Europe Has Moved Away from the Freedom It Partly Invented

Someday someone will write a great book tracing the places where, over several millennia, the light of freedom—political, cultural, economic, and religious—was turned on and those places where the light went out.

Such a book might begin with the Urukagina reforms in Lagash, in present-day Iraq, in 2400 BC and then ancient Peru, where the Caral civilization apparently renounced war in favor of peaceful trade 4,500 years ago. It would tell us of freedom under the Han dynasty in China 2,000 years ago, the ancient Greeks and Romans, medieval Islam, the world’s first parliament in Iceland, England’s Magna Carta, and German, French, Dutch, and Italian capitalism, which would later lead to the Industria l Revolution and then to the miracle called the United States.

If things continue as they are now going, the part of the book on freedom’s decline may have to tell us when and how Europe lost faith in the freedom to which it had contributed so much.

Notre-Dame Cathedral’s reopening in Paris has given rise to a celebration of Europe, Christian civilization, and the West in many parts of the world. The problem is that Europe has been declining for quite some time—politically due to a lack of leadership and vision; economically and socially due to the failure of its socialist model; culturally due to a loss of faith in the values that made it the cradle of freedom and capitalism; and morally due the resurgence of extremists.

A few years ago, if you asked who ran Europe, the answer would have been Germany. If you asked on whose shoulders the European Union rested, the answer would have been Germany and France, with Great Britain playing an eccentric but significant role because of its history, economic weight, and relationship with the United States. Italy and Spain would have been awarded an honorable second place. Today, there is no clear answer.

Germany, which is undergoing a lasting crisis, and France, whose mode l has been exhausted and where leftist and right-nationalist collectivism is dominant, do not project leadership and authority, but rather an erratic, confused image. Scandinavian Europe does not have sufficient weight to lead, while Central/Eastern European countries have had an air of superiority in recent years because of the failures in Western Europe. Their illiberal political models have seemed legitimized by economic performances superior to their neighbors’ because their governments have intervened less in their economies. (Poland, where a more liberal government is now in charge, is trying to overturn its authoritarian legacy.)

Overall, Europe, which represents 17 percent of the world’s economy, has been stagnant for years. Seventy percent of the per-capita GDP gap between Europe and the United States can be explained by the former’s very low productivity. Between 2010 and 2023, cumulative GDP growth rate was 34percent in the USA and just 21 percent in Europe. Over the same period labor productivity in the Eurozone rose by just 5 percent. If productivity isn’t rising, how do you grow the economy? By increasing the workforce. But the birth rate has collapsed, and the backlash against immigration makes it difficult to fill th e void that way. This decline is largely the fault of Europe’s socialist model, where the state spends far more than it should, harms private enterprise with its maddening regulations and constant political interference, and suffocates society with taxes and every political fashion. (In Germany decisions dictated by an environmentalist ideology have created an energy disaster and severely affected industry.)

European states have perpetual fiscal deficits and colossal debts. In France and Belgium government spending represents the largest share of GDP, which is insane. Economic decline is not the only cause of social tension and frustration in Europe nor of the degradation of political life. Other factors are linked to the upheavals of modern life and globalization, to immigration, and to human stupidity, which, in confused times like these, emerges in various forms. Wokism and nationalism are two of the most obvious ones.

Ultimately, the problem is that Europe has moved away from the freedom it partly invented.