This week, many European nations mark Armistice Day, commemorating November 11, 1918, the day the carnage of World War I ended. Almost a century later, it is clear that this date was not only the day on which bloodshed and destruction in Europe ceased - at least for the time being. This was also the day on which the great European exhaustion began.
Former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in his new book World Order, calls World War I the "war from which Europe never recovered," a "tale of abdication, even suicide."
In Kissinger's view, World War II was only a continuation of that collective suicide. The second conflict used up whatever resources had not already been depleted a generation before. "By the end of World War II, Europe's world-ordering material and psychological capacity had all but vanished. . . . It became obvious that no European country was able any longer to shape its own future by itself."
What followed was small miracle. With a little help from their American friends (essentially a Europe 2.0 across the Atlantic), the exhausted Europeans could start over again. A prosperous and peaceful continent was built that overcame even the ideological divisions of the Cold War. But never again would Europeans be the fully autonomous masters of their own fate. This state of affairs continues to this day.
How does this situation play out in the twenty-first century? The answer is discouraging. For many, the European Union is a big, ill-conceived project that takes away precious sovereignty in exchange for dubious benefits and meddlesome intrusions from abroad.
In reality, however, the EU is the last rearing up of a continent that is still exhausted but no longer harbors any suicidal tendencies. It is also the last best hope for Europeans if they want to regain some degree of autonomy over the way they run their affairs. In the greater scheme of things, Europeans today matter only because they form a fairly well-organized cluster of nations with a degree of cooperation that is unprecedented in world history.
But the great European survival project called the European Union is not immune to the illness of 1918. Exhaustion is everywhere. In many ways, the EU's current lackluster performance is a continuation of 1918-type exhaustion by other means.
In Europe today, political resources have been used up, and treaty change looks impossible. Europeans embrace economic reform only reluctantly. They do not tackle immigration and integration issues properly. They silently accept energy dependence on unreliable, even adversarial, external players. And there is no detectable willingness to build more democracy into the system.
