democratic society. Instead, we should make the reporting requirements much more strict and immediate. A New York Times editorial yesterday reported how the Senate currently reports political contributions: “Instead of quickly downloading [actually it’s uploading] their campaign financing data directly to the Federal Election Commission, like everybody else, senators print out their records on paper and snail-mail them to the Senate secretary. These pages have to be scanned into digital images that are then e-mailed to the election commission, where—wait now—they have to be printed and collated. This paper treadmill—perhaps 10,000 pages—is next sent to a private contractor to be tediously typed at a cost of $250,000 back into a computer, of all things. From there, the information is e-mailed back to the election commission for, yes, posting on the Internet.” By the time the money is reported, of course, it has already been put to use and, after the election, the campaign can always do the oops-clerical-error routine and return the money when it no longer matters. If it were up to me, I would remove all limits on contributions by American citizens (to the candidates, parties, and citizen groups) and simply require that every candidate and officeholder report contributions, in whatever amount, on their websites the very same day the check is deposited in the bank, along with full disclosure of who gave it and, for amounts over, say, one thousand dollars, that person’s business affiliations. The media—not to mention the other candidates—can be relied upon to keep close tabs on who is giving what to whom and reporting on it. Then the American people can decide for themselves if a candidate or officeholder is being unduly influenced. Since I’m a democrat, I have every confidence that the people are more than capable of making intelligent judgments on the matter.
March 25, 2007
The European Union’s Birthday Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:50 PM EST This weekend is the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of what became the European Union. The E.U. began with six members, a different name (the European Economic Community), and a much smaller purpose. Having begun life as a mere free-trade area, it now has 27 members, some of the attributes of a federal state, ambitions to further integration, and no constitution (although not for want of trying). For internal purposes, the E.U. is an escape from the nightmare of history, especially from the world of genocidal warfare recently waged by European nation states. It also has pretensions to being the best and most attractive model for modern societies, and some of these pretensions are on view this weekend, as the E.U.’s celebrants bloviate in the European press. If the E.U. is the model for the future, it is a model in distinction to other possible models, and the United States being one such, there is a temptation for E.U. enthusiasts to accentuate the differences between the E.U. and the U.S., to the E.U.’s advantage. So the E.U. becomes a generous and decent social market society, rather than the heartless and inegalitarian American market society; it becomes the champion of international law rather than a violent cowboy culture addicted to the hasty resort to force; etc. There is something to be said for the Europhile vision, along with something to be said against it. One thing to be said against it, as mentioned above, is that habit of magnifying differences with the U.S., which in many ways shares a common cultural inheritance with the E.U., and minimizing differences between the histories of the states within the E.U. For example, Will Hutton, one of the Euro-bloviators and the editor of the Observer, today writes that “Europeans believe in the great Enlightenment trinity of values—freedom, equality and fraternity. The French revolutionaries of 1789 speak for the British as well. You may object that hunger for freedom is universal. So it is. But it is Europeans who went through the Enlightenment together, freed themselves from the constraints of monarch and church and so dared to know, in Kant’s great phrase, and then embraced the Enlightenment inheritances. . . . The United States may be the other great Enlightenment creation, but it is only liberal America that believes in the complete trinity of Enlightenment values—and liberal America’s eclipse, until very recently, has exposed the gulf between Republican, conservative America and Europe. For them, the only value that counts is liberty. No European culture would want to make such an incomplete statement about the pillars that underpin a just civilisation.” So, all Europeans believe, and have believed, similar things, which only some Americans believe. Really? Americans, of course, do value equality under the law; economic inequality is advancing within the E.U. as it is within the U.S.; we have our own senses of fraternity; and Europeans’ senses of fraternity are both various and imprecise. The U.S. has an uglier history of racial inequality than do E.U. states, unless you think about Poles, Jews, the Roma, and the Irish, etc., as races, which some Europeans have, in which case the U.S. record is less strikingly odious. The U.S. future on race more narrowly defined is not obviously grimmer than the E.U.’s future. As for all Europeans sharing all of these values more with one another than with Americans, I am not clear that Englishmen have more in common with, say, Romanians than they have with Americans. Over the last few weeks, fascistoid mobs have been shouting anti-Semitic slogans and occasionally committing arson in Budapest (other mobs, with different politics, did comparable things in France a summer or so ago). Does England really have more in common with Hungarian political culture, and for that matter with French political culture, than with the U.S.? And which Hungarian and French political cultures? In Hungary, did the Arrow Cross and the Anglophile magnates have the same political culture? Did Bonapartists, Legitimists, Dreyfusards, and anti-Dreyfusards share one political culture in France, and share it with all Britons?
Another problem with Europhile bloviating is that if you are escaping from the nightmare of history, you can be tempted to suppress a lot of history in the process. Hutton opines that “The creation of the E.U. is one of the best things we Europeans have done.” Maybe, but Europeans have done relatively few things together as Europeans, and much of the best of what Europeans did collectively they used to imagine they had done as members of particular nations. Some of them still imagine things that way. If Will Hutton had chosen to imagine himself as British, rather than European, he could have observed that among the best things the British had done were, say, stopping Philip II from setting up what was once called a universal empire, in Philip’s case one to be lit by the light of burning heretics—this was done in conjunction with some other Europeans, for example, the Dutch, but against the efforts of different Europeans. Then there was stopping Louis XIV from doing more or less the same thing, also stopping Napoleon from setting up a universal empire, and stopping Kaiser Bill and Adolf Hitler from setting up universal empires, in the latter case one also illuminated by human torches. If one departs from the peculiar and once-famous British specialty of thwarting universal empire, there’d also be suppressing the slave trade, stamping out suttee, etc. There would be much darker entries in the ledger, but the accomplishments would remain, even after restating them in less atavistically jingo language than I have chosen to use. Alas, since these were all the accomplishments of some Europeans against other Europeans, there is no obvious way to make them “European” accomplishments. And the English case is only one such. What will happen to the passionately nationalist heroes of, say, the Risorgimento when the E.U. writes its history? How about Jeanne d’Arc? How will Polish history read? On the evidence of Hutton’s (and similar) tones, if the E.U. is to have a history, many seem to think that it will be advisable to deemphasize a lot of the European history that has actually happened.
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