Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks

Edited by Daniel Esterman

(Getty Research Institute, 243 pp., $39.95)

I.

Jim Manzi and his friends are trying to reframe the argument about Western European social democracy into something other than the one he originally made. To review: Manzi’s essay – which, again, isn’t all bad – hinges upon the premise that the United States must navigate between economic growth-destroying social democracy and social cohesion-destroying Reaganism.

Jim Manzi's conservative reform manifesto in National Affairs has attracted all sorts of praise on the right. And Manzi does have some interesting observations and decent proposals. His main premise is that there's an inherent tension between economic dynamism and social cohesion. Conservatives, he argues, must oppose the Democrats' growth-stifling social democratic agenda without going so in the other direction that they allow the the social fabric to rend.

In the popular imagination, the United States and Europe are assumed to be radically opposing poles--"Mars" and "Venus"--on issues such as market regulation, public education, social policy, health care, crime, and the environment. But is that really the case? The numbers would suggest otherwise. My book, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike, presents quantifiable data on a wide array of social conditions on each side of the Atlantic.

With no signs of cooperation from Tehran and Obama's year-end deadline approaching, the administration is pushing for new sanctions against Iran starting in January. For a better understanding of the sanctions situation, check out these recent TNR pieces:

In "Over a Barrel," David Makovsky and Ed Morse argue that the current sanctions being considered are unlikely to have much effect:  

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West

By Christopher Caldwell

(Doubleday, 422 pp., $30)

As its subtitle makes clear, this is a book about immigration, Islam, and the West. But at the same time this is also a book about a particular moral culture, a set of attitudes, habits, and beliefs that has developed in Western Europe over the past sixty years. There isn’t a good shorthand way to describe this moral culture. Sometimes it is called “political correctness,” though politics as such does not define it. Sometimes it is called “the culture of tolerance,” though at times it is not tolerant at all. Christopher Caldwell mostly winds up calling it the “European project,” which is not bad, since it implies that it is something that Europe is still building, an ongoing but incomplete enterprise, a “project” for the future.

Our negotiations with Iran are not off to a good start. After the initial meeting in Geneva on October 1--with Iran on one side and Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the United States on the other--Iranian representatives said they had agreed to send processed uranium to Russia. Then, a day later, one of the Iranian negotiators denied they had agreed to any such thing. Iran, it seems, is in no mood to make genuine concessions. But, then again, why should it be? The sad fact is that Tehran holds most of the negotiating cards right now.

Why did church attendance drop in Western Europe during the 20th century?

An agnostic/atheist-type like me might speculate that increases in income, education, and urbanization made it easier for people to think and act for themselves and break away from the authority of the church.

A pretty shocking story from the London Times:

Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it.

In an extraordinary frank meeting with Mr Gorbachev in Moscow in 1989 — never before fully reported — Mrs Thatcher said the destabilisation of Eastern Europe and the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact were also not in the West’s interests. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. Nor would it do anything to risk the security of the Soviet Union.

She describes her reasoning as follows:

The G7 was originally conceived as a form of steering committee for the world economy (antecedents). Existing formal governance mechanisms, around the IMF and the UN, seemed too cumbersome (and too inclusive) during the 1970s, with the breakdown of fixed exchange rates, assorted oil shocks, and the broader shift of economic initiative towards Western Europe and Japan.

As one would expect, coverage of Robert McNamara's death has focused on his management of the Vietnam war and his later reappraisal of its necessity, but the former secretary of defense left an equally important--and far more positive--legacy regarding U.S. nuclear policy.

I.

The first two phases of Western reaction to the opening of the Berlin Wall are now over. Unbridled euphoria about the liberation of East Germans has given way to delicately phrased ambivalence about the possible reunification of Germany. We might as well complete the cycle by devoting a few lines of unabashed nostalgia to the days when the wall stood intact. No kidding. In terms of sheer stability, the cold war has possessed an austere elegance that is unlikely to be matched by any subsequent arrangement of nations.

This article was originally printed on June 24, 1967