In the spring of 2003, I was invited to meet a high-ranking European diplomat who was visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories on a fact-finding trip. I was then the editor of the Jerusalem Post, and the diplomat wanted to hear what representatives of "civil society" had to say about the intifada. I argued that the violence was of Yasser Arafat's making and would not go away until he did. In reply, the diplomat observed that Israelis and Palestinians alike could benefit from the example of France and Germany, which after centuries of conflict had wisely agreed to set differences aside and embark on a path of harmonious collaboration, the result being the European Union.
The soft nostrums of European diplomacy are always hard to take, especially when the people to whom they are offered are being blown up daily. But what struck me most about the diplomat's exhortation was his evident sincerity. He really seemed to believe that the EU was the product of some kind of spontaneous moment of enlightened European statesmanship, which by pure chance occurred sometime in the late 1940s, rather than of Germany's annihilation as a military power, American dominance in Western Europe and the Soviet menace. And it was through this prism of a mythologized past that he had come to the Middle East to offer his prescriptions for peace.
That encounter comes to mind following last week's successive rejections by French and Dutch voters of the proposed European Constitution. Already much has been written to explain the whys and whereofs of the result: the dismal condition of the European economy; popular disaffection with the elites that supported the Constitution; fears it could lead to the dismantling of the welfare state and to Turkish membership in the EU; the incomprehensibility of the document itself.
But the deeper reason behind the "no" votes, I suspect, is that Europe's imagined past no longer provides relevant answers for its depressing present. This has happened elsewhere in the world: in the old communist countries, for instance, and in the Arab world today. Now it is the Europeans who have awakened to the fact that the great myths that have sustained their joint enterprise this far will sustain it no further.
There are four such myths. The first of these -- the founding myth -- is that the root of Europe's historical problem is nationalism. Of course, Adolf Hitler was a nationalist, and Hitler was the cause of Europe's physical and moral implosion in World War II. But nationalism isn't Hitlerism, and Hitlerism wasn't merely nationalism; fundamentally, it was totalitarianism. By contrast, the communist countries imposed on Eastern Europe after World War II were explicitly "international" in their outlook. Europe, however, was not better off because of them.
The second myth is that, since nationalism is the problem, Europe must be the solution. "We need more Europe, not less," said Tony Blair in 2002, in a speech that stressed the need for a European Constitution. In Mr. Blair's view, wherever the EU has gone, good things have followed. Yet it would be closer to the truth to say that wherever good things have happened, the EU has followed.
After last year's enlargement of the EU by 10 new member states, European leaders congratulated themselves for the achievement of making Europe "whole and free." In fact, Europe had already been free for 15 years, an accomplishment that owed more to Ronald Reagan than to the timid European leaders of the day who sought accommodation with their eastern neighbors. Indeed, if the EU's enlargement was extraordinary in any respect, it was in its belatedness and the comparative miserliness of its terms.
The third myth is that the "European solution" actually solves anything. Turn again to Mr. Blair: "The way that EU membership has transformed Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece into prosperous economies in 20 years," he said, "should be tremendous encouragement to Central and Eastern Europeans."
The notion that it was EU membership that was primarily responsible for making these countries prosperous is demonstrably false. Switzerland and Norway, two of Europe's richest countries, are not in the EU. As for Ireland, it joined the EU in 1973, remained a backwater despite massive subsidies from Brussels, and only took off following radical free-market reforms in the late 1980s. Most EU leaders, however, have avoided serious domestic reforms -- and the political risks they entail -- in favor of grandiose pan-European schemes.
In the case of the euro, it's true, Europeans have been better served by a single well-managed currency than by a basket of sometimes poorly managed ones. Still, the same Maastricht Treaty that created the euro also imposed arbitrary budget-deficit caps that precluded tax cuts, and every year the EU comes closer to harmonizing its fiscal and regulatory regimes, with ruinous consequences for competition and job creation.
Finally, there is the myth that the EU has something larger to offer the world. In economic affairs, the offering has been corporatism and welfare, a model supposedly more humane than America's system of "cowboy capitalism." In foreign affairs Europe has stood for dialogue, development, human rights and multilateralism. Yet the soft-power methods of European diplomacy did nothing to stop the killing in the Balkans and have proved basically irrelevant in the war on terror. As for euronomics, it has delivered 15 consecutive years of laggard performance, culminating in some of the highest unemployment rates the Continent has seen since the 1930s.
What does all this mean for "Europe"? Until last week, the quotation marks would have been unnecessary: A myth in which people believe has the moral, and often practical, force of fact. A myth in which people no longer believe is a trunkless statue in the desert. Last week, the EU lost its trunk. Europe -- no quotation marks this time -- may now discover itself anew, and prosper.
