The Elementary Articles—#17 (May 2022)
On natalist narratives, Zemmour's Jewish paradox, the meaning of Brexit and the lure of national dependence.
Welcome to another issue of The Elementary Articles, where I share my latest work laced with the odd nugget of personal news. As always, I look forward to your feedback by replying to this e-mail or on Twitter (@JorgeGGallarza). Happy reading!
Fine-tuning the Natalist Message
I am back in Paris from a two-week stay in Madrid—and what a blast that was. Wednesday before last, I was lucky to attend a panel session—the Spaniards call that “conferencia”—on family policy hosted by the good folks over at University CEU San Pablo’s CEFAS Forum (thank you Elio and Fernando!) And on that panel, three speakers took turns to intone what is by now the conservative consensus on the matter—namely, that we are living through a “demographic winter” that risks ending Europe as we know it, and that along with robust family policies such as tax breaks and paid parental leave, our societies should stress the joys of forming a family to would-be parents. This point alone prompted me to jot down a few scattershot thoughts, kindly published by The European Conservative this week-end. From the piece:
Shaping a narrative that invites young couples to procreate, the speakers seemed to agree, is the more promising non-financial avenue to reverse the ageing of our society. The third panelist, Spain’s guru demographic alarmist Alejandro Macarrón, tackled the heart of the matter with something of an iffy diagnostic. If young couples are not having enough children, he seemed to argue, it is partly because they’re underestimating the long-term fulfillment and self-actualization that flows from bringing a newborn to life. If only the government could help fix that informational asymmetry through publicity campaigns to persuade them of doing what is already in their best interest, Macarrón’s thinking went, we would be back at replacement levels in the foreseeable future. Fill those bus-stop billboards with irresistible pictures of cute lil’ babies—Macarrón’s slides had plenty of them—and you can seduce the rising generation away from wanting pets and toward breeding human beings. The messaging of those campaigns, he highlighted, should stress that childlessness is misery and that only parenting can elevate one to a happy life.
And some more:
This rationale strikes me as self-defeating. If young couples are postponing, or altogether refraining from having children in such large numbers, the decision-making of each one individually cannot possibly hold all the explanatory weight—the culture must bear some of the blame, too. Individuals live and breathe in a culture that helps shape their behavior, and the reason that behavior today locates the birth rate below replacement levels is because the culture has gradually come to emphasize the immediate pleasure of countless other stimulae, all geared towards maximizing our individual sense of happiness, unmoored from family and community. Striving to persuade young couples to alter their calculus with a message that doubles down on the same happiness-at-all-costs individualism is likely to fall flat. Only by rediscovering a vision of the good life that reckons with the suffering inherent in human experience and conceives of individuals as social animals bound by duty to one another—Edmund Burke’s “partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn”—do we stand a chance of bending the rising generation’s egotism and make them want to grace their communities and nations with new human beings.
Éric Zemmour’s Jewish Paradox
It may or may not be too late to re-up my last take on the first-round of France’s presidential election, held nearly a month ago. That’s fine, you don’t have to read the entire piece—but indulge me a few seconds. With only 7% of the vote, right-wing pundit Éric Zemmour, by far my preferred candidate, flopped beyond anything predicted. That flop is explained primarily by his failure to reach into the right-wing, working-class electorate that forms Marine Le Pen’s base of “disgruntled somewheres”, in David Goodhart’s famous dichotomy. Yet amongst the Jewish electorate, the picture is almost exactly the inverse. Although France forbids the breakdown of electoral data by ethnic background, this much is clear from glancing at the areas where Zemmour scored the highest share of the vote: whilst well-off Parisian Jews largely heeded their community’s calls to reject the extremes, their working-class coreligionists showed up for Zemmour in surprisingly high numbers. This is what I have called “Zemmour’s Jewish paradox”. From my piece over at The European Conservative:
Zemmour’s strategy of addressing the anxieties of working-class Jews stands in sharp contrast to decades of electioneering by the country’s largest Jewish institutions, which routinely call for Jews to reject the extremism of both left and right and embrace republican values by voting for centrist parties. This contrast between Zemmour and mainstream Jewish organizations such as the CRIF was heightened during this campaign by a highly publicized riff over the role of the Vichy regime in abetting the Holocaust: whereas Zemmour contends that Vichy saved French Jews by helping deport foreign ones in their stead, the CRIF and most mainstream historians have denounced this effort to rehabilitate Vichy as a form of revisionism bordering on denialism. In this light, whilst Jewish grandees such as the CRIF’s leader Francis Kalifat have tasked Jews with honoring the soul of the Republic and the memory of Alfred Dreyfus by renouncing nationalism, Zemmour has stirred them to reject the tired pieties of old and vote with their anxious minds for a candidate who will protect them.
