The continent keeps trying to manufacture loyalty with forms and exams. It has forgotten that its own order is a culture, not a machine.
In an essay this week, Sir Tony Blair told his own party it was “playing with fire”. The architect of New Labour now wants cheaper energy placed above net zero, and illegal immigration solved “by whatever means”, because settling it is, in his words, “pre-conditional to getting the British people to listen to bigger arguments about the future”. Whatever one thinks of the man, the so-called far Right was not far, but mostly right. As Mark Steyn remarked years ago, “If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.” The concession, though, mistakes the disease for a symptom.
The political class is beginning to admit the problem while still misreading it. Its answer to a decade of failed integration has been more paperwork. Newcomers must sign declarations of values, sit orientation courses, and pass exams on the separation of powers and the national holidays. Denmark has its citizenship test, Germany its naturalisation exam, Austria its compulsory value-and-orientation courses. The premise is that belonging can be taught in a seminar room and certified with a stamp.
The mistake is older than the migration debate. For three centuries the West has told itself a flattering story about its origins: That the Enlightenment replaced emotion with reason, superstition with science, the tribe with the rational individual. On this telling, a modern liberal order is no culture at all, merely the absence of one, a neutral machine that anyone will accept once the rules are explained.
The West did not abolish culture, however. It built a new one and forgot that it had done so. As Henry Kissinger observed, every age has its governing concept: In the medieval period religion, in the Enlightenment reason, later nationalism, and in our own time science. Reason became the sacred core of a civilisation that kept every emotional quality of the faiths it claimed to have surpassed. The error is to imagine that because our values present themselves as rational, they need no emotional attachment in order to survive.
They need a great deal of it. The Weimar Republic did not fall because its constitution was badly drafted. It fell because too few Germans loved it. Important segments of the army, the civil service and the old elites, as the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset noted, rejected the republic “not because it was ineffective, but because its symbolism and basic values negated their own.” A constitution that no one loves is a document, not a country.
Here the distinction that matters has been quietly lost: The one between culture and ethnicity. Ethnicity is given. No one chooses the place of his birth, the shape of his face or his mother tongue. Culture is the opposite, because it is chosen and held together by feeling. A man may be born Swedish and become American, more attached to the Declaration of Independence than to any crown. He may also hold a passport for a lifetime and feel nothing whatever. The genius of European nationhood in its better moments was that it rested on culture rather than blood. Englishness, in the philosopher Brian Barry’s phrase, was additive rather than absorptive: It thinned its own content until Scots, Welsh and English could share one state. None of that was the achievement of ethnicity, but of an idea of belonging that people actually felt.
When the feeling is absent, citizenship decays into something nearer a membership card. It confers benefits, demands no obligations, and holds its member only so long as the benefits exceed the dues. A British passport, in such a world, is not emotionally distinct from an Amazon Prime subscription, and a subscription commands no loyalty. The citizen, as the philosopher Steven B. Smith puts it, is animated by a powerful sense of belonging to a people; the bourgeois can be at home anywhere. It was no accident that the Islamic State recruited some thirty thousand fighters from at least eighty-five countries, on an appeal purely of identity and belonging. Where the passport offers only services, a creed that offers a home will win.
The same blindness shapes how Europe now tries to repair the damage, which is with incentives. Having lost the ability to assume shared conviction, the state falls back on treating its citizens as the economists’ Homo economicus, a creature that responds to nothing but cost and benefit. Gary Becker won a Nobel for the claim that economics offers “a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behavior,” from marriage to crime. Yet to say that people maximise whatever they choose to maximise is, as Francis Fukuyama pointed out, a tautology that explains everything and therefore nothing. It cannot say why a man bothers to vote, or why the comfortable and educated join revolutions likely to get them killed. Political loyalties are badges of social membership, not calculations of private advantage.
A civilisation that can no longer count on shared conviction has one substitute left, which is control. When trust erodes, human choice comes to seem too dangerous to permit. The signed declaration, the values examination, the expanding apparatus of surveillance: These are not displays of confidence but confessions of its loss. Trust, loyalty and solidarity are the externalities that markets and laws presuppose but cannot produce. As Kenneth Arrow warned, trust cannot easily be bought, and if you are forced to buy it you already have reason to doubt what you have bought.
A civilised culture is the achievement of centuries of difficult collaborative work and the establishment of moral rules and boundaries, which can be easily destroyed. Europe will not certify its way out of this. Social cohesion, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt reminds us, has never once in human history been produced by rational argument alone, and it will not begin to be now because a ministry has printed a new form. The continent does not suffer from a shortage of rules, nor of reasons; it suffers from a shortage of the emotional attachment that makes rules and reasons matter at all, and whether a civilisation that no longer finds its own inheritance worth loving can teach the newcomer to love it is the question its governments have so far been most careful not to ask.
Europe has forgotten how to build