a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

We are off tomorrow to fly to Holland, where I am going to give the 2010 Hannah Arendt Lecture at Radboud University in Nijmegen [click here], and then on to England, where I will give the 2010 Freud Lecture at University College London [click here]. Not often do I get to wear my Politics hat and my Psychoanalysis hat on the same trip—on the same head. Christine teases me and says that a big left brain exercise routine followed by a big right brain one will make me at last a balanced individual so we can then relax and go to the British Museum.

Over the last week, preparing ourselves, we have been talking about immigration, especially because Holland, our first stop, is such a complex example of the immigration phenomenon that is so deeply testing the European social democracies now. We visited Amsterdam in 2009 for a Nexus Institute conference, and had the chance then to observe firsthand that remarkable city’s struggle to remain a model of progressivism. We had dinner at the residence of the city’s mayor, Job Cohen, who went on last spring to campaign for his social democratic Labor Party at the national level, running with a Turkish woman named Nebahat Albayrak as his No.2.  Winning the Prime Minister spot would have been a hugely important achievement for Job Cohen –a cosmopolitan Jew with a leftwing community organizing background–and for all who hoped that he would represent them. The social democrats wanted him to put his finger in the dike holding back the surging popularity of Geert Wilders and his far right, anti-immigrant –chiefly anti-Muslim—Freedom Party. But Cohen did not win the Prime Minister position, and Wilders’ party advanced. The unsteady center-right coalition that now rules Holland is expected to collapse quickly, and then who knows what will follow.

I got just that far with this post before we took off for Holland, arrived the next morning at Nijmegen, and were so busy for two solid days that there was not a moment to write further. And then, after a splendid overnite in Utrecht, we settled in for five days in London, after spending a night in Cambridge with young friends from Berlin who had thrown a party for all their international, multicultural friends there. Both hemispheres of my brain became so overcrowded with “European” experiences and impressions, conversations and encounters, delight and apprehension, that I could hardly think at all. Now, finally, we are back in Canada and I will be writing now in retrospect.

Last Wednesday morning, I woke up with a dream that featured a young Australian political science PhD candidate named Michael, whom I had met at the Cambridge party. He was telling me –as he actually had at the party—about how disgusted he is with the center-right coalition now ruling in Australia: “so mean-spirited, so provincial and without knowledge of the world, so like your Tea Party types –they have no sense for the real needs of the people they lead, they just serve the mining interests who are destroying Australia and its economy.”  Michael made that statement, and in my dream I responded with: “A spectre is haunting Europe…”

Recalling the opening of Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto to this smart, sensitive young man, who hopes to return home from his student years in Europe to work as a policy advisor to “some old style Aussie social democrat, if one is still to be found by then,” was my dreamwork way of presenting the feeling that haunted me through this whole ten day trip: the next few years are critical.  Europe is at a turning point, just as we are in America.

There is only one conceptually accurate word for the spectre that is haunting Europe now: fascism. And versions of this European fascism are haunting parts of the world –Michael’s Australia, my USA—that do not have much of a fascist legacy from the 1920s and 1930s. In my dream the phrase “a spectre is haunting Europe” came out of my mouth and then flew upward to become a huge newspaper headline on a banner over our heads. We were ready to parade with it.

This, I think, represented my wish that the social democrats of Europe would unite, as they have nothing to lose but their brilliant social democratic achievements.  They must figure out how to respond to the kind of thing that Geert Wilders and his like throw at them. Wilders tells the Dutch that all their precious state-sponsored cultural programs and children’s educational programs are “left wing hobbies.” He speaks with contempt. The Dutch majority, so proud of their national culture and at the same time so cosmopolitan, so intensely concerned that their children grow up in an equalitarian society, multicultural, multilingual, so sensible in their approach to healthcare and universal social services, hear this charge –“left wing hobbies”—and are just stunned. Paralyzed. They cannot imagine how this kind of crass, regressive stupidity appeals to so many of their countrypeople, who are by no means stupid.

The majority cannot understand why Wilders and his followers reject the mainstream Dutch desire to find the best ways to help the new Muslim immigrants from Africa, from the Middle East, from the former Dutch colonies of southeast Asia, get settled, get educated, get what they need to thrive and contribute their cultures to the multilayered Dutch culture. The people we met in Nijmegen look at the young Muslim women in their headscarves riding bicycles to the university –like everyone else, young and old—and they think: integration is working! Let them wear headscarves, let them bicycle! There are more bicycles in Holland by far than cars, and more ecological consciousness than anywhere except Scandinavia, so the majority of Dutch think: we are working together to save ourselves from the catastrophe that threatens us all.  Becoming, over centuries, the European people most able to manage water and land, canals and fields, wind turbines, once wooden, now metal, they figure they can manage equality and social services for everyone while they engineer for the future. As long as you have shared convictions and beliefs to guide you, the problems are logistical. Yes, many of the young Muslim men, dislocated, not yet educated or well employed –there is, after all, a ferocious recession going on!—are aggressive toward women and toward  the Dutch gays, but the problem is logistical, cultural-logistical. Hopefully.

