The EconomistNovember 7th 2020 Europe 49I
n an episode of “Blackadder”, a British historical sitcom,
Edmund Blackadder finds himself having to rewrite Samuel
Johnson’s first-ever English dictionary after his idiot manservant,
Baldrick, throws the sole copy on a fire. Time is short, and he has
been threatened with gruesome murder if he fails. In desperation,
he asks Baldrick for help. Baldrick’s definition of “dog” is certainly
original: “Not a cat”. When it comes to defining Europe, leaders
end up unintentionally channelling their inner Baldrick. Europe is
defined by what it is not, rather than what it is.
For some, Europe is—in Baldrickian terms—Not America. Un-
der Donald Trump, the gaps between America and the euhave wid-
ened, with the euseen as a rival on trade and a freeloader on de-
fence. Leaders including Emmanuel Macron, the French
president, now think in terms of a specifically European rather
than Western civilisation. Both America and the eumay be capital-
ist democracies, but Europe is greener, more equal and more hu-
mane, argued Mr Macron in a speech last year. But not everyone
agrees that America is the best example of what Europe is not.
Americophiles still lurk in the eu, particularly in eastern Europe,
where America has remained hugely popular under Mr Trump.
Typically, these Americophiles prefer a different, but still Bal-
drickian definition: Europe is Not Russia. Joining the euwas a way
for eastern European countries to assert independence from Mos-
cow. During the 1990s and 2000s, Europe was an evangelistic pro-
ject, open to anyone willing to sign up. Now it is an exclusive one.
Expansion is viewed as a burden, rather than an opportunity. The
bloc’s frontiers must be strictly defined, with those stuck between
Europe and Russia having to pick a side, sharpish. Sometimes oth-
ers decide for them. When discussing the eu’s response to Bela-
rus’s slide into despotism, Thierry Breton, the French commis-
sioner, said the quiet part out loud when he announced: “Belarus is
not Europe.”
Where there is more agreement is on the definition of Europe
as Not Africa. Europeans once expanded into Africa; now they fear
the reverse. Migration has been a neuralgic issue, but there is an
ugly consensus when it comes to Africa: tightly limited legal mi-
gration and brutal treatment for anyone who arrives illegally. “The
Scramble for Europe” by Stephen Smith, which spells out the pros-pect of mass migration from Africa into Europe, received effusive
praise from Mr Macron, for instance. Sometimes this attitude
bleeds into outright racism. During one meeting, a southern dip-
lomat summed up the eu’s debates over asylum with a startling ul-
timatum: Europe needs to decide whether it wants to be black. For
all that Europeans argued that Mr Trump was an affront to liberal
values, they are not always so different. When it comes to the bloc’s
policy towards Africa, there are similarities. The only reason
“Build the Wall” never caught on in the euis because the bloc uses
the Mediterranean as a moat—one in which nearly 20,000 people
have died since 2014.
Not being Africa has been a long-term pursuit. After all, the eu
began as a club of five failed and fading empires (plus Luxem-
bourg) working out how to survive. Defining Europe as Not China
is a more recent development. China’s entry into the World Trade
Organisation was supposed to herald an era of westernisation. In-
stead, Chinese companies snatched intellectual property from
Western rivals, while the Chinese government kept its market
largely closed even as the euopened its own. Now leaders such as
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, worry that a non-demo-
cratic power will for the first time have the lead when it comes to
technology. Other systemic rivals were more easily disregarded.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, it was dismissed as good for beat-
ing Nazis in land wars, but bad at producing the good life. To Euro-
peans, American superiority was ultimately fine, since it too was a
capitalist democracy. Decadent Europe had the option of matching
American wealth and power, but preferred a life of puny armies,
long holidays and fat welfare states. China offers no such comfort.
The prospect of a technologically superior power coping with pro-
blems such as covid-19 better via an abhorrent political system
looms in the minds of euleaders. If Europe struggles to match the
results of rival systems then why should people support it?
Perhaps faith would do it. The eu’s founding fathers may have
been devout Catholics, yet God is absent from its structures. “Per-
haps it was considered better for Europe to be Christian not in let-
ter but in spirit,” writes Olivier Roy, a French author, in “Is Europe
Christian?” “Or maybe this pillar of European identity was so obvi-
ous that there was no need to carve it in stone.” Whether Europe is
part of Christendom or a secular endeavour is an emerging fault
line in the bloc. It cuts across everything from gay rights to abor-
tion, with governments in a liberal west—and the euinstitutions
themselves—now set against their illiberal peers in the east. Rath-
er than grapple with this question, a caucus of European politi-
cians have reached an uneasy compromise whereby Europe is sim-
ply “Not Muslim”. It is an easy definition to sell. According to Pew, a
pollster, the majority of people in Italy, Poland, Greece, Slovakia,
Czech Republic, Lithuania and Hungary have an “unfavourable”
view of Muslims.Whatever People Say I’m Not, That’s What I Am
A reliance on Baldrick’s idiosyncratic method of definition stems
from Europe’s relative weakness. Where European powers once
expected others to bend to its norms—dressed up as universal val-
ues, naturally—it now worries about the process happening in re-
verse. Or, as Ivan Krastev, a writer, puts it: “Lack of power means
universalism becomes exceptionalism. You stress the differ-
ences.” eupoliticians do not want to be a colony of America or Chi-
na, while some fear Islam or an unpredictable Russia. They end up
explaining all the ways Europe does not fit with any system other
than its own. Baldrick would be proud, but the eushould not be. 7Charlemagne Baldrick’s Europe
Europe should stop defining itself as what it is not