Moment of Truth

A state of emergency has the virtue of revealing reality. The reality it reveals in France and the entire Europe is far from flattering. The crisis shows a lack of integration in each country and among them as a whole.

 

“Reality is the only truth.” This tautological phrase that could seem a truism was popularized in Argentina by General Peron. The phrase dates back to Aristotle and was reformulated by German philosophers. For example, Hegel argued with sibylline intention that “the real is the rational and the rational is the real”. It is likely that Peron did not consider these philosophers, only indirectly and passed through the sieve of the Realpolitik by Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor from the first German Empire and one of the cornerstones of the “hard” geopolitics that Peron undoubtedly must have taught in those courses at the War College.

If we delve deeper into philosophy, in particular the theory of knowledge, we could agree with the Romans that the central issue is the adequatio rei et intellectu; i.e. adequation of things and intellect. The Romans did not suspect what Marx as well as Freud later suspected, that the understanding more than adequating itself to the thing, frequently disguises or conceals it. Reaction, illusion, and ideology are masks with which the understanding holds back reality. In the end, reality takes revenge with a strong and surprising slap. It is the cunning of reason referred to by Hegel, the invisible hand regarding which Adam Smith—not always kindly—talked about, the structural crisis mentioned by Marx and the perverse effects studied by contemporary sociologists.

The terrorist attacks in Paris were a strong and surprising slap by one reality that Western world has been concealing for a long time. Perhaps, the novelty of the situation resides in the fact that this time the revelation was negative: to say it using Hegelian language, it was the negation of the negation. What do I mean? To clarify it, I will quote a well known children’s fable.

Once upon a time, there was an Emperor who was so worried about his garments that he ordered a new suit from two crooks who promised to make one with such a special cloth that it could only be seen by those who were not fools or unworthy of their position. They just accumulated the gold and rich materials that they were receiving while they pretended to be weaving. When the Emperor’s advisors went to see the tailors they became afraid to be taken for fools so they returned praising the garment. The same happened with everyone who visited the tailors, and with the own Emperor, who, when the suit was ready did not hesitate to take out his clothes. He went to the parade dressed with his invisible clothes, which were also praised by the entire town. Until a boy yelled amid laughter “The Emperor is naked” and everybody, including the Emperor, realized the deceit, and realized how ridiculous they had made themselves look.

As it is a children’s story, we can watch the cartoon on this site:

The Paris attacks, and the reaction they provoked, made clear that Europe as a super-state does not exist. It has no central government, rather a parliament and a bureaucracy that are slow and dysfunctional. It has a Central Bank that can print money in a concealed manner and among banks but it is not entitled to share the debt burden among members or equally distribute the financial risk. It has open frontiers inwards and porous frontiers outwards. Its armed forces have a negligible firepower compared with the United States that are still NATO’s main warrantors. It lacks a common, strong, and consensual foreign policy. In sum, Europe functions as the invisible suit of the Emperor.

Ultimately, the reality of a State is based on its ability to exercise sovereignty. As Carl Schmitt sustained sovereign is he who is able to defend a political community in a state of emergency. Faced with the emergency, Europe did not know how and could not act. Instead, the French State did have to exercise its old sovereignty: closing borders, placing troops in the streets, declaring the state of siege and suspending individual guarantees. For a long time there has not been in France such a widespread display of three-color flags, nor listening so many times to the Marseillaise (of course avoiding the more bloodthirsty verses of the national anthem). And that scenario in a country I recall, in my older age, as having no fear and no frontiers in 1968. Being surprised naked, the European States rapidly dress themselves with whatever drapery they have on hand. My suspicion is that such clothes are a disguise. I will explain how and why.

European countries, together with the United States, exchange tactical information on Iraq and Syria to display some media achievements with a bombardment here and there. But the Paris attacks showed that they are not prepared to face terrorism in their own homes. They had abandoned national sovereignty in exchange for the illusion of a nonexistent supranational sovereignty. Everybody is talking about the Daesh cells that penetrated in Europe together with the wave of Syrian refugees, and Europe did nothing with that. Daesh terrorists designed the attack in Siria; they organized it in Belgium, and executed it in Paris. Even more, Europe never did anything to counteract the conversion of their own fellow nationals to international terrorism. Further down I will explain how this process of non-integration was allowed in Europe.

