Time to Kill: Europe and the Politics of Leisure
Mini Teaser: Europe, now liberated from the Cold War, as a whole is far more likely to face a period of acute economic stagnation, the undermining rather than the expansion of democracy, and serious social upheaval.
Europe, now liberated from the Cold War, is seeking to reconstitute
itself, and in doing so fulfill the lofty integrationist expectations
of the early post-World War II era on a fully continental basis.
Despite minority undertones of skepticism both here and in Europe,
the prevailing expectation is that a new and better Europe is taking
shape, one that will be united, prosperous, stable, and democratic.
But such expectations mirror hopes, not reality. Europe as a whole is
far more likely to face a period of acute economic stagnation, the
undermining rather than the expansion of democracy, and serious
social upheaval.
Conventional economic analysis and a few select sociological
observations suffice to account for most of Europe's coming
trouble--of these more below. But it may be, too, that what would
otherwise be merely trouble will turn into a full-blown crisis for a
reason that has so far received little attention: that Europe is
destined to bear the initial brunt of a revolutionary change in the
human condition. Such a bold assertion naturally invites skepticism
if not outright rejection. Nonetheless, humanity may well be standing
on the edge of a fundamental reversal of the human condition: the
elevation of work into a privilege and the denigration of leisure
into the burden of idleness.
Revolutionary is indeed the only way to describe the implications of
such a reversal of the social functions and values of work and
leisure. Throughout the ages, for all but a privileged minority that
could command servants, the need to labor has been accepted as an
inescapable burden. Only that same privileged minority had the luxury
of true leisure, meaning not merely time free from work but
discretionary time and energy uncontaminated by exhaustion or
deprivation. Now we face a future in which the need for human labor
will rapidly diminish to the point where there is no longer enough
work to occupy the majority--let alone the entirety--of the human
talent and energy available. Leisure will become ever more abundant,
up to and indeed beyond the point of idleness and boredom.
Increasingly, those with meaningful work to accomplish will
constitute a privileged minority, while the majority will consist of
those burdened with idle "time to kill."
The origins of this transformation go back to the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution when, for the first time in history, machinery
began to replace heavy human and animal labor and also to provide
humanity with enormously increased mobility. The pace of that
revolution itself continuously accelerated, but since the arrival of
electronic technology it has been explosive. Smart machines, equipped
with increasingly sophisticated virtual intelligence, now more and
more perform the tasks of both production and service that human
society requires. The human home as well is far along in featuring
autonomously intelligent, comprehensively responsive technological
enhancements of human purpose--such as programmable environmental,
communications, cooking, cleaning, and security systems.
These developments are already so familiar as to require no further
elaboration to those living in the technologically most advanced
nations. Much of humanity, of course, finds itself in earlier stages
of industrial and technological development, but the more gradual
pace of the lateral extension of the industrial-technological
revolution has not retarded its headlong rush in the most highly
developed countries. Nor has the correlation between technological
advance and the growth of material prosperity broken step as this
rush has continued. Up to the present, too, the volume of work has
remained sufficient to sustain more or less acceptable levels of
employment--and hence the consumption levels required to keep a
consumer society economically robust.
In the days ahead, however--and not so far ahead--there will be an
inexorable rise in unemployment in the societies already most
technologically advanced: the United States, Europe, and Japan. Much
can be done, and is being done, to share jobs between two or even
more people, to shorten worktime, increase holidays and vacations,
and search for other means to spread out employment opportunities
more widely. But despite such expedients, unemployment will increase
as the need for work decreases.
Now there is a standard economic objection to this scenario, and it
will be just as well that it be made explicit. It may be argued that
the problem of absolute scarcity was already solved thirty or forty
years ago in much of the West. Certainly, to someone living a century
or two earlier it would have seemed so. But people tend progressively
to transform their definition of "want" into "need", and there seems
to be an infinite capacity to create new--critics would say
"artificial"--demands in a consumer society. It is not self-evident
that this process cannot continue indefinitely, or at least for a
very long time; if people are willing to spend money on some thing or
some service, there will be jobs to make whatever that thing is or
that service delivers. There may be more smart machines, but there
will also be more demands and hence more (if different) jobs created
by that demand.
