The European Crisis in Civilizational Perspective Anthony Mansueto The deepening financial crisis in Europe is rapidly shredding the already fragile bonds of solidarity holding the disparate societies of the European Union together. It was only after significant pressure from the United States that Germany agreed to bail out the Greek economy. But Spain and Portugal and Hungary are also on the verge of financial collapse and many of the states of Eastern Europe are also quite week. Most analysis of this crisis has focused on its economic dimensions, which are clearly important. But the deeper question it poses concerns the European project itself, and bears on the way that Europe responds to continuing demands for expansion. What is Europe? What distinctive civilizational ideal does it carry? And what forms of political and economic organization will best advance that ideal? We should, in fact, be surprised that the European Union has held together through its successive waves of expansion as well as it has. The original Common Market comprised nation states which derived, for the most part, from the original territories of the Holy Roman Empire: France, Germany, Low Countries, and Italy, with the capital, Brussels, set in Charlemagne’s old demesne (now called Belgium), not far from his ancient seat at Aix-la-Chapelle, which the Germans call Aachen.   This may seem like little more than obscure historical trivia to neoliberal globalists who, when they look at civilizations, see only markets. But the European Common Market was, first and foremost, the project of Christian Democrats such as Robert Schumann. It formed an integral part of Jacques Maritain’s vision of a New Christendom. The European project was deeply rooted in Catholic social teaching, which rejects on principle the modern ideal of sovereignty and especially of the sovereign nation state. Instead, Catholic social teaching upholds the principle of subsidiarity: decisions should be made at the most local level compatible with the Common Good. It also argues for creation of effective international political authorities. The European Common Market was to serve both principles, re-invigorating cities and regions while creating mechanisms which would avoid the re-emergence of any possible causus belli, which in the wake of the Second World War threatened to end Europe once and for all. Indeed, central to the Catholic analysis of Nazism and the Second World War, was the idea that  Europe had stumbled on secularism to be sure, but that this secularism had taken a very specific form: the attempt to create sovereign collective political subjects which, by making humanity the master of own destiny, conferred on it a kind of divinity. The creation of the European Community was part of the Church’s decision to rebuild a base for itself among the peasantry, the working class, and the middle strata after the collapse of the ancien regime, a turn which encompassed Christian Democracy generally, Catholic collaboration with trade unions and congregation based organizations in the US, and the development of liberation theology in Latin America. Embedded in this project was the historic Catholic civilizational ideal: a society dedicated to the cultivation of human excellence, including, but by no means only, spiritual excellence. The European project was viable in the first place, then, because, with the exception of outlying regions such as Sicily and the Mezziogiorno, these countries shared a common political history reaching back to the ninth century and, second, because they gave birth to political parties which hoped to tap into that history to provide creative solutions to the problems of the modern world. Note that while Catholic Social Teaching has always supported the creation of effective international political authorities, it has not, generally, attempted to replicated the experience of the European Union elsewhere in the world.   To be sure, not everyone who supported the creation of the European Union and its predecessor formations did so for Christian Democratic reasons. For the pro-European section of the center-left, the European Union became a counterweight to the United States; for the emerging neoliberal right it became a strategy for strengthening markets at the expense of states, both by creating a larger free market area and by circumventing the strong national solidarities which supported the European welfare states. Both of these interpretations of the European project counseled expansion. But they also lacked roots in any compelling  civilizational ideal on which to found an expanded European solidarity. The left had long since abandoned Enlightenment ideals in favor of postmodern despair and the right, profoundly misreading American society, imagined that a united European could be built on the unique foundation of a unified regional market. Christian Democracy, meanwhile, had largely spent itself by the 1970s. This was not so much a political failure as a spiritual one. While they never managed to define a unique “third way” between capitalism and socialism, the Christian Democrats did give the European welfare state a distinctive turn, conserving peasant, artisan, and merchant sectors and giving religious and other nonprofit organizations a central role in the administration of welfare programs. What they failed to do was to draw Europeans back to the Church, leaving the European project and Christian Democracy generally with neither vision nor strong spiritual foundations. And so, when the fascist regimes in Portugal and Spain and the military dictatorship in Greece finally fell, these states were admitted, along with the UK, Ireland, and Denmark. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the reunification of Germany made the former East Germany part of the Union, but also transformed the Union into a mechanism for the incorporation of former Soviet bloc states into the West. Soon six became twenty-seven and even Turkey was demanding membership. But no one knew anymore what Europe was about. For most Europeans, in fact, it seemed increasingly to promise only the worst of what both the left and right together had to offer: more bureaucratic regulation and weaker social safety nets. When the Vatican, under John Paul II, having turned from its Latin American strategy of the 1960s and 1970s to a rear-guard effort to hold a Europe it had already lost, began demanding that the European Union include in its Constitution some reference to Europe’s Christian heritage it occurred to no one to agree, but to supplement this with a reference to the Enlightenment and other traditions, such as Judaism and Islam-- which had helped to shape Europe. Europe no longer stood for anything. This, ultimately, is why it was so hard to persuade the Germans to bail out Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Hungary. Why bail out these relatively prosperous spendthrift states while much of the world is still starving? Because they are European? In what sense? Geographic proximity has more often been a cause of enmity than of friendship between states. By race? Surely we don’t want to go there. In the absence of any higher civilizational ideal the European project will continue to flounder. It is far too early to say that Europe is “over.” If fascism didn’t destroy Europe then there is no reason to believe that a cyclic financial crisis will. But the European Union may well have spent itself as a visionary civilizational project. At the very least it will require a new birth, one that is civilizational before it is political and economic. Europe will have to own its history and its ideals. This does not, to be sure, mean reviving Maritain’s project for a New Christendom. Europe is too diverse for that. Nor does it mean countering postmodern despair with an Enlightenment revival that no one seems to want. But Europe must once again become proud of what Christianity and the Enlightenment have given to the world as well as self-critical about their limitations and errors. Ultimately, however, Europe needs an ideal which is as big as Europe itself. And Europe is bigger than even Christianity and the Enlightenment combined. Perhaps Europe could learn, in this regard, from the United States, which has rediscovered its sense of meaning and mission not by looking to the old elites, but rather to its periphery, its ex-slaves and its immigrants who have found in the institutions of the old Anglo-Saxon founders the matrix for creating a public arena neither confessional nor secular, but constituted by deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value. Europe itself has just such a periphery. Right now, it is a periphery which far too many Europeans regard as at best a source of cheap labor, and at worst as a drain on tight budgets. I am speaking of the South --of the Algarve and al- Andalus, the Midi, the Mezziogiorno, of Sicily, and of the Balkans. This Europe can do something which no other part of the West can. The South alone can remember an engagement with Dar-al-Islam which was something other than a clash of civilizations. And it can remember an Islam which Dar-al-Islam itself has forgotten, an Islam which was something other than a fundamentalism. The South remembers Convivencia. It is, I believe, out of this memory of Convivencia that a new European identity will emerge, an identity which is in accord with the developing population realities of the continent, one in which secularism can no longer be identified with freedom and tolerance and in which religion no longer means the Vatican. Such a Europe would remember its Jews and would know how to speak with rather than at Jerusalem, Cairo, Istanbul, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran. Such a Europe would have a reason to exist.