It’s too soon to say Europeans are actually from Mars once again. But the Continent’s Venusian idyll has taken blow after blow: the euro crisis, the aggressions of Vladimir Putin, and now the convergence of mass migration and Islamist terror. Nationalism is returning, border fences are going up. The center is weakening, the far right is gaining power. The Mediterranean and the Russian marches are zones of conflict again, and ancient habits — French military adventurism, Little Englander separatism, a tense relationship with Islam — are resurfacing.
The European elite still believes in the Kantian dream of perpetual peace, which is how the Continent ended up with Angela Merkel’s open-door policy for Syrian refugees. But its leaders are also adapting to post-Kantian reality, and nowhere more so than in France, where the government has basically gone Le Bush-Cheney under both Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande: intervening in Libya, Mali and Syria, responding to terrorist attacks with Bush-esque rhetoric, and implementing a terror crackdown that makes the Patriot Act look libertarian.
In certain ways America is mirroring these trends: We’re involved in Libya and Syria as well, we have our own refugee-related anxieties, and in Donald Trump we have our own version of Europe’s nationalist right. But if nationalism is making Europeans more militaristic, in America it’s inclining us to lay down the burdens of empire, to retreat into a self-sufficient Arcadia all our own.
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