A discussion with Pierre Manent
Pierre Manent, director of studies at EHESS (Advanced School of Social Sciences), and professor of political philosophy, takes apart the post-national enthusiasm of Europe’s elite, and worries about the depression of populations summoned to break with their past. He notes a double blindness: the unified world whose coming is being hailed is not going to happen tomorrow, and it’s a good thing, because such a world is far from desirable. Considered as obsolete and guilty, nations are still the reality in which citizens live. We should be glad of that, says this “liberal-patriotic” thinker, for, without the cradle of the European nation-state, democracy mutates into mere management. And Europe, detached from all peoples and territories, into a “centralized human agency.”
– A disciple of François Furet and Raymond Aron, a brilliant interpreter of Tocqueville, you are known as a scholar. Now, in The Reason For http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3351, you sound an alarm and appeal for what one could call a political rearmament. Is the situation so serious that it forces you to intervene in the public arena?
– A rearmament! That’s your word, not mine. For me, what is needed instead is “Gaullian” language. We are overtaken by a sort of mania for “renunciation”. We remember only our crimes and our failings. We are positively refusing to prolong anything that was great and noble in the long French experience. The most http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4511 thing is that we are celebrating this weakness of the brain and the heart as being an example of a progress in human consciousness.- In Europe, the ever more intensive process of equalization of conditions, according to the Tocquevillian definition, goes hand in hand with a progressive “denationalization”. Now for you, without the nation-state, there is no democracy.
– We have not measured the degree to which our experience with democracy was connected to this extremely unique political form that is the European nation-state. We have more and more come to regard the nation-state as a simple coating, exterior to democracy, or as the scaffolding that permitted its development. With the European Union we seem to have reached an ulterior stage of democracy, liberated from its old glittering finery, mutated into pure governance, and not connected to any people, to any territory, to any particular mores. With the May 29, 2005 referendum, we were able to see the fracture between official political action and the real feelings of European citizens, who have the feeling that they are being carried away in a movement that no one can control. But this “pure democracy” has lost its representative virtues.
– In other words its democratic nature. Yet, the United States, which has not renounced the nation-state, is also experiencing a crisis of democracy.
– True, but the American system, because it is still truly national and representative, is capable of correcting, however brutally, its direction. If Americans vote for President Bush and the Republican Party it is because, rightly or wrongly, they believe those candidates are better able than the Democrats to confront the challenges of the times. Not that the United States enjoys moral and social health in every test it is put to, but their political system reacts to the fluctuations of American opinion and to the vision, accurate or erroneous, that Americans have of what is good for the United States.
– In France, people go to the polls with the feeling that nothing they do will have any influence on political decisions anyway, that the so-called “establishment parties” will conduct, notwithstanding their rhetoric, the same policies.
– The problem in Europe, particularly in France, is that our politics, though obviously bad, are not correctible, whatever the orientation of the electorate. The European machine has been set up in such a way that it cannot not be deployed, the result being a “purposeless finality” (“finalité sans fins”). The outcome that we are celebrating, the 25th anniversary of Europe, and soon the 30th, will have been created by a mechanism that no one can control, and that was not desired by anyone.
– But you postulate that American activism and European passivism (“quiétisme”) are two versions of a democratic empire the extension of which represents the growing unification of the world.
– American politics is based on the idea that differences between human groups are superficial. Democracy, imposed if necessary, will rapidly produce mores and regimes that are so close to our own that the democratic order will be assured. But the fact remains that this doctrine is compatible with the strong feeling of the specificity and excellence of the United States. The fact that they are still a nation-state allows them to take American interests into account while they sovereignly master their own special use of the universalist ideology. Inversely, we do not control the universalist ideology, it controls us.
– While political correctness has never exalted differences to the extent it does now, isn’t it paradoxical that the abolition of differences is considered as the ultimate horizon of human history?
