Europe

Let’s get this straight – there is no such thing as Europe

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That is not exactly true as there most definitely is such a geographical concept as Europe and even a cultural one, though there have been enormous problems in defining the latter ever since it emerged in the fifteenth century or so. The great historian of the Renaissance, Sir John Hale, has written about it at length in many of his works. What there is not is a political and social entity called “Europe”.

 

There are few things more irritating than blithe American assumptions about “Europe” and “Europeans”, all of which have been in evidence in connection with Obama’s Berlin speech, which seems to have been a little less than overwhelming according to what people who were there say.    

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The right to a job

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There has been a certain amount of fuss recently over the case of the sued hairdresser. The story is readily available in the MSM so I shall sum it up very quickly indeed. Ms Sarah Desrosiers runs a hairdressing salon in King’s Cross, North London, which specializes, as she puts it, in “funky urban hairstyles”. I am not sure I know what it means but whatever it is the business has been successful. As it happens I know two young women whose hair is always beautifully cut, who had followed Ms Desrosiers when she left the big salon she had worked for and set up her own business.

In other words, we are talking about a talented, hard-working, entrepreneurial young woman of the kind this country needs many more of. Whether we are going to have them after this particular episode remains questionable.

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Thomas PM Barnett, Rule-Sets, and Democratic Sovereignty

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In a recent post on the Thomas PM Barnett Weblog, Tom laments the Irish people voting against the Lisbon Treaty:

It is weird how the EU can let one country decide to run a plebiscite and then kill a treaty.   Better is majority like we did with the Constitution.

(I might add that the Constitution wasn’t adopted by the United States by way of a majority; it required consensus of all thirteen states under the Articles of Confederation.   Tom is correct, however, in that Treaty ratification today requires the consent of the Senate, which is not unanimity.   But I digress…)

Tom’s view seems to fall in line with his views on forms of governance around the world:   In the first of his books he discusses the concept of the Rule Set:

A collection of rules (both formal and informal) that delineates how some activity normally unfolds.

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Ireland votes No to the Lisbon Treaty

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This is big for us on this side of the Pond. Ireland is the only member state of the European Union that has had a referendum on the Constitution  for Europe Mark II, known as the Lisbon Treaty. In the other states, governments and legislatures ratified with no reference to whether people want to have this far-reaching and complex document imposed on them. The reason for that is simple – just as two years ago in France and the Netherlands, so this year in Ireland, when the people are given a chance to vote on a further step towards the creation of an integrated European state, they tend to say no.

We are still waiting for the official result but the government has conceded and the spin has begun. We shall hear a great deal about people not really voting against the Lisbon Treaty but on many other subjects. Whenever people vote the “wrong” way, they apparently do not intend to do so; they are merely misguided or have  misunderstood the subject.

The big question is what will happen now. According to EU rules every treaty has to be ratified by every signatory state. Clearly Ireland will not be able to ratify the Lisbon Treaty. Strictly speaking that should mean the end of it and the still incomplete ratifications, such as the British one (the Bill is still in the House of Lords, waiting for the Third Reading) should now stop. The EU may decide to make some cosmetic changes and insist that Ireland vote again. This has been done before but not recently, as it is becoming a high-risk game. Or there may be a Declaration that gives Ireland a special status at the level of the Nice Treaty that the country finally agreed to after two referendums, the second one conducted in a very dodgy fashion. That, one must assume, is legally challengeable as it breaks the EU’s own rules. So we wait.

Pleased though we are, it has to be said that this is not the end, or the beginning of the end or, even, the end of the beginning (to misquote Churchill’s famous pronouncement). There is a long way to go before we can restore any semblance of democracy to European countries.

D-Day: “Clink”

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One of my favorite writers is A.J. Liebling. This recent review of the new Library of America volume of his Six Armies in Normandy. The reviewer justly praises John Keegan’s book Six Armies in Normandy, then compares Keegan’s writing about the invasion to Liebling’s on-the-scene reportage.

His account of the Normandy Invasion is pretty much limited to a single cross-channel trip by a single landing craft. Its art is almost the inverse of Keegan’s. It begins in boredom, unacknowledged anxiety, uncertainty; its later moments of danger and violence are realized largely after the fact. It is so small a fragment of the gross event that it has almost no significance in the success or failure of the invasion. Liebling later found out that of the ten landing craft that were part of the group with which he went in, four were sunk before they had unloaded the men they were carrying, “a high proportion of whom were killed.” …
 
Liebling was, he says, on the upper deck during the four minutes it took for the two platoons the landing craft carried to disembark. “I looked down at the main deck and the beach-battalion men were already moving ahead, so I knew that the ramps must be down.” Just as the stern anchor was being taken up “something hit the ship with the solid clunk of metal—not as hard as a collision or a bomb blast; just ‘clink.’” This is the direct experience of what was later discovered to have been a seventy-five-millimeter antitank shell with a solid-armor-piercing head hitting the forward anchor winch, being deflected toward the stern, tearing through the bulkhead, smashing the ramp winch, breaking into several pieces, and killing two of the crew. Clink.

We read of spectacular and overtly horrific events on D-Day. Yet, often death came in seemingly trivial form. People are walking along, in photos of the invasion, apparently nonchalant, next to them, not five feet away, someone is falling, hit by German fire. Tanks that are supposed to “swim” ashore are deposited in the water too far off, they drift off target, they try to steer toward where the troops are pinned down on Omaha Beach, off-angle in the surf, they founder, they sink like stones, all their crews die. People who think they have reached safety, behind barriers, away from the enemy, are smacked, lethally, by random shell fragments or stray bullets.

D-Day was a gargantuan, colossal undertaking. It was a juggernaut, a Moloch. It ate men with both hands. It consumed the Germans in stacks and heaps. Read about what it was like to be under the hammer of Allied naval artillery and airpower. It was like the Earth was being torn up by the roots. Few lived to tell the tale. Americans, especially at Omaha Beach, where the German resistance was strongest, also died in droves.

There was no other way to do it. The Third Reich had to die. The Allies, including the Red Army, had to kill it. There was no easy, clean or humane way to do it. They were fighting a malign enemy which had, insanely, chosen to launch a war against the entire world. It would not surrender when it was beaten, but only when it was crushed. There was no rapier thrust, no magic bullet. It was sledge-hammer blows, straight on, with men and machines, until the beast was smashed, and had bled its life away. It cost lives and it was going to cost lives.

Defeat for the Allies was possible on D-Day. Eisenhower knew that. Montgomery, the meticulous planner and unsung hero of Overlord, knew it too. Rommel, who planned to beat them, knew it.

On top of all the massive armament hurled at the Germans, the day was finally carried by the courage and will of the attackers to press on, to come to grips with the Germans, destroy them, and push inland. Napoleon said that in war the moral is to the physical as ten to one.

Let us have perpetual gratitude to the men of D-Day.