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What is going wrong in Europe? While conditions vary greatly from country to country, one thing is clear: ideology is not the issue, nor is it the answer. Social democratic governments are under pressure in Britain, The Netherlands and West Germany; rightists and centrists are being besieged in France, Italy and Belgium. One common link for these crises is the lingering economic malaise. Continuing unemployment and inflation have restricted the ability of nearly all governments in the European Community to expand the costly social services that their citizens came to expect during more than a decade of boom. Unfortunately, notes Hamburg Economist Günther Grosser, "all these social promises are based on a full-employment economy."
But how can Europe achieve noninflationary economic growth? There are virtually no unexplored markets left within the Community itself and no promises of vast new markets elsewhere. Moreover, one essential for expanding an economy—investment by entrepreneurs—has been discouraged by high progressive tax rates, environmental obstacles, anti-business sentiment among bureaucrats and intellectuals, and labor regulations designed to appease powerful unions.
Economic worries are undoubtedly heightened by what former U.S. Diplomat Martin Hillenbrand terms "the waning of creative political forces." Hillenbrand, now director of the Paris-based Atlantic Institute, explains that "while there is always a tendency to romanticize the past, today's leadership is simply not of the same stature" as that of such postwar giants as De Gaulle and Adenauer. Fairly or unfairly, today's leaders are blamed for being unable to do anything about crucial problems like the oil crisis, thereby contributing to a widespread mood of helplessness and frustration. Says Viscount Etienne Davignon, the Community's Commissioner for Industrial Affairs: "There is a strong sense of fatalism. People feel they can't change things." Neither can minority or coalition governments that seem to lack a broad popular mandate. Leopold Labedz, editor of Survey (a London-based journal specializing in East-West affairs), sees this immobility contributing to "the weakening of the fabric of political structures throughout Western Europe, a diminution of authority that affects all the institutions—family and church, as well as state."
Impressive Gains. No responsible analyst suggests that there are any immediate internal threats to democratic institutions in Europe. The only legitimate worries focus on how Italy's far left and right might react if that country collapsed into political chaos, and how committed the French Communists are to the democratic values they so recently embraced. A case can even be made that the rule of law and liberty has scored impressive gains on the Continent in recent years: witness the overthrow of the military junta in Greece, Portugal's survival of a radical leftist threat, the relatively smooth transition from Francoism in Spain. Many in Western Europe hope for bold new strategies and bold new leaders. None seem on the horizon. About the best that can be expected right now is slow and limited economic improvement, and a painful muddling through.