LETTERS FROM EUROPE
Norman Birnbaum
WESTERN EUROPE, 1975
I was in Europe in june andjuly, drafted these notes in September, and
made some changes as PR went to press in October. The point is not to stay
ahead of the headlines, but to get behind them. Now Spain is on our TV
screens andon our minds. The European strugglefor democracy and socialism
finds us with a nonelectedgovernment which has not been at pains to conceal
its view of what is good for Europeans,' democracy sometimes, socialism
almost never. What became apparent to me was that we need a new govern–
ment with new ideas.
The ways in which old cultures confront new problems tell us
much about their inner reserves of confidence, energy, and ideas . At first
glance, Western Europe in 1975 lacks world historical weight. An uncertain
revolution in Portugal, the Communists ' electoral success in Italy, the in–
creasingly evident incapacity of neo-capitalist and social democratic technoc–
racies (if, indeed, they can be distinguished) to control economic depression,
are surely not epochal. The mass media's fusion of eroticism and pornography
(a cultural version of Gresham 's Law , by which inauthentic sensuality drives
out the authentic kind) , the flight of many intellectuals into a new hermeti–
cism , of others into a social realism of stupefying crudity do not bespeak a
culture full of possibility. Things , however , are not quite what they seem . I
went to Europe this summer resignedly. I hoped to find something other than
a more elegant version of our own cultural and political sterility, but did not
expect to do so. What I found was that Europe has a chance to create a new
political community-a small chance, undoubtedly , but history may well
consist of a series of small chances (most of them , of course, missed) . The
enormous attention given to Portugal in the European press , the internal
divisions of the left on this (and most everything else), the half-convinced
polemics between left and right , were really so many communications in code.
Western Europe is at sea, but its elites (and more importantly, its publics) are
tryi ng
to
make for new and uncharted land . A familiar rhetoric did not
