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PARTISAN REVIEW
quite conceal the asking of unfamiliar and uncomfortable questions.
Our vision of Europe at the moment is obscured by precisely the most
essential element in the situation-the renewed antagonisms of a society
suddenly confronted with choices it had thought lay in the future . The Euro–
peans had supposed that they were on their way to a new community, with
time enough to make the transition painless. Old conflicts were to be over–
come, conventional historical costs reduced, a linear path to a secular utopia
begun . The new crisis of capitalism has deprived Western Europe of these
consolations-or illusions. Change is once more hard to bear and even harder
to control. In old Marxist terms, problems of the economic base now seem
more important than those of the cultural and political superstructure . The
old Marxist terms, however, are insufficient: modern capitalism integrates
market and state, politics and culture. It is often difficult to say where one
begins and the other leaves off. Despite serious inflation, large unemploy–
ment, and general constriction, the Western European populations are not
turbulent. Profound discontent, gnawing criticism of all political elites, and
occasional eruptions of protest do not attest radical revulsion for the system,
much less impend its overthrow. Europeans, to be sure, are not Americans.
Over the centuries they have developed traditions of collective action . Com–
pared with Gerald Ford's country , Western Europe is seething . Measured
against its own past experience, it is quiescent . Why have its antagonisms,
some of them of pure class conflict, not exploded with far greater force?
The~e
are historical moments which cast into relie(assumptions which
then begin to lose that self-evident quality which is the source of their plausi–
bility . Europe can no longer count on economic growth .
It
cannot believe
that , its colonial and imperial past behind it, the Third (and Fourth) Worlds
reserve a special admiration for their former masters. World politics (the
triangular struggle ofChina, the Soviet Union, and the United States) seem to
pass above European heads, like a missile in flight . European autonomy is
threatened, its historical space reduced.
Sometimes, this sort of situation results in a spiritual leap forward. Old
constraints on thought dissolve, new possibilities come to awareness-indeed,
are invented . A culture once repeating itself comes alive . Nothing of this sort
has happened as yet in Western Europe, but in France and (especially) Italy, it
might . Western European culture strikes me as in deficit, but also in search of
new units ofaccount-a new language ofpolitics. There are two different, but
connected, questions . To what extent are the political goals of the recent past
unattainable, because they rest on false ideas of social possibility? But then,
are new political ideas likely to be discussed by a public which is gravely
handicapped by the failure of Europe to have attained one of the classical
democratic aims : cultural equality? A very tentative answer would assert that
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