Thoughts on the Post WWII World

“Russia has never regarded itself, nor been regarded, as European, and the Balkans have been the bare fringe of Europe. ‘Europe’ has comprised the lands which spoke Latin or German and their derivatives; which had parliamentary government, capitalistic business, and mechanized industries, and which continued the common culture inherited from Rome…” – 1935 Public domain image of speaker and university lecturer, Chester Rowell

CHESTER ROWELL'S COMMENT

IS Europe slipping? European thinkers at least say so. Kayserling ponderously predicted the downfall of Occidental civilization. Andre Siegfried says that Europe, henceforward, will no longer be the center of the world, in culture, wealth or power. And Emil Ludwig– exiled from a Germany, whose ruler is too stupid to realize how German was the service he rendered to Germany, in making the great Germans of the past live again– is telling us that Europe is about to destroy itself, unless America assumes the leadership of a new League of Peace, in place of the League which he thinks has failed,

BY “Europe” these critics mean – as do most Americans – Western Europe. Russia has never regarded itself, nor been regarded, as European, and the Balkans have been the bare fringe of Europe. “Europe” has comprised the lands which spoke Latin or German and their derivatives; which had parliamentary government, capitalistic business, and mechanized industries, and which continued the common culture inherited from Rome.

AMERICA, until now, has been an outpost of that Europe – and may, if these prophets are correct, become its successor. But Europe was the center. It colonized the other continents, and continued its cultural leadership of the two Americas and its imperialistic domination of all the rest. North America was European in race – except the little that was African – and was all European in language and civilization.

Civilization also, so far as it was “Occidental,” became European. Even Japan was “modern” to the exact extent to which it was consciously European. All these lands were ruled by parliaments, elected by the people; they all had systems of laws based on either the Pandects of Justinian or the common law of England; they all had factories and mercantile corporations and farms which sold their crops for money; they all, except Japan, professed Christianity (and rarely practiced it), wore the same clothes, spoke a Germanic or Romance language (or English, which is both), ate much the same food, with knives and forks, from dishes, at a table, and had nearly the same manners and customs.

NOW, say the Cassandras of all this is ending. Europe is ceasing even to be European. When Hegel classified history by the generalization that in the ancient Orient one man was free, in Greece and Rome some men were free, while in modern Europe, all men were free, he thereby relegated to the Oriental category what all Europe beyond the Rhine has since become. The Europe of free thought and research, and of the objective evaluation of history; of respect for the intellect and discipline of the passions; of the tolerance of opposition and of conflicting opinions; of the development and application of science for the uses of man; of the magnification of art and literature as the revelation of man; of economic, political and cultural individualism, and of the glorification of the free personality as the supreme end of the State – that Europe is gone, except on its Western fringe, and is precarious there.

INDUSTRIALLY and politically, too, Europe is no longer the center. It no longer feeds the markets of the world, and has broken itself into hostile fragments which refuse to trade even with each other. The British Empire has ceased to be an empire; the black, the brown and the yellow men no longer recognize the innate right of the white man to rule and exploit them; the center even of learning is migrating to America, and America, not Europe, is now the capital-furnishing creditor of the world. If Occidental civilization maintains its supremacy at all, it will be because it finds a new center in America. So, at least, say the Europeans.

FINALLY, they say, Europe is about to destroy itself by war. When that happened before, it ushered in five hundred years of fanaticism and disorder, and another five hundred of a brighter but still mediaeval feudalism, before the modern world emerged. If it happens now, they predict, that it may mean, instead, the substitution of Bolshevik tyranny and compulsory proletarianism for the freedom of thought, of life and of opportunity which it had taken Europe two and a half thousands years to develop. If that happens in Europe, they say, how long can America survive as an isolated heir to the institutions of Greece and Rome, of the rough freedom of the German forests and of the beginnings of representative government in the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemod, of the revival of the Rennaissance, and of the vast industrialism of modern times? Or shall we go down, too, in the common collapse?

SO speak the voices of gloom. But so they ever spoke, when civi- lization did not fall, but merely moved. So spoke Greece, when its culture moved to Rome; so Italy and Spain when France became the center, and so France when leadership passed to Britain. So, finally, spoke France and Britain, with the voice of cannon, when Germany menaced their supremacy, and enlisted the whole world in their cause. If now, the center of wealth and power first, and of culture a generation or two later, shall pass to America, it will be only what has always happened. If that is all, the West will merely have moved westward, to the dismay, but not to the ruin, of the East it left behind. If America thus survives the threatened disaster of Europe, that will be progress. If, instead, it shares the common ruin – our civilization will have gone the way of Nineveh, and of Tyre.– From The Oakland Tribune, 1935

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