… or at least, its three largest economies on the Freudian couch …
Brought to me by my Gallic friend Alain, here’s light relief in truths recognised, outside the Extreme Centre, by the attentive whether of Left stripe or Right. I’m pretty sure I’d disagree profoundly with his diagnosis but, in this tweet before Xmas, a Daniel Fourbert who self-describes as a ‘French-Polish geo-economist, philosopher and European supremacist’ is wickedly incisive on the symptoms:
Europe doesn’t have “a problem”. It has three problems. Three European nations are suffering from a severe “post-imperial hangover”.
First, there is the United Kingdom, a nation that voted for Brexit – to “take back control” – only to realize it has forgotten how to drive.
The British identity crisis is like watching a retired lion try to go vegan. It traded imperial confidence for an HR department’s sensitivity training. The land of Churchill is now run by a sprawling “nanny state” bureaucracy more terrified of offending someone on X than of actual decline. Its police, once the envy of the world, now seem to spend more resources investigating “hate incidents” and painting patrol cars in rainbow colours than catching burglars. It is a nation desperately clinging to the aesthetics of tradition—the Royals, the pomp, the tea—while its institutions have been hollowed out by a progressive rot that makes a California campus look conservative. They want the swagger of the 19th century but are paralyzed by the emotional fragility of the 21st.
Then there is France, the angry, chain-smoking aunt of Europe who refuses to admit she’s been unemployed for decades. Her hangover manifests in permanent insurrection masquerading as “civic engagement.” Her identity is split between a delusional elite who still think Paris the capital of the universe and a populace that expresses “joie de vivre” by burning down bus stops every Thursday. The French have a Napoleonic complex without the Napoleon; they demand the living standards of a conquering empire while working a 35-hour week and retiring at an age when Americans are just hitting their stride. They preach “Republican values” and aggressive secularism, yet the state has lost control over vast swathes of its own suburbs. France is essentially a beautiful, open-air museum with the curators on strike, the guards afraid of the visitors, and the management lecturing the rest of the world on “grandeur” while the electricity bill goes unpaid.
Finally, we have Germany, the neurotic giant that decided the only way to atone for its history is to commit slow-motion industrial suicide.
Germany’s post-imperial hangover is a moral autoimmune disease: a country so terrified of its own shadow that it has replaced national pride with aggressive self-flagellation and recycling regulations. Their identity as “Moral Superpower” translates to shutting down perfectly functional nuclear plants to burn dirty coal, while lecturing their neighbors on carbon footprints. A nation of engineers has engineered a society that doesn’t work. The German spirit, once defined by efficiency and discipline, has mutated into a paralyzed bureaucracy where filling out the correct form is more important than the outcome. They are so desperate to avoid being “threatening” they’ve become essentially a large NGO with an army that has broomsticks for rifles, terrified that showing any backbone might be interpreted as a relapse. 1
Heigh-ho. These days we must get our entertainment wherever it can be found.
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- The depiction of Germany is far the weakest: showing the limits of any perspective, even one as witty and insightful as Daniel Fourbert’s, blind to class and empire. It misses the starkest symptom of the “slow motion industrial suicide” he rightly identifies: its having gone cold turkey – hence my addition of the Nordstream map – on the cheap Russian energy crucial to its status as Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse. And given Germany’s hawkishness on Russia, and position as the world’s fifth largest arms exporter, talk of an ‘army with broomsticks for rifles’ is a tad wide of the mark!