Some more:
Whether owing to his allegedly excessive laissez-faire or the electorate’s choice to vote tactically, Zemmour may have failed to wrestle the yellow vest, left-conservative vote from Marine Le Pen. But among French Jews, this is precisely the bloc that showed up for him decisively. At a minimum, this result shows that the tired, stale voting instructions issued from on high by the community’s legacy institutions are increasingly ignored by those very Jews most threatened by the rise of anti-Semitism, or who have fled from that threat to Israel. Rather than sterile scholarly controversies over Vichy’s role in the Holocaust, these Jews are primarily concerned by the imminent threat of unchecked migration from Muslim-majority countries. In revealing this fracture, Zemmour made things marginally easier for Marine Le Pen in the runoff, provided she seizes on her opportunity. Her campaign has had a strategy to capture the working-class Jewish vote of its own, documented in a 2019 book by Judith Cohen-Solal and Jonathan Hayoun, although one ultimately undermined by her failure to condemn her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s comment in 1995 that the gas chambers were “a point of detail” of World War II history. If his daughter manages to overcome that blemish and lock in a substantial share of middle and working-class Jews come April 24th, it will have been in no small part thanks to Zemmour’s campaign.
The Meaning of Brexit
Editor’s note—this book review features in the summer 2022 issue of The Mace. It is reprinted here by kind permission, exclusively for readers of The Elementary Articles.
This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe. By Robert Tombs. Allen Lane; 224 pages; 16.99$.
Britain never meant to entangle itself in a continental march towards federalization and has seized on Brexit as an opportunity to project power, argues an erudite book by eminent historian Robert Tombs.
“The future of Europe and its peoples”, declares Robert Tombs in the preface to This Sovereign Isle (2021), “now worries me more than that of Britain”. What are the odds he’s sincere? A more cynical version of this argument—that Britain stood to gain from leaving an unworkable supranational chimera—loomed over the 2016 referendum on Brexit, which Tombs was among a handful of British academics in openly supporting. But with the drawbridge finally pulled after the EU-UK withdrawal deal of January 2020, why should a Brexiteer pity Europe’s fate, if not to thumb his nose at it? Isn’t Tombs’ self-professed worry for the continent somewhat tongue-in-cheek, at best a mental contortion to retroactively vindicate the gamble him and 17 million Brits took by voting to leave? Reading his book—a succinct and lively account of why Brexit happened—persuades one this is not the case. Tombs, who is too enamored of Europe to wish it ill—he has spent a career teaching modern French history at Cambridge—is in fact making a sincere point. His book makes ample room for the possibility that Brexit may spell trouble for the UK and that the EU may one day overcome its divisions. But the far likelier scenario is that the bloc will, by beefing up the political superstructure on top of the single market the UK thought it was joining in 1973, merely substantiate the case for Brexit.
Tombs doesn’t just posit that extricating itself from a continental project towards federalization will help right Britain’s trajectory—he believes that joining the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973 in the first place was a flawed, spur-of-the-moment decision, making each of Britain’s subsequent 47 years of membership a historical aberration. This clearly demarcates him from many even in the Tory party who supported EU membership on the condition that the EU remained a free-trading area instead of a centralized supranational entity, a hope that Tombs finds utterly naïve. He harnesses an admirably detailed level of historical analysis to plot the different rationales for European unity from the 1950s onwards on each side of the Channel, the incompatibility of which he argues made an eventual rupture inevitable. Whilst Britain was lured into the common European market by pure economics, the continent’s drive to forego elements of national sovereignty to a single pan-European superstructure was grounded in a deeper, darker experience of the 20th century, one that would eventually overpower the Brits’ concerns. The imperative to exorcise the Holocaust through progressive supranationalism, in other words, placed the utilitarian Brits in the minority whilst cutting them off from the Commonwealth, with which post-Brexit Britain is reestablishing deep ties. “For Britain”, writes Tombs, “integration had nothing to do with escaping past horrors and everything to do with a sudden fear of a declining future”.
