LONDON: Contemplating the European Crisis (I think a capital C is called for) I find myself driven even to reading Toynbee. Not Polly Toynbee of the Guardian, whose work I always follow with the greatest pleasure, but her long-dead and largely forgotten ancestor, Arnold Toynbee, the philosophical historian of the rise and fall of civilisations.

For one plausible long-term interpretation of the chaotic reaction in Europe since the French non of May 29 is that these are the symptoms of a civilization in decline, if not in decadence. How ludicrous that the prime minister of Luxembourg should insist, like some east European communist leader of old, that black is white and everything can therefore continue just as before. The government will dissolve the people, and elect another. How absurd that, confronted with the greatest popular challenge to the European project since its inception, France and Britain can think of nothing better than to face up for a vicious cross-channel squabble over their respective contributions to an EU budget that costs the average British taxpayer less than £3 a week. Like the Bourbons, our leaders have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

If I were Chinese I’d be laughing all the way to the bank. After the European centuries, from about 1500 to 1945, and the American century, from 1945 until some time in the first half of this one, the Asian century dawns on the horizon. As Tom Friedman of the New York Times acidly observes, while Europe is trying to achieve the 35-hour week, India is inventing the 35-hour day. Whatever our “knowledge-based” advantage, no economy can compete successfully on such terms. Things must change, if they are to remain the same.

Toynbee was led to ask why civilizations decline and fall through his experience of what has been called the European civil war from 1914 to 1945. His own grand, schematic answers have been largely discounted by professional historians, but the question remains a good one. As with all terribles simplificateurs, some of his ideas are, at least, suggestive.

For example, among the characteristic features of disintegrating civilizations he finds the conjoined twins of archaism and futurism. Some people wallow in the memory of a golden age that never was while others glorify an imagined future. Does that sound familiar? Then there is what he calls the idolisation of an ephemeral institution. For some Europeans today that idolised ephemeral is the nation state, for others the EU. And there is his basic and perhaps rather obvious point that the decline of civilisations proceeds in a serious of routs and rallies. Coming close to self-parody, Toynbee suggests that the normal rhythm seems to be rout-rally-rout-rally-rout-rally-rout: three-and-a-half beats.

In the first half of the 20th century Europe inflicted upon itself the mother of all routs. In the second half of that century it produced a formidable rally. While the EU cannot (and generally does not want to) match the US in military power, it does in combined gross domestic product and social attractiveness. It is the world’s largest single agglomeration of the rich and free. Moreover, it has just got much larger. This is an extraordinary success that, at the time of Toynbee’s death, in the year of the first British referendum on our membership in “Europe”, almost nobody foresaw.

The next year, in 1976, Raymond Aron wrote a book called Plaidoyer pour l’Europe Décadente, translated into English as In Defence of Decadent Europe. His great concern was that western Europe was losing its self-confidence, its will to win, what Machiavelli called virtù — “the capacity for collective action and historical vitality”. The challenge he feared was not the far east, which, apart from Japan, hardly appeared as a competitor in those days, but the very near east: the Soviet-dominated, communist-ruled half of Europe. (Interestingly, given the negative significance attached to the word “liberal” in the recent French referendum debate, his alternative title was In Defence of Liberal Europe.)

His fears in respect of the communist east turned out to be unjustified, although a pessimist might say that, in a process of “competitive decadence”, the east simply collapsed first. As a result, and due to the magnetic attraction and active policies of the European Union, eight post-communist democracies joined the EU on May 1 last year. Never before have so many European states been liberal democracies, joined in one and the same economic, political and security community. Yet the European Crisis has arrived just a year after this triumph, and partly caused by it. For, among many other things, the French and Dutch votes were also noes to the consequences of enlargement and to the prospect of further enlargements.

Thirty years ago Aron worried about a kind of hedonistic self-indulgence characteristic of decadent societies. At the risk of sounding like a cross between Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford, the thought does occasionally occur when flicking through British and European TV channels, from Celebrity Love Island, through Big Brother, to the endless onanistic German chatshows. Aron also worried about Europe’s low birth rates, which in the meantime have become still lower. “The civilization of self-centred enjoyment,” he dared to write, “condemns itself to death when it loses interest in the future.”

Of course, looked at from another viewpoint, liberal in a different sense, the very low birth rates in countries such as Spain, Italy and Germany are an expression of increased liberty: namely a woman’s right to choose. But it’s common sense that welfare states then need someone else to support so many pensioners. That someone is to hand: a young, vigorous, growing population just across the Mediterranean, eager to come and work here. But Europe is proving very bad at making Muslim immigrants feel at home. The Dutch nee vote was in significant part a vote against Muslim immigration, and the French non was in part against Turkey joining the EU.

It may not have escaped your attention that this analysis of European decadence bears a startling resemblance to that of American neoconservatives and anti-Europeans, against whose crude caricatures I have so often fought. To this I would say two things. First, American neocons would be idiots to gloat. Europe and America are two parts of one larger civilisation. If the old Europe on this side of the Atlantic goes down, it may help the new Europe on the other side of the Atlantic in short-term power relations, but it will be enormously damaging to US interests in the longer term.

Second, it’s up to us to prove them wrong. Nothing I have darkly hinted at here is inevitable. Jeremiads are meant to be self-denying prophecies. The European project has many times moved forward precisely through and out of crisis. My formula, from Romain Rolland via Antonio Gramsci, is “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. At a time when most columns in British and European newspapers are engaged in the familiar, admonitory rhetoric of “we should do this, we must do that”, it can help to stand back and, with the pessimism of the intellect, calmly contemplate the abyss. But then, after a period of reflection, we should act. Give yourself a treat: prove a neo-con wrong.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service