What is wrong with this argument? It vastly underestimates the
revolutionary impact of information technology, which holds a future
where machines can make other machines, and where the overall
substitution of machine for human labor will progress exponentially.
Already, smart machines have polarized the labor market in the most
advanced countries. On the one hand we have the symbol manipulators
and the machine-builders and caregivers, and on the other the
McDonald's and hospital laundry workers. This itself is a truly
explosive social issue, and one that technological dynamism is likely
to make much more acute as, with the passing of time, jobs on the
lower end of the sophistication scale disappear much faster than
those on the upper end.
Europe's Handicaps
Whether one sees the growth of leisure as a truly revolutionary
phenomenon or as a serious but still manageable social problem, its
full effects are likely to be experienced first in Western Europe.
For of the three economically advanced areas of the world--North
America, Northeast Asia, and Western Europe--the last will be the
least able to respond effectively to it. The fundamental reason for
this lies in the structures of government economic policy that the
exceedingly generous welfare states of the continent have adopted.
Rising unemployment increases demand for compensatory public
expenditures, and the states of Western Europe are badly placed to
afford such additional expenditures. Their plight is due to a
combination of external and internal circumstances, both of which
restrict their ability to avoid a social crisis.
As for the internal constraints, here we come to mostly conventional
economic considerations. While West European states are not all
alike--Britain after Thatcher, for example, has reduced the role and
cost of central government more than its Continental partners--they
are similar enough for present purposes. The Federal Republic of
Germany represents the quintessential and most acute example of the
European dilemma. The recent sharp rise in German unemployment
suggests more than merely cyclical adjustments and the costs of
integrating the former German Democratic Republic to the tune of
nearly $2 billion per year; it is almost certainly structural in
nature. The current level exceeds 11 percent, one not experienced in
the Federal Republic since the 1950s. The current French unemployment
level is even higher (12.8 percent) and the Spanish much higher still
(21.8 percent). Indeed, comparable problems exist throughout the
European Union today, suggesting not random difficulties or
mismanagement, but the result of something embedded in Europe's
essential way of doing business.
The economic problems generated by generous welfare states are many,
but for Europe the implications for unemployment are the most graphic
and serious. The core of the problem is that the added costs of
assisting ever increasing numbers of unemployed require ever greater
public expenditures. Something has to give. Efforts to reduce the
costs of the welfare state and to increase tax revenues are
predictably producing heated controversy virtually everywhere in the
EU countries. Governments throughout Western Europe find themselves
politically unable to cut exceedingly generous benefits, and so they
turn instead to efforts to stimulate more economic growth in order to
pay for it all. But stimulating growth, if it is public sector
growth--and that is the easiest to bring about under current
circumstances--only puts more pressure on government budgets, which
makes such forms of stimulation too expensive even to contemplate for
many countries today. If it is private sector growth, on the other
hand, that will only advance the technological revolution that will
breed still higher rates of unemployment, which, of course, the state
has obligated itself to subsidize at still very generous levels. And
private sector growth is harder to stimulate precisely because the
burdens of the welfare state have made it prohibitively expensive to
create such jobs.
Obviously, then, such "solutions" cannot work for long. Taken
together they resemble a sort of social welfare Ponzi scheme, where
new growth is used to pay past obligations, which in turn generates
ever greater future obligations. If indeed the world is entering a
new era in which work is becoming a privilege, then it no longer
follows that increased productivity and sales will increase
employment. On the contrary, gains in both productivity and sales may
be dependent on greater reliance on technology and consequent
reductions in the use of human labor. If European governments fail to
understand this dynamic, they may manage themselves straight into
economic collapse.
Nonetheless, it is inevitable that strenuous efforts will be
undertaken to find ways to avoid confronting the problem. One such
effort will be to allow human labor to remain cheaper than technology
in performing tasks at the lower end of a polarized labor market. At
the moment, for example, it is still possible for industries
headquartered in technologically advanced states to export production
to parts of the world where labor is cheaper than at home. It is also
possible to establish immigration policies that attract cheap labor.