My hosts in Nijmegen asked me how I thought they should answer Wilders’ charge: ”left wing hobbies.”  This question, I said, opens onto the very large and complicated one of the nature of the new fascism. Facism is morphing. In the wake of the 1970s and 1980s recessions, so connected to international oil production and growing globalization, the far right parties everywhere seemed familiar, remakes of the 1920s and 1930s: the members tended to be paramilitary or at least obsessed with military symbols and insignia; they wanted to defend themselves with violence against the infiltrators they suspected were everywhere, undermining their society, sucking away at their economies, diminishing their potency. The Neo-Nazis and skinheads, looked like they came out of the horrible post-World War I years when the avant-garde, adventurous, experimental roaring twenties modernist young met up with the marginalized, war-damaged, unemployed young who did not even belong to the working class and also with the petty bourgeois little people and small farmers who felt their way of life was gone forever –all rootless or deracinated people fearing the world held nothing for them to hang onto. The Neo-Nazis and skinheads looked like understandable products of social pathology—like America’s KKK and John Birch Society rightists. But the new rightists who taunt the social democrats with indulging their “left wing hobbies” are not these paramilitarists. They are not brownshirts. They are bluecollarists and whitecollarists.

What is truly surprising and shocking about the new far-right leaders is that they appeal to centrists and right-centerists, who are not uneducated and marginalized or deracinated. No, the far rightists appeal to capitalists large and small who have in common that they have subscribed to a conservative ideology, the one that is known in America, where it originated, as neo-conservativism (sometimes neo-liberalism) or sometimes “the Washington Consensus.” In Great Britain, where it took root during Margaret Thatcher’s reign, this ideology helped transform the leftist Labour Party into the center New Labour Party under Tony Blair and appealed to all other parties and groups at the center and center right. Mainstream political groupings and parties have moved now so far rightward that the far right is not that far away from them. With a little strategic compromising, coalitions can form amongst them. And the centrists feel they may benefit from the raw energy and ruthlessness –the lack of political respectfulness and conventional play-by-the-rules attitudes—typical of the Geert Wilders in this brave new world of obsessional hatreds.

The ideological strand that unites the far-right paramilitarists, the far-right anti-immigrant
parties, and the center-right conservatives is simple. It can be delivered in a strong sound-bite. “Limited government.” Everyone can claim that it is “big government” or social democracy with all its hobbies that has made society vulnerable. At the moment, the major vulnerability is said to be “deficit spending,” or going into debt for the hobbies that sustain equality and inclusiveness. So the major remedy is “austerity” –the word that David Cameron and his centrist coalition in Great Britain use obsessively to describe the radical cuts they are now making in social programs, particularly ones that hold out the possibility of equality and inclusiveness to the young.  That is, they are hacking away at the caps that have been put on school and university fees.

The counter-soundbite has to be: “government that helps each helps all; government that helps all helps each.” Strictly in terms of economic theory, it is obvious that governments need to go now in the direction of a modified Keynesianism, adapted to each national context,  that takes unemployment as the central problem of the moment. In the current emergency, employment is the key mode of inclusion and stemming  the tide of inequality that is sweeping the world. Deficit spending must create jobs. But, in a larger frame, to combat the forces of regression that are growing everywhere, the forces of a fascism that would sound reasonable and mainstream, we have to parade under a banner of  “We are all in this together.”

While we were sitting in Heathrow waiting to board our plane home to Toronto, Christine was reading in the London newspaper The Guardian about the Cameron government’s “austerity” plan for increasing university tuitions. She kept shaking her head and reminding me: “You know that I never paid one penny for my entire medical school education in New Zealand, not a penny for the whole six years. My government put the foundation under my adulthood, paved the way for my contributions to the health and mental health of my countrypeople, and then of the British when I immigrated, then of Canadians when I immigrated again. No one should pay for an education! People must learn that they will be taken care of by the people they take care of  –this is the principle, so simple, that these people who talk about “left wing hobbies” must be taught, as they are too frightened to find it for themselves.”

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