The city of Brussels is emblematic of the European unreality. We have seen it in headlines and on TV answering in a theatrical form its realization that the city has been the main black market for weapons in Europe and a center for terrorist activities. After the attacks, France has been under a form of simulated martial law. It represents the staging of a compensatory response. For its part, Brussels is a city divided in three ethnic and linguistic antagonist communities. Police forces from each sector do not share data or coordinate their actions. It is at the same time Belgium’s capital and the official seat for the European Union. I will say it bluntly: the beautiful Brussels is the divided capital of a non-existent country and the seat of government of a non-existent Union.

Europe never consolidated, as the United States did after several years of vacillation (known as the Articles of Confederation) by sanctioning a national Constitution and establishing a federal state.

The current military deployment is not a war against terrorism; rather it is a theatrical façade. There have already been several strategic warnings that global Jihad sees France as a preferred objective: the Toulouse attacks in 2012, the shootings at Hiper Casher and at Charlie Hebdo in 2015. It seems that all that was not enough to change the way France and Europe face terrorism. Recent events—the explosion of a Russian plane at the Sinai Peninsula and the double suicidal attack in Beirut—neither woke up the intelligence agencies of those countries to participate in the fight against Daesh in Syria and Iraq. All these events should have produced a radical change in prevention measures in France: multimillion investments in intelligence infrastructure, including constant vigilance of immigrant communities, increasing border controls, and the establishment of a joint European unit to gather intelligence information about the global Jihad that has declared total war against the “Crusaders.”

However, the sole prevention, though necessary, is never enough. The French, as well as the rest of the Europeans, abided by the freedom of movement law and open borders, with the illusion of a European State to which none of them sincerely subscribed. Today, faced with Greece’s reluctance to submit its borders to a trans-European force, the Union threatens that beleaguered country with its expulsion from the Schengen Treaty. This is how the disintegration of the European project begins. The regression to national sovereignties, after thirty years of illusion, is a sad spectacle of “every man for himself.”

In part, it is true that France turned itself into an easy walk for every type of immigrant, both legal and illegal. However, the immigration alarm, fed by the hard right, disguises its, categorical failure to integrate its own youth that are migrant in origin but already French citizens “on paper.” Now French politicians have decreed a national emergency with special laws that include administrative detentions, night raids, and the restriction of movements to swaths of the population. The exact same measures that Israel is taking with the Palestinians, and that received great condemnations by France.

Now I will write as a sociologist. Which France is the one that today is so hurt and elicits my sympathy (it is one of the countries I love the most)?

France’s serious problems are not new nor do they originate just from abroad. They are nationally manufactured and come from thirty years of State policies (in France the State is more active and present than in Anglo-Saxon countries) that with good or bad intentions have fractured the society in two. To put it in the right French frame, the trente glorieuses (the glorious thirty years) were followed by the trente honteuses (the shameful thirty).

France is a corporatist welfare State that has functioned well for an integrated and prosperous majority—the age group that was born between the 40s and 60s and is aging together with the institutions in which they seek refuge. This majority, that in general supports the intervention of the State, has social benefits –health, education, and transportation and energy subsidies with family allowances, unionization, and pensions— that would be inconceivable in the United States. That is the field of the famous French “solidarity.” But it has done so at the expense of the marginalization and exclusion of the following social sectors: youth, women, legal or illegal immigrants, from the first to the third generation. These groups face huge barriers and State policies that impede their integration. They have no voice, no vote, and no access to the dignity of a full citizen. They are a minority, but a large one that instead of diminishing increases its numbers and that instead of improving worsens. Within this almost 40% of the population, there is a hard core of young immigrants from former colonies, most of them Muslim, with permanent unemployment and disposed to extreme adventures.

A society that distributes social benefits upwards, where 60% is comfortable and 40% feels bad, is a sick society, despite the defensive support of its “model” as superior to the Anglo-Saxon “wild” capitalism or its victimization by a supposedly perfidious globalization. Indeed, if France should move from its social model to the Anglo-Saxon one, it would jump from the frying pan into the fire. But it would forget that in Nordic countries or in Canada the chosen model is superior to those two.

France has declared war as did Don Quixote to the windmills. Terrorism cannot be defeated with 1,500 soldiers wondering through Paris. This “war,” different from the previous ones, asymmetric, global, and prolonged (I guess it will last another 30 years) requires two things: a hard and sincere geopolitical realism in the short run and a socio-economic re-equilibrium strategy in each society in the medium and long term. In the end, this “war” is won with another development model, one with productive integration, fairer and more egalitarian than the current one, with an honest awareness, and with the duty of facing the structural crisis of the badly globalized world.