While both such practices are now widespread, they create many
problems. The former often involves systematic violations of human
rights: a vast amount of apparel worn in the technologically most
advanced nations, for example, is manufactured in the Third World by
child labor or prisoners. And conclusive evidence of the
extraordinarily high cost of German labor--the most expensive in the
world due in large part to the fact that every Deutsche Mark of wages
is nearly doubled by the cost of mandatory social benefits--resides
in the fact that German firms have been driven to take advantage of
lower labor costs in the United States by establishing manufacturing
plants there.
Exporting production is also significantly counterproductive in the
short run. Apart from the fact that it represents a kind of
exploitative neo-colonialism often involving human rights violations,
it aggravates unemployment at home and reduces domestic investment.
In the long run, economic growth and rising living standards are not
only likely to raise labor costs above present levels around the
world, but will result globally in continued reduction of the need
for, and economic advantage of, substantial human labor in all
manufacturing, maintenance, transportation, and clerical processes.
There is no realistic prospect that West European states can address
their problems of rising unemployment by lowering their cost of human
labor sufficiently to underprice technology-driven manufacture and
production.
As for the second practice, that of encouraging immigration to supply
cheap labor, this is doubly injurious. The immediate effect is to
displace local labor, particularly local labor in unskilled and
semi-skilled jobs. Worse, as the forces of technology grind away
lower level jobs, immigrants end up disproportionately on the
dole--as is already the case in France, Italy, and Germany. This not
only bloats government financial responsibilities, but could
introduce acute social divisions, with the potential to undermine
both civility and democracy itself across the continent.
As to the external sources of trouble, the burden on public
expenditures is further seriously increased by the pledge to
establish the single European currency. While in itself that currency
requires no vast new expenditures, its adoption greatly restricts the
borrowing capacity of member states. As a condition for entry, the
European Monetary Union demands limits on national deficits of 3
percent of GDP and on total public debt of 60 percent of GDP. West
European states are therefore left with very little discretion and
face a zero-sum game: spending in relief of unemployment must come at
the expense of other public spending, and vice versa.
The conditions for sharing in the euro currency are uniquely devised
to achieve monetary stability, but they do not stand altogether
alone. Singular as their purpose may be, they also form part of a
larger--and looser--design to standardize social and economic
conditions within the European Union, and to do so at a high and
expensive level. Bureaucracies being what they are, it comes as no
surprise that the European one in Brussels is energetically pursuing
the many little, and occasionally larger, steps toward the common
standards and measures that lend substance to the concept of common
EU citizenship. The European bureaucracy operates formally under the
authority of governmental representatives from all of the member
states, but in practice the servants of the European Union possess a
growing ability to play a virtually unsupervised regulatory role
within member states. The odds are that this ability will complicate,
inhibit, and even frustrate national governments rather than provide
them with assistance or relief as they struggle with the rapidly
expanding problem of unemployment.
In addition, for the near future there is the added burden that
Western Europe--and particularly its main economic engine,
Germany--remains committed to heading a major effort to assist the
economic and social recovery of Central and Eastern Europe. This
commitment also extends prudentially to the successor states of the
former Soviet Union, because it is feared that their instability
would adversely affect the rest of Europe. From 1990-95, the member
states of the European Union contributed over $50 billion to twelve
Central and Eastern European beneficiaries, and these contributions
have been extended to 1999.
Europe's Social Disadvantages
Economic factors alone cannot account for the fact that Western
Europe is already experiencing serious unemployment while U.S.
unemployment is currently at a record low: 4.9 percent, less than
half the rate in France and Germany. After all, America is
technologically as advanced as Europe, if not more so, and American
social welfare programs are also very expensive, even if they are
less comprehensive and expensive than their European counterparts.
The United States too, like Western Europe, devotes public funds to
overseas assistance, not only to Central and Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet states, but to developing economies all over the globe.
