“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Orwell’s satire on Stalin’s unscrupulousness is conventionally taken to be his reckoning with the Soviet dictator’s willingness to collude with Hitler on the eve of the Second World War. But the fact that Orwell wrote the fable in early 1944, the latter part of the war when “Uncle Joe” was the West’s ally - and the attempts by British censors to suppress the book - suggest that its target was more Capitalist-Communist connivance in general than the Nazi-Soviet Pact in particular.
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc’s Communist regimes between 1989 and 1991 has Orwell’s satire lost its sting?
In many ways the recent convergence of Western former Cold Warriors with East European ex-Communists adds extra spice to Orwell’s vision of the underlying empathy between political classes regardless of their ostensible ideological differences. The latter turn out to be temporary divisions, easily overcome when the political and economic elites on both sides of the divide decide to do business together - at the expense of the masses east and west alike.
Nothing has recently given renewed currency to Orwell’s insights into the cynicism of bourgeois and Bolshevik politicians more than the unholy alliance between right-wing Republicans in the U.S. Administration and born-again ex-Communists in what Donald Rumsfeld called the “New Europe” of the former Warsaw Pact against lifelong democrats in the “Old Europe,” whose real faults are overlooked in preference for condemnation of their unwillingness to toe the Pentagon line without deviation or query.
What is this “New Europe”? Who constitutes it? Where did they come from and where are they headed? What does the existence of a Washington-backed “New Europe” mean for the “Old Europe”, the existing EU, mainly made up of America’s long-term allies in NATO before 1989?
A wake-up call to re-think illusions about the EU’s future
Donald Rumsfeld’s comments dismissing France and Germany as “Old Europe” and insisting that the “centre of gravity is shifting to the east,” should be a wake-up call to both proponents of EU expansion and genuine Euro-sceptics. Until now both Euro-enthusiasts and Euro-sceptics have supported including the ex-Communist states of Eastern Europe as a way of bolstering their mutually contradictory visions of the union.
The standard Brussels line has been that an ever more united Europe would necessarily be a counter-weight to the United States, albeit within the framework of the North Atlantic alliance. But the US-funded web magazine, Transitions on-line emphasized in its “Our Take” editorial “Choosing Sides” on 10th February that “Central European leaders [are], among the most committed backers of Washington and a united Europe” This latter point should ring alarm bells with Britain’s Euro-sceptics who fall in behind every American initiative without question, but have failed to notice Washington’s support for a united Europe.
Closer scrutiny of US policy towards EU expansion and the parallel growth of NATO suggests that neither Euro-sceptics hoping to slow European integration, nor supporters of an EU superstate as a balance to the trans-Atlantic superpower are getting their way. Washington is winning the battle for influence in the New Europe, not least because it started laying the foundations of influence long ago.
The strategic importance of the whole of Europe, old and new, was underlined by Michael Gonzalez of the Wall Street Journal (Europe) who wrote in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review in August/September, 2001, before 9-11 let alone the Rumsfeld rumpus: “…the United States from its very beginning as an independent nation has been based on universal values… The [British] europhobes who would leave the EU to join NAFTA have, then, tragically misunderstood America as an idea. But, much worse, they have not grasped the exigencies of its status as a world power… Europe - all of it [emphasis added] is the center of gravity of America’s global power projection. America can prepare to deal with potential hot-spots throughout the world only as long as its international political base, the Atlantic Alliance holds.” If anything the post-9-11 strategy of the Pentagon has been to embed its power further in Europe if not necessarily in the same bases as before.
To many people the Franco-German split with America and her allies over how to deal with Iraq has come as a great shock. But the division is not just Old v New Europe, but rather between democratic Europeans and ex-Communists, east and west. With a few exceptions, George W. Bush’s most vociferous allies belonged to their Communist parties when he was partying at Yale.
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