How sick is Europe?

摘要

It is tempting to think that there is something profoundly and newly rotten in Europe. In the past few months, violence across the continent has been perpetrated against synagogues and other Jewish buildings, raising the spectre of anti-Semitism reviving in the continent that spawned it. In a number of apparently civilised countries, such as Austria, Italy and Denmark, political parties hostile to immigrants and in some cases with fascist antecedents now participate in coalition governments or prop them up. Last month this trend seemed to sharpen when Jean-Marie Le Pen, a populist thug, won enough votes in France to knock out the main candidate of the respectable left to reach the final round of the presidential election. And last weekend brought a new shock: Pim Fortuyn, the leader of a far-right party that still has a chance of holding the ring after next week's general election in the Netherlands, was shot dead. Little wonder that many people, connecting the dots, are asking whether violence and racism might become Europe's new norm. Americans have particular reasons to despair of Europe. As Americans strive to spread their free-market gospel of prosperity and individualistic freedom around the world and to fight the scourge of global terrorism, Europeans often seem singularly unappreciative of those well-intentioned aspirations. Yet now, if this week's assassination of Mr Fortuyn is anything to go by, terrorism looks as if it is rising in Europe too. Two months ago an Italian labour-law professor who was advising his country's government was gunned down.