Welcome back. Before we start, some news for readers.
This is my last Europe Express weekend newsletter for the Financial Times. I am retiring. My successor will be Ben Hall, and you will find him at ben.hall@ft.com.
I have spent 28 years at the FT, but my career in journalism began 16 years earlier, as a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency in 1981. Looking at Europe today, I see some unsettling similarities with the state of affairs back then, but also some big differences that serve as a reminder not to overdraw historical comparisons.
Tensions past and present
The late 1970s and early 1980s were marked by severe tensions in east-west relations. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Two years later, Poland’s communist authorities suppressed the independent trade union Solidarity under martial law.
In 1983, a Nato military exercise codenamed Able Archer 83 alarmed the ever suspicious Soviet leadership. Other than the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, this was the cold war’s most dangerous moment in terms of the risk that nuclear weapons might be used.
In complete contrast to 1962, however, the general public in western countries (and, it goes without saying, in the ultra-secretive Soviet Union) knew nothing at the time about the Able Archer incident.
Today’s tensions in Europe are related chiefly to the Ukraine war and to the behaviour of Washington and Moscow. One dramatic difference between the early 1980s and now is the rift in the transatlantic alliance, highlighted this week by the hostility towards Europe voiced by high-level US officials in leaked national security discussions in Washington.
Another difference is the Trump administration’s attempted rapprochement with Russia. This is ruthless great-power politics. Unlike the Reagan administration’s co-operation with Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, it isn’t based on the hope or perception that relaxed international tensions might go hand in hand with liberalisation in Moscow.
Worse still, the US interest in taking an economic stake in Ukraine, while conniving at the country’s partial annexation by Russia, summons — to some people in central and eastern Europe — the spectre of the partitions of Poland in the 18th century by three bigger powers.
Limits to historical analogies
It’s tempting to make such analogies, but there are limits to their usefulness.
Martin Conway, chair of the history faculty at the University of Oxford, put it very well last month:
“There can be few tutors at Oxford who have not on occasions resorted in tutorial discussion to comparisons between, say, Henry VIII and Churchill, or indeed the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the events of 1989.
“Such exercises are, on the whole, exercises in thinking rather than suggestions of a real connection between different individuals and eras; and more sustained discussion of these comparisons tends to move rapidly towards emphasising the many differences between contexts and circumstances …
“Whatever else we might think about Donald Trump, the Alternative für Deutschland and the Putin regime, they clearly have a novelty which negates any simple equivalence between historical precedents and the disconcerting present.”
The EU, imperial Spain and Berlusconi
I agree with every word Conway says. But sometimes in my FT career I have succumbed to the temptation of drawing historical comparisons which, I now confess, do not really survive close inspection.
When I was based in Brussels, I once compared the EU to the 16th-century Spanish empire: multinational, often slow-moving and administered by a European Commission whose departments, known as directorates-general, struck me as curiously similar to the bureaucratic policy councils of imperial Spain’s government.
On the other hand, when I was the FT’s correspondent in Rome, I resisted pressure to compare Silvio Berlusconi, the then Italian premier, to Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator.
I thought political and economic conditions in Mussolini’s time were so vastly different from those of modern Italy, a prosperous democracy integrated into the west, that such a comparison made little sense.
Still, Berlusconi did bear a certain resemblance to Achille Lauro, a flamboyant Italian businessman and politician who rose to prominence in the 1950s.
In Italy Reborn, his recently published history of Italy in the post-second world war years, Mark Gilbert writes of Lauro:
“[He had] a taste for high-living, football and beautiful mistresses. [He] was a proto-Silvio Berlusconi, an entrepreneur who was able to strike a rapport with a population that was losing faith in politics and wanted quick solutions.”
Nigel Farage and Vichy
Another comparison I’ve never made, and not only because I have only occasionally written about domestic British politics, is that which some people have drawn between the political slogans of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party and Philippe Pétain’s Vichy regime in 1940s France.
The Pétainist slogan was “travail, famille, patrie” — work, family, fatherland (see my colleague John Thornhill’s review of Julian Jackson’s superb book on Pétain’s postwar trial).
Reform UK’s slogan is “family, community, country” — so two of the three words are basically the same.
But let others ponder the significance, if any, of that. I take the view that Vichy was Vichy and today’s British rightwing populism operates in a radically different context.
Trump and Nero
One last example. Earlier this month, Claude Malhuret, a French senator, compared Trump to Nero, the 1st-century Roman emperor:
“Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a buffoon on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.”
French politicians are free to say what they want, of course. But Malhuret’s analogy seems to me a bit of a stretch.
Still, because we’re talking about comparisons to Roman emperors, let me mention a personal favourite: the late French president François Mitterrand’s unforgettable description of Margaret Thatcher as possessing “the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”.
I think that was possibly half a compliment, but with Mitterrand you could never be sure.
The French and British past
Just because we should be careful with historical analogies, that doesn’t mean we should neglect the study of history itself.
On the contrary, now that the war in Ukraine and the actions of the US seem to be forcing Europe to stand more on its own feet, a knowledge of the past can be most helpful in understanding the thinking and behaviour of individual countries.
Luuk van Middelaar, head of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, wrote an illuminating article on this three weeks ago. He observed:
“France . . . rediscovers, during such historical moments, the bedrock of its centuries-old history and its role as a European impetus — as embodied by successive kings, generals and presidents.
“The UK too has a national image to draw on, and reserves of historical action that predate the Atlantic alliance and membership of the EU.”
The German question
Matters stand differently with Germany, van Middelaar said. He wrote:
“The Federal Republic is a product of Europe’s postwar security order; its life and identity are bound up with the US role as its protector …
“This may explain why the Germans were so distraught during the first month of Trump 2.0, more than any other European nation . . . Germany is losing its historical footing.”
But van Middelaar sees a chance that Germany, under its chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz, may rise to the occasion if he carries out his ambitious plans for spending on defence and infrastructure.
So, too, do some of Merz’s colleagues, such as Markus Söder, the Bavarian state premier:
“Germany has decided not to be defenceless any more, Germany wants to be there again, Germany wants more.”
Well, we shall see.
I hope you have read the Europe Express weekend newsletter with as much pleasure as I have had in writing it.
Goodbye, everyone.
Are the west’s golden years over? — an essay by Florence Gaub for The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies.
Tony’s picks of the week
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, is capitalising on an unusually permissive international climate to crack down on his domestic opponents, Gönül Tol of the Washington-based Middle East Institute writes for the FT.
An unusual new tier of Russian bureaucracy is taking shape, made up of people close to President Vladimir Putin and tasked with keeping an eye on the officials formally in charge, Andrey Pertsev writes for Carnegie Politika.
