As I begin to write, I am riding on a fast train along the river Rhine, making my way from Holland to an old “Schloss” near Lake Constance in Austria, where I am to speak at a summer school on the future of European-American relations. The train is not very crowded; the camping sites along the Rhine are, despite its polluted waters and the heavy overhanging clouds. Europeans are on the move these summer days along overcrowded highways, in charter planes or in special trains, to overcrowded beaches, from boredom and comfort to often unknown destinations and holiday hardships.
The Rhine evokes both historical and personal memories. On the steep hills bordering the river, hidden among the vineyards, one finds many proud castles, built since the Middle Ages to protect property, control shipping and levy tolls. Today some are more than ruins, others have been converted into youth hostels, hotels, or museums. In one of them a group of young, idealistic Europeans came together in the summer of 1961, answering an appeal by the Dutch Crown Princess (the present Queen of the Netherlands), to dedicate their energies and talents to the unification of Europe. The purpose of the meeting, which I had been asked to chair, was to do something practical and useful and not merely to issue a resounding declaration.
As young Europeans in the early sixties, we belonged to the outward-looking generation, cherishing ideals very similar to those of the “new generation” in the U.S. The meeting set up a small organization we called “The European Working Group”; it was not a fancy name, which was exactly how we wanted it to be. We hoped to be seen and remembered by our work. We hoped to become the nucleus for a future European Peace Corps. By working together in a common, coherent and necessary task, we thought we could help unify Western Europe in the process. As a group, indeed, we did a good job (as was our design). We rebuilt a village in Iran, devastated by an earthquake, and our teams thereafter spread to several other areas and developing countries. Our broader aims, however, were not achieved. Soon after our group had been launched, governments began to set up their… own national peace corps (at the time it was fashionable in Western Europe to imitate the U.S.), with little interest for a common “European” endeavor. For a short period in 1963, I combined my chairmanship of the Group with the post of director of the Dutch Peace Corps. It didn’t work. With Charles de Gaulle governing France, the virus of resurgent nationalism soon infected Western Europe as a whole, including development-assistance policies. Non-governmental organizations like ours ran out of money. In 1965 I became a University professor and in 1968 our Group ceased to exist.
My train has now left the Rhine valley, winding its way past Heidelberg through the lush green hills to the city of Stuttgart, the site of the Headquarters of the U.S. European Command since it was thrown out of France in the late sixties. Located just outside the city in barracks formerly used by the German Wehrmacht, it is a poorly protected and easy target. A few hours later, I crossed the border into neutral Austria. Somehow, one has the feeling these days that Austria is the place where many West Europeans would like to be: in a neutral country without the burdensome responsibility, with the United States, for standing against the Soviet Union and maintaining peace in freedom and justice. The idealism of a dynamic, outward looking Western world in the early sixties seems to have been replaced by paralysis and resignation to an uncertain fate in the mid-eighties.
After my lecture I traveled the same itinerary in the opposite direction, this time with a member of the European Parliament for the German Green Party. In one emotional outburst after another, he lashed out against President Reagan, American foreign policy, the division of Europe masterminded in Yalta and… against his own party. He did not like the Soviet system, nor did he have any illusions about its repressive character. Still, he strongly advocated a European disengagement from the U.S. as a step towards East European disengagement from the Soviet Union. He disembarked long before I had reached my destination, leaving me behind to ponder his arguments and attitude. With the best of my ability, I could not find any logic or coherence in the policies he argued; nor did I manage to convince him of the need for Western Europe and the United States to stay together given the circumstances of the world we live in. His plaidoyer for a European disengagement may represent a minority in Germany or Western Europe today. The attitude or mood he reflects, however, is far more widespread; and it is a troubling one. Forty years after the end of the world war, Europeans are in the grip of an emotional nationalism, a sense of frustration over the interminable division of their continent and a sense of failure in the attainment of the ideals for which previous postwar generations worked. This mood, in my opinion, cannot be explained by political failures alone. After all, Western Europe has experienced peace and prosperity for long time; its relationship with the U.S. has been better than any other in history between a great power and a variety of smaller states; European integration, despite setbacks and crises, has been quite impressive; and life in our democracies is better than bearable. Why then this mood of resignation, frustration and destructive nationalism? Why this flight in illusions, this rejection of political reality, this constant stream of recriminations among allies, and the equally persistent expressions of “understanding” for repression in the other part of Europe?
In his book Freedom ad Culture (1939), John Dewey wrote:
The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here within ourselves and our institutions.
A foreign totalitarian state like the Soviet Union, I must add, can and does aggravate the threat to democracy by trying to manipulate and influence personal attitudes and institutions whenever and wherever conditions of confusion and disarray prevail. The conditions themselves, however, are of our own making. The confusion and disarray one feels in West European society today has to do with a very profound sense of disorientation and lack of purpose, a loss of identity and personal responsibility. Such is not a political or economic but a human condition. Paralysis and resignation to an uncertain fate, far from being the acceptance of reality, express the attitude of those who have given up the battle within themselves. Whoever accepts this battle gathers inner strength and develops a sense of identity and responsibility, and an innate desire for freedom. Whoever yields in this battle, also yields to the lust for power or an instinctive wish for submission—to inner often destructive compulsions or external anonymous forces. The former attitude is a source of dynamic idealism, the latter a source of passive conformism and weariness.
Looking at West European society with the eyes of a traveler, both into memories of recent history and along pathways of contemporary fellow Europeans, I became impressed by the extent to which political attitudes had been shaped by personal and often family experiences. My various encounters with memory and living persons at least offered some new perspectives on understanding the present condition of confusion and disarray. Ours is not a problem of “generation gaps,” of a successor generation taking over from the generation of the angry sixties, which itself had rebelled against the previous wartime generation. Our most crucial problem lies in the progressive disruption of family life, whether by the divorce of parents, the degradation of marriage to an obsolete and optional form only of social organization, the degradation of motherhood to an unpaid job and of fatherhood to outdoor moneymaking, or by the unlimited intrusion of TV in family life.
I should remind the reader that in a totalitarian dictatorship the disruption of family life is Official Policy. Such disruption belongs to the techniques practiced by one-party totalitarian dictatorships to achieve full control of society. The destruction or weakening of social units based on family, tradition and religion serves to atomize and isolate the individual and helps the party to impose huge and undifferentiated mass organizations in which the individual can be more easily manipulated. In too many instances, the disorientation I referred to earlier finds its roots in the disruption of the family.
As I returned home from my train ride along the Rhine, I found some very good friends awaiting me. For years they had been on the brink of divorce. Through the power of prayer and with wise assistance, they radically changed their lives and now radiate happiness far around them. Indeed, neither for a family in disarray nor for a society disoriented, will there ever be a good reason to give up.