– Indeed, this passion for resemblance, this idea that humanity is heading towards its necessary unification, is triumphant. Yet such a unification is in no way desirable. The oldest liberal idea is that uniformity is the sister of despotism. At any rate, despite certain appearances, globalization is not the harbinger of the end of differences. Economic globalization is producing the rise to power of non-Western zones but nothing guarantees that their development will take the same paths as the West. A world in which China and India are the major powers is in a sense more diverse than the world governed by the Western powers. In Europe itself, our countries are more closed in on themselves than they were 30 years ago. Do you think that we are more interested in the Italy of Berlusconi than in that of Berlinguer? Finally, the self-affirmation of Islam is adding to the heterogeneity of the world. In the days of Nasser and the predominance of Arab nationalism, the Muslim countries constituted a world whose categories were intelligible to us, that resembled us or that wanted to resemble us. Today, the Islamic world is a world that is distancing itself from us, not a world that is coming closer.
– The growing differences pose a particular problem for the West, whose identity is founded on the universality of its values. Should we mourn the death of this universality and take refuge in total relativism?
– Of course not! Universalism is the very soul of Europe. But our universal principals are linked to particular intellectual, moral, religious and political experiences. They are not found in the formulae that proclaim them.
It’s just that the affair of the Danish cartoons has demonstrated that while information, images and ideas circulate without restriction, it is more and more difficult to disconnect interior order from exterior disorder.
It is not the interior dimension of this affair that is striking. There would not have been the slightest movement of Muslims within our countries, or perhaps even outside of our countries, if not for the deliberate decision of a certain number of Arab or Muslim countries to intimidate Europe. We witnessed a crude operation, but apparently efficient enough to make Europe feel that it was under surveillance and that it had to justify its mores and customs before a political and religious tribunal outside of Europe. The situation does not call for subtle arguments on the balance, however necessary, between freedom and respect of opinions, but (instead calls for) firmness of European governments which until now have allowed themselves to be shoved around by systems that do not respect freedom, in particular religious freedom.
– Isn’t the weakness of governments in this affair the reflection of the fact that we do not know how to be a people any more – which means that we are dealing with a democracy that has neither demos nor kratos?
– We do not know how to live in our nations. The glorious nation suffered and caused too many calamities. We can no longer, if I may say so, “start over as in 1914.” Only we haven’t discovered what life after the nation consists of. Conventional wisdom claimed that our national lives were henceforth an illusion and that we were already living in Europe. Well it isn’t true. That said, the European construction will be a reasonable enterprise provided they give up their attempt to denationalize nations. The future of Europe is in initiatives such as Airbus or Ariane, common actions, and not in the imposition of abstract rules that are supposed to lead to a superior stage of human existence.
– The irony of history is that we are colliding today with the fulfillment of what we ourselves invented: equality has become egalitarianism, Enlightenment has become the triumph of the individual, democracy has been degraded into “hyperdemocracy”…
– Of course, but it cannot just be deplored. If we distanced ourselves from the sovereign and purely national State, it was because it had produced devastating effects. But we did not calculate that this world freed from our old guilt would not be livable. And we didn’t see that the artifices we were constructing to govern us were going to prevent us from governing ourselves. There is a point where the instrument is too vast and too complex for the one wielding it. In cartoons from the revolutionary period, we see the peasant carrying the priest, the nobleman, and the tax collector on his shoulders. Of course, we no longer live under the yoke, but each of us bears the weight of a pile of governing bodies, from the municipality or the region to the United Nations, and in between the State and Europe, not to mention diverse commissions and organisms. In truth, our daily lives now consist only of applying more and more rigorously rules that are more and more rigorous. We have here a systematic self-mutilation of citizens for the purpose of preventing all risks that free actions might engender. The principle of precaution, in a comical exaggeration, has taken on the value of a constitutional amendment in France, and will soon forbid us from leaving our cradle. When I hear the Minister of Agriculture celebrate with exaltation the fact that all of France mobilizes for a wild duck found dead near a pond, I have the feeling that we have entered a strange world.
– Your book could have been called “Requiem for Politics”?
– If you like, but we cannot escape from politics. The era of depoliticizing is perhaps about to end. We are we to do with Europe, with America, with the Arab-Muslim world? What Burke already called the catechism of human rights does not provide an answer to these questions.
http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/2007/12/reason-for-nations.html