Indeed, Tombs chalks up Britain’s decision to join the EEC squarely to what could be called post-imperial syndrome. Haunted by the fear of becoming geopolitically irrelevant upon losing its last few colonial possessions overseas—a fear famously captured by Dean Acheson’s dictum that “Britain had lost an empire but hadn’t yet found a role”—, the country’s political class and its powerful Foreign Office thought that joining Europe’s embryonic single market would ensure Britain remained, albeit indirectly, part of a leading global power. By doing so, they overturned two centuries of British strategic thinking on European matters, in which Britain “had never been tempted or forced to ally itself with the hegemonic continental powers of the day to share in the spoils of dominating Europe”. Britain, in 1973, “was the sinking ship and Europe was the lifeboat”. This pessimistic view of Britain’s own arsenal for global influence was, as would later be witnessed during the referendum campaign, markedly elitist and cosmopolitan. "The hope that the EU could provide a counterweight to the superpowers and a bulwark against global dangers”, writes Tombs, “was never wanted or believed in by most people in the UK”. Britain, a victor country in World War II that had been spared the horrors of occupation, collaboration, and genocide on its soil, was tethering itself to a political project its other members were using, at least partly, to exorcise their past. “Ascribing peace and harmony to the EU is a matter of faith, not historical analysis. The EU enjoys far less moral luster in the UK, and debate about it has been utilitarian”.
For a measure of how far-sighted Tombs’ read on the dynamics of European integration has proved to be, look no further than today’s EU. To launch France’s Presidency of the EU Council, President Macron gave a much-awaited speech in the European Parliament two weeks ago, pointing among other things to abortion as a new “fundamental right” the bloc should enshrine in EU law. This kind of announcement is nothing new in the history of European integration, as Tombs’ shrewd historical analysis makes clear. Aware that Margaret Thatcher would give a keynote speech against European federalism shortly after at the College of Europe in Bruges, then-European Commission President Jacques Delors travelled in early September 1988 to Bournemouth for a counter-address of sorts at the Trades’ Union Congress (TUC) in which he hoped to woo the Labor Party into supporting his plans for deeper economic integration by similarly promising “social rights” as its corollary. Leaps of integration of this sort, if only rhetorical, have been a routine reflex for EU leaders looking to breathe new momentum into a stalling European project. Tombs is similarly astute in locating the flaws in Europe’s security architecture. Just as it faces up to Russian aggression on its eastern front, “the EU is burdened with a dominant member state”, he writes about Germany, “that will not recognize its own power or accept the duty to others it entails”. On the contrary, post-Brexit Britain under Prime Minister Johnson has proved to be an agile and effective actor in responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, by welcoming plausibly hundreds of thousands of refugees and decreeing asset freezes aimed at UK-based Russian kleptocrats.
If Tombs’ historical acumen translates into forward-looking prescience, the EU is in for a rocky post-Brexit future, whilst Britain will be free again to tap into its own deep reservoirs of both soft and hard power. The bloc “has become a political black hole”, he writes, “sucking authority away from elected governments but being unable to wield that authority effectively”. This mix of political gridlock and institutional fecklessness has long been the EU’s standard fare, but it hasn’t sufficed to bring the entire edifice of European integration crumbling down because the European electorate’s firm belief that the alternative to the EU is always far worse has acted as a buffer. Tombs argues this is now at risk too. “Will the peoples of Europe acquiesce in an undisguised loss of national and democratic sovereignty? The assumption that they will do so indefinitely because they have no choice is a fragile basis for a great political enterprise, flying in the face of Europe’s history and its vaunted values”. Over a year since Britain officially left, the EU seems as far as ever to draw the lessons from Brexit. This makes Tombs’ worry for the fate of Europe sincere, if somewhat sneering.
The Lure of National Dependence
You may have grown tired by now of my mentioning the NatCon conference in Brussels in late March, but it truly was an outstanding event. Two weeks ago, The European Conservative published an essay adapted from my remarks on “challenges to national independence”. In it, I argue that West European nations are being coaxed into forfeiting their independence in exchange for better access to the global commons—in the case of Russia and China—or better security—in the case of the US. From the essay:
Energy is merely one facet of “national independence,” a concept not to be confused with national sovereignty, self-government, national freedom, or sovereignty. These terms can all seem easily interchangeable, but there are subtle differences in their meaning. For one thing, independence is a stronger term than sovereignty. Whereas a country can give up elements of its sovereignty—and most of our Western European nations have doubtless forfeited too much of it to the EU and other global institutions—nations often find their independence threatened from without. This is what we are seeing at work in Russia’s brutal aggression in Ukraine. It is more difficult for a country to give up its independence unilaterally, thought such a giveaway is not entirely impossible.
Some more:
Indeed, just as the EU has been sucking up ever larger swathes of national sovereignty since the 1950s, West European nations have been undermining their own independence by relying on a hostile nation for a large chunk of their energy supply. Thus Western European nations become geopolitical pawns at the mercy of Vladimir Putin’s whims. But this is not the only attack on independence. Western nations have contracted out their infrastructure projects to China, whose predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) seeks to neuter all criticism of the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) domestic abuses. They have issued debt bonds and shares in strategic companies to the Chinese state. They have outsourced vital supply chains, such as semiconductors or Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), to countries that have no interest in European nations’ self-sufficiency or recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. They have relied on the US for their security. Or, following the US’s lead, they have committed themselves to endless wars from which they can hardly extricate themselves once those wars’ objectives are met.
