Europe Loses Its Mind
By Michael A. Ledeen

Almost all of my adult life I have been a Europhile. I lived in Europe for the better part of 11 years, and considered myself lucky, because the thing I cherish most--good, informed intellectual conversation with people who know a lot about history and enjoy talking politics and philosophy--was better there. Intellectuals were more appreciated in Europe. Even though we lived in miserable apartments in Italy for several years, without heat or hot water in a fifth-floor walkup that was hell to reach if you had a baby carriage in one hand, the groceries in the other, and the baby strapped to your back, I enjoyed high social status because I was a "professor." 

All this flowed automatically from well-established European convictions. Culture was important. The best ideas came from cultured people. Therefore the things that cultured people did, like writing books or composing music or designing buildings, were treated with appreciation and respect.

In contrast, American intellectual life seemed less interesting during the 1960s and '70s. Certainly conversation was much less challenging. Most Americans didn't know beans about history, even their own. Virtually no one in the United States knew anything serious about the stuff I was working on--Italian fascism and other nasty mass movements. Europe was my real home, the place I went for cultural nourishment, for intellectual stimulation, and for imaginative political thinking.

Today, all that has changed. Now, conversation is much better in America. Intellectual creativity is incomparably greater. Both the number and the variety of truly stimulating magazines--the favorite medium of intellectuals--are far greater here than in Europe. 

But even without the comparison to the United States, with all its current dynamism in the life of the mind, the European intellectual scene has become almost unbelievably boring. Talks with European intellectuals often bring nothing but whining and self-justification. Though Americans are now concerned about anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and other unhappy aspects of European culture, these are not new developments. What is new and troubling is that Europeans have gone brain dead. There is no energy there, no spark of imagination, none of the intellectual playfulness I found when I first set foot on the continent in the mid 1960s. 

Out of the last 50 Nobel winners in physics and chemistry, only 12 were Europeans. European novelists defined contemporary literature for decades, but no more. European movies used to put Hollywood to shame. Now European flicks are rarely worth watching; even Iranian movies are better. Most of the European press has lost any semblance of independence, having long since surrendered to the enforcers of political correctness and sold its soul for invitations to the best dinner parties and unmerited awards from one another. 

The resurgence of European chauvinism and other ugliness is closely related to the collapse of Old World intellectualism. It's as if the only way Europeans can assert themselves is by embracing the excesses of previous generations. There is a growing sense of inferiority among Europeans--an accurate recognition that Europe counts for much less than it used to. 

Many Europeans realize that their current irrelevance is largely the result of their own freely made decisions and their own lack of enterprise. First and foremost, Europe has refused to take up the heavy lifting of modern warfare, choosing to buy lots of "butter" and few "guns." As their defense and R & D budgets shrank ever smaller, Europe's ability to fight alongside the United States shrank as well. Before the invasion of Afghanistan earlier this year, American leaders informed NATO that the U.S. really didn't need European participation in the fighting, that we would do the whole thing along with the British--who have kept up much better than the continentals. This produced primal screams from the European defense ministers, who realized it would be a political humiliation. They accordingly insisted that America find a role for them, and it was done.

By failing to assume the most basic responsibility of defending themselves, the Europeans implicitly put their destiny in our hands. But rather than face this unpleasant truth, European leaders have scrambled to find a scapegoat for their own malfeasance. The only available candidate is the United States. Instead of admitting their own fecklessness, they accuse us of bloody thinking. Instead of taking steps to improve their military power, they denounce us for overwhelming other nations. 

At the same time, they wheel and deal with the world's worst dictators. The Europeans continue to negotiate fresh deals with the terror masters in Iran and Iraq today, ranging from aircraft sales to oil exploration contracts. And not just in the Middle East; European countries have done everything in their power to provide modern military technology to communist China, and not a single deputy in the European Parliament has stood up and asked if this policy was really in the interests of the Western world.

Giving up on the capacity for self defense has enormous consequences for any nation. It is always part of a process of turning inward, of self-indulgence. The big political debates in Europe today are not over war and peace, but over pasta and cheese. The fights in Brussels are over how many new regulations to impose on European manufacturers, European workers, European doctors and lawyers. The E.U. is simply not working through the question of how to deal with the threat from radical Islamic terrorism. 

Throughout the Cold War, Europeans saw themselves as wise, experienced, and thoughtful counselors to the American Prince. But their general loss of enterprise and imagination now undercuts them. Instead of trying to inform and guide, they merely whine and spit at us.

Of course they are angry; we have shown them up badly. Our ability to dominate the world, intellectually as well as militarily, is the clearest possible proof of their own failure. And they are reminded daily of their impotence by our obvious lack of concern over the possibility that they might opt out of today's war against the terror masters. 

This is only their latest humiliation, following years of cultural embarrassment in book stores (top American authors are translated into all the European languages yet there is relatively little cross-pollination among Europeans themselves), in theaters (where American movies are far more popular with their own people than local ones), on the field of business (where most European companies have been followers rather than leaders for decades), and elsewhere. 

Back in the 1960s, things were a lot different. But there is no contemporary equivalent of the Gunnar Myrdals, the Raymond Arons, the Luigi Barzinis, or the Albert Camus of those times. Today's European intellectuals have turned selfish, utterly materialistic, and lacking in independent thought. European politics now revolves around the quest for guaranteed material comfort--shorter work weeks, longer vacations, earlier retirement, and cushier pensions. 

Perhaps the worst part of Europeans' brain death is their supine embrace of their announced enemies. During the Cold War, there was no shortage of European intellectuals who actively appeased the Soviet Union, but there was always a strong majority in favor of the defense of the West. To the surprise of many Americans, there was a 1980s revival of courage among the French intelligentsia, for instance, above all those known as the "new philosophers." Young former leftists came to see that Solzhenitsyn was right, and that Soviet tyranny had to be condemned. Alas, there is no similar revival these days, as we see in the shocking silence of so many European elites in the face of radical Islam. 

Civilizations have their ups and downs, and Europe will likely rouse itself from its current torpor and self-indulgence to once again play a major role in the affairs of the world. It's happened before. The Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. After Western armies were defeated by Muslim forces for centuries, the tide was eventually turned at the gates of Vienna late in the seventeenth century. 

We can only hope this happens again soon. 

—Michael Ledeen, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute spends time in Europe every year. He is author of The War Against the Terror Masters.