Beyond that, America maintains a costly military establishment that,
while reduced from Cold War levels, dwarfs its European counterparts
not only in absolute terms but proportionally. How then to explain
the differences? The crucial difference between the American and
Western European economies lies in three areas: the leisure industry;
the service industry; and the "charitable" or, better, the
not-for-profit sector. Of these, the leisure industry is the most
significant.
Human leisure creates economic demands as does any other human
appetite. One demand generated by leisure is perhaps best designated
as diversion, that is, relief from idleness or boredom. Diversion can
take many forms, among them entertainment,learning, cultural
pursuits, physical exercise, substance abuse, and sexual indulgence.
In response to such demand, leisure industries have already
mushroomed throughout the technologically most advanced economies. Is
it possible then, that employment in leisure industries can over time
replace jobs lost in production and manufacture? The still
multiplying profusion of fitness clubs, for instance, designed to
furnish healthy exercise for those whose lives no longer demand much
bodily exertion, certainly offers new employment opportunities. So
does the gathering of great numbers of people at entertainment and
sporting events, where audiences need food, drink, sanitary
facilities, transportation, and so on. Unquestionably, leisure
industries will grow along with increased leisure, and they are bound
to generate new employment. The question is how much new employment,
and of what kind.
It may well be that the most significant capacity of the new
technology will turn out to be its ability to cater profitably to
individual tastes. People who crave exercise can purchase for home
use the very machines that fitness clubs deploy for their users, or
perform aerobics under direction by video cassette rather than a live
instructor. Fast food of limitless diversity can be machine-produced
and purveyed with limited human involvement. Electronic programming
of literally infinite abundance can be summoned from cyberspace to
meet individual taste anywhere, anytime.
As things stand today, employed people tend to make the most use of
such leisure products and services; the unemployed cannot so easily
afford them. In the future, however, should a way be constituted--or,
rather, as a way is constituted, for it will have to be done in order
for society to function--to distribute wealth even to those for whom
there is no necessary and meaningful work to do in an age of smart
machines, this would not be the case. A greatly increased demand for
leisure products and services can be anticipated, but comparable
increases in employment cannot, for the same technological dynamic
will apply here as elsewhere in the smart-machine economy now coming
into being. Today an increasing number of people are employed making,
handling, shipping, retailing, and invoicing video cassettes,
computer games, and the like, but, as in other domains, much of the
low-skilled employment involved in this activity is being "exported"
to lower-wage economies, and in the future that sort of employment is
the most vulnerable to information science-based automation.
Obviously, some new jobs will continue to be generated by such
leisure products and entertainment programming, but not only will the
number of such jobs be limited, the better ones will be concentrated
in a particular locale--America. The capacity for individuation does
not eliminate the tendency of individuals to share common taste and
preference: mass enthusiasm, or rejection, is still much in evidence,
and such mass reaction is of great significance to those who use
telecommunications for financial or political gain. Mass appeal by
definition requires vulgarization. Vulgus is the Latin term for the
people, and accurately connotes the lowest common denominator. It
follows that the software (i.e., content) of telecommunications is
dominated by the United States, where from its very beginnings it has
been a commercialized, as opposed to a pro bono publico, product and
industry. The American global dominance of telecommunications
software generates significant employment in the United States, and
also inhibits the growth of this type of employment in Europe. The
commercially driven exports of American software appeal strongly to
European tastes and saturate the European mass audience to the point
of virtual monopoly. In this sense, Europe has been colonized by
America, and to an extent that even Jacques Servan-Schreiber did not
anticipate in his 1960s description of ledéfi américain.
The service industry sector in the United States is equally
characterized by aggressive commercialism. Personal services of
infinite variety are part of the American market economy. Their
European counterparts are in general less profuse and varied, more
extensively regulated, and to great extent provided by public
agencies rather than for-profit entrepreneurs. The health care sector
provides just one example. Although more regulated than in the past,
and dependent on tax-financed subsidies for the care of the elderly
and indigent, health care in the United States continues to function
as a commercial industry. The recent American fervor for cost control
has not reduced commercialism, only changed its shape. For-profit health
maintenance organizations now charge fees for their work to reduce
the direct expenses for health care providers and products. The
savings that result from lower costs for medical services themselves
therefore must be balanced against the new expenditures for the
middleman role of the cost containers. More generally, despite recent
privatization efforts in Britain and elsewhere, whole ranges of
public services, transportation, sanitation, communications, public
safety, and so on tend to be public enterprises in Europe but private
enterprises in the United States. Even the U.S. Postal Service has
been organized since 1971 to operate on a for-profit basis, and there
are many and increasing examples of business as well as residential
communities policed and sanitized by commercial contract, or of
prisons operated by private contractors.
