The New Old World

The New Old World
By Perry Anderson
(Verso $39.95)

This collection of essays from one of Europe’s most formidable Marxist intellectuals takes the razor to many attitudes, but most of all to liberal ones. At the centre of Perry Anderson’s concern is Europe itself – inspired, he says, by the great contemporary historian of European integration, Alan Milward, and in particular by Milward’s central insight: that the construction of the European Union was always based on domestic calculations and in effect bolstered or even “rescued” the nation state. The federalist hopes and rhetoric with which the EU is still encumbered are for Anderson, following Milward, “a pack of pieties”.

In this spirit, Anderson parts company with those on the left who, shorn of a viable movement of their own, have thrown themselves behind the cause of European integration. He approaches the EU with the deepest scepticism, and finds much to justify the use of his blade. Most forceful, in my view, is his sustained comparison between the democratic and “open government” pretensions of the union and the secret or semi-secret deliberations of the European Commission and, above all, the Council of Ministers and its hugely powerful vassal body, the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper). He believes the EU’s institutions are unambiguously and increasingly elitist, and that this sparks both an exit from engagement and popular hostility.

He writes: “The contempt for elementary principles of democracy shown by the elites of the Council and the Commission and their subordinates, not to speak of an army of obedient publicists in the media, is reciprocated by the disdain of the masses for the parliament that supposedly represents them, who ignore it in ever-increasing numbers.”

The other major essays – on France, Germany, Italy and Turkey, with an astringent historical review of modern Cyprus – are suffused with a disappointed contempt. The disappointment comes not from the actions of politicians (generally deplorable, in his view, but always predictable) but from the decay of the intelligentsia, especially in France, which he once saw as the cultural and intellectual centre not just of Europe but of the world. Telling here is his view that, Milward apart, nearly all of the interesting work on EU integration has come from Americans – Andrew Moravcsik, Craig Parsons, John Gillingham, Neil Fligstein, Giandomenico Majone (Italian, but trained and teaching in the US) and, most recently, Christopher Caldwell, the FT columnist and author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

For Anderson, the state of the intelligentsia is at least as important as the world of the politicians. The descent he sees from Jean-Paul Sartre to Bernard-Henri Lévy is a QED: the one a serious and vastly influential thinker, the other a “crass booby”, a “grotesque”. That Sartre – a man who, in George Walden’s phrase, grew into rather than out of support for totalitarianism – lauded the mass murderer Mao, while Lévy has vigorously opposed Mao’s contemporary heirs, does not merit a comment.

The main reason for reading these essays is Anderson’s refusal to bow to any pieties, especially leftist ones. To the current widespread belief that from Silvio Berlusconi to fascism is but a hop and a step, he retorts: “Italy is closely enmeshed in the European Union, its economy, military and diplomacy all subject to multinational controls that leave little leeway for independent policy of any kind ... there is neither need, nor chance, of Berlusconi becoming an updated version of Mussolini.”

Yet for all Anderson’s unblinking gaze, present throughout these essays, like ghostly victims at a victors’ banquet, are hints that something else might have been possible. That something else is not defined here: indeed, in the essay (not in this collection) that Anderson wrote to relaunch the New Left Review in 2002, he negated the possibility of any substantial defiance to the capitalism whose cruelties and exclusions he documents, writing that “for the first time since the Reformation, there are no longer any significant oppositions – that is, systematic rival outlooks – within the thought-world of the west; and scarcely any on a world scale either”.

Still, the ghostly shapes that haunt Anderson’s work demand a more substantial form. Those former Marxists who have thrown their energies behind centre-leftism can claim reformist gains. His long-time collaborator, Tom Nairn, who threw his energies behind Scots nationalism, can see a (wholly pro-capitalist) Nationalist party in formal power in Edinburgh. What kind of economic and social arrangements does Anderson want? Or is it enough to continue to slice and expose? A question he may, or may not, answer.

The writer is an FT columnist