UnDecencyPod, your favorite Euro-realist podcast:
And here comes your monthly recap of the episodes my colleague François and I have published in the past month with Uncommon Decency. Remember that we've launched a Patreon page to allow you to support the show with as much or as little you can. We would sincerely appreciate your support!
58. Franco-Hungarian Post-Election War Room [BONUS] In numerous ways, Hungary and France couldn’t be more different from one another. Hungary is a landlocked set of hills and plains in south Central Europe, flanked to the North and East by the Carpathian mountain range, and to the West and South by the Drava river. It is a meagre remnant of its former self, having lost two thirds of its territory in the 1920 Trianon Treaty upon losing the First World War. France is a hexagon almost seven times the size, bathed by the Atlantic ocean and the Mediterranean sea. The contrast is even starker in demography than in geography. France is a rapidly aging and growingly childless society, its replacement of successive generations increasingly assured by vast waves of immigration, primarily from south and eastern Europe in the interwar period, and then from former colonies in the the Maghreb and Subsaharan Africa after World War II. Hungarian nationhood, meanwhile, has often dovetailed with descending from the Magyar tribes that first settled into the former Roman province of Pannonia nearly a millennia ago. But for all of their substantial differences, the elections held in these two countries over the past ten days have imparted similar lessons about the challenge of incumbency, the appeal of populism, the impact of international wars and the temptation to shoehorn complex events into readily-baked, cliché narratives. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán campaigned on his sound economic record and on keeping his country out of the Russo-Ukraine war. He was re-elected to serve a fourth consecutive term, his Fidesz party gaining a two thirds supermajority in Parliament. Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, seems similarly fated for re-election on April 24th after securing a larger gap between his share of the vote and Marine Le Pen’s than in the last first-round five years ago. This week, we sit down with our regular US-based co-host Julian Graham to unpack the takeaways from these two races.
59. Churchill, Brexit and Europe, with Andrew Roberts: Sir Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, claimed during the 2016 referendum on Brexit that "the last thing on earth Churchill would have been is an isolationist. "Oui”, I think he would have wanted to stay in the EU”. On the other hand, David Davis, the leading pro-Brexit politician, argued that this vision of Churchill as a remainer was in "defiance of history. Winston Churchill”, Davis went on, "saw a very good argument for some sort of a United States of Europe. But he never wanted us, Britain, to be a part of it. That's the key point.” As part of Uncommon Decency’s biographical series on giants of European history, we felt we couldn’t shy away from covering Churchill, having covered Napoleon and Henry Kissinger in episodes 22 and 55, respectively. Churchill's passionate plea for a United States of Europe has been duly acclaimed by historians, but just what place did he envision the UK taking in that post-war European order? To answer that question, we are joined by historian Andrew Roberts, who has written Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018), a best-selling biography of the former Prime Minister. In addition, Mr. Roberts hosts the Hoover Institution’s Secrets of Statecraft podcast.
60. Season Finale: Macron Forever! with Elisabeth Zerofsky & John Lichfield: In the spring of 2017, Emmanuel Macron upended France’s political system by breaking ranks with a socialist administration and running for President as the leader of a new party that bore his initials, En Marche! Five years after that victory, Macron has again triumphed against Marine Le Pen in the runoff of the presidential race. To be sure, turnout was historically low, and Le Pen climbed from 34% to 41.5% of the vote. Yet Macron is the only French president in 20 years to win a reelection bid. Furthermore, his towering standing in the French political landscape seems matchless. The two traditional governing parties—the center-right Les Républicains (LR) and the social-democratic Parti Socialiste (PS)—are both in utter shambles, whilst their fringe competitors—Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI)—are not perceived by most voters to be credible governing alternatives. With the field wide open, for now, for Macron’s lock on the Presidency, what’s next for the country? Will the near future see the beleaguered right and left rebuild themselves? Will Macron’s second term be more of the same? To discuss these questions and more, we are joined this week by New York Times Magazine contributing writer Elisabeth Zerofsky and veteran correspondent of all things French John Lichfield. This also happens to be our finale of season four, but do not worry, we will be back in September. Listen in to the end of the episode for a hint of what’s next for the podcast.
What I have been reading:
My friend and co-host François Valentin for UnHerd on France’s crisis of political apathy.
Nathan Pinkoski on Marine Le Pen’s runoff loss for Compact.
The WSJ editorial board on Europe’s abortion lesson to America.
The end
Thank you all for reading! I look forward to your replies, and see you at the next issue.