While European practice in the service industries obviously generates
employment, that employment is funded by government budgets. These
tax-supported service activities can only sustain or increase
employment at public expense. The result is disproportionate European
vulnerability to conditions of scarce employment and excessive
leisure. To the extent that it results in greater profit and higher
employment in the commercial service industries, excess leisure in
the United States is not an economic disaster but an opportunity. In
Europe, however, the consequence of excess leisure is greater demand
for government-operated public services, increasing the need for tax
revenues, and adding to employment only at greater public cost.
The U.S. economy also contains a large "third sector" (the first
being the for-profit, and the second the publicly-financed), which
consists of the charitably supported component. To a very pronounced
extent the religious, cultural, educational, and intellectual
activities of American society are in the hands of not-for-profit
organizations. These provide a great range of community social
services at no direct cost to the consumer. (True, this
multibillion-dollar component of the American economy is partially
tax-supported: the private gifts that support it are tax-deductible
for the donor, and the organizations that deliver its services are
tax-exempt. Thus public support is derived from taxation--but from
taxation foregone rather than from tax-funded appropriations.)
The economic significance of this third sector is very considerable.
Its current annual operating expenditures, involving over a million
institutions, represent roughly 8 percent of gross domestic product,
and it utilizes over fifteen million people, composed of
approximately ten million full- and part-time employees and more than
five million volunteer equivalents of full-time employees. The
sector's share of national income is nearly 7 percent, just under
half the 15 percent share of government. (The share of national
income for for-profit business is 78 percent.) A European counterpart
of this not-for-profit sector exists, but on a much reduced scale
compared to the United States.
The Political Implications of Europe's Troubles
The purpose of these observations is not to compare the American and European economies overall, but to identify specific economic circumstances that to some degree delay and cushion both the rise and cost of unemployment in the United States, while causing Europe to be more immediately and severely exposed to them. But on both sides of the Atlantic, these are early days.
The impact of the increasing lack of work and the concomitant growthof demand for tax-supported relief on advanced societies will greatly strain the fabric of European society, and do so sooner than in the United States. No one can forecast how Europe will respond to the unprecedented challenge that it is still only beginning to face, but experience suggests that its response may pass through four phases: denial, amelioration, crisis, and resolution.
Denial is the typical initial human reaction to an unexpected confrontation with threatening circumstances that defy easy comprehension. Individuals as well as societies cling to the familiar, and deny that it may no longer apply. Policymakers are of necessity focused on the issues of today and tomorrow--on the "in" tray, as the saying goes--and thus tend naturally to reject the prospect that the day after tomorrow will present radical change. At any given time politicians in Europe's democratic states, no less than those in America, keep at least one eye trained on the next election, and incline to defer identifying new problems so long as current ones provide sufficient challenge. The press and the public refer indications of trouble to traditional experts who prescribe traditional remedies. Any analysis forecasting radical change is likely to meet not only rejection, but irritated denial.
But contemporary Western Europe is approaching a degree of discomfort that already renders denial difficult to sustain. The triple burden of rising unemployment, assisting Central and Eastern Europe, and adjusting to the harsh requirements of the euro currency is directing attention to the early warning signals of a new economic and social era. Thus the second phase of response, amelioration--the effort to improve the situation by making the necessary adjustments--already seems to be in the infant stage. The issue of whether or how best to proceed with the single currency is not universally regarded as definitively settled; even the German government now suggests that the 3 percent debt figure is not holy writ, but only a general target. There is a rising European chorus urging belt-tightening and drastic measures to reduce unemployment--witness the French effort over the past two years to rein in labor benefits. But the effort to ameliorate unavoidably produces a clash between the emerging new era of work as privilege and the deeply rooted European commitment to social justice--hence, not incidentally, the long and bitter strikes that the French government's efforts have occasioned. Unless dramatically new methods are established to distribute an abundance produced by a minority of able-bodied adults in society, that clash seems bound to produce a general and mounting crisis.
On the surface, the technologically advanced societies of Western Europe and the United States are much alike. Both exhibit the dominance of an urbanized middle class whose value system sustains an essentially free-market economy, as well as political democracy. Both prefer to operate by compromise rather than command. Below the surface, however, the legacy of centuries of class consciousness and class conflict still remains part of the European social fabric. The open frontier spirit of American society, ever optimistic and individualistic rather than disciplined, ruthlessly self-centered and mobile rather than embedded in a static communitarianism, sharply contrasts with the European mentality. The sense that options are closed and that gain by one group is made possible only by loss on the part of others, that expectations should be restrained in the face of centuries of disappointment, still prevails in European thinking.
One result of these differences is that political divisions in Europe are far more deeply rooted than in the United States. The concept of social justice, while wholly accepted in America as well as in Europe, has connotations that are widely divergent from one side of the Atlantic to the other. In the United States, it brings to mind human rights, the individual freedoms of the Bill of Rights, a pragmatic need to protect the public sensibility from intolerable affront, and a keen awareness that even the indigent have economic potential. In Europe, however, social justice has echoes of revolutionary struggle, of triumph over past oppression, and of the ever-present threat to "us"--who do the work--by "them"--who rapaciously reap the profit. The fundamental difference between the European welfare state and the American version lies in the European conviction that it is the indispensable and desirable role of the democratic state to promote and preserve social justice, while for most Americans the state is at best a necessary but dubious last resort. In theory at least, they continue to subscribe to the Jeffersonian dictum that that government is best which governs least.
Differences as to the meaning of social justice between Europe and the United States are further complicated by divergences in the role of religion. As Peter Berger has shown in these pages, church membership has declined throughout the technologically most advanced nations of Europe. But in the United States religion survives as a serious force, and in recent years a significant conservative religious Christian movement with important political implications has arisen. What is commonly called the "religious right" is explicitly committed to traditional Christian values, but it is also vigorously and explicitly hostile to "big government" and what its leaders decry as godless betrayal of the sacred--such as the right to life when abridged by legalized abortion.
The American religious right has been evoked by an opposition to the dominant secular religion of the day - that stream of American social and political liberalism that gained great strength from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. As in Europe, American liberals maintained, and still maintain, that it should be a primary obligation of government to promote social justice. Clearly it would be impossible to explain the origins of the American civil rights movement without reference to such a phenomenon. On both sides of the Atlantic, this obligation has become a canonic element in the Western civil religion - both in its diluted Christian form, and in the do-goodism into which the once proud tradition of classical liberalism has now degenerated.
The key difference between Europe and the United States in this regard is twofold: nothing comparable to the American religious right is in evidence in Europe nowadays; and the liberal orthodoxy is institutionalized far deeper in the structures of the welfare state - and even inside the churches - in Europe than it is in America. This lay orthodoxy is under attack in America; in Europe, with the partial exception of Britain, it really is not.
These differences suggest that the outcome of large-scale enforced leisure will be a new form of social conflict in Europe. One could envisage in addition to classical "proletariat" style social upheaval a kind of cultural chaos. Masses of basically sated but bored people are less likely to man barricades than to debauch society generally. The lack of self-definition and self-respect, and the consequent demoralization that is bound to afflict so many, is likely to lead to a sense of alienation and purposelessness so acute as to touch off any number of morbid cultural trends. Indeed, we already see the beginnings of such phenomena among unemployed and underemployed youth all over the continent - and here urban North America is no exception - from self-styled anarchists in Germany to skinheads and assorted "punks" in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and beyond.
The growth of such essentially antisocial forces could be as corrosive to normal life as any amount of proto-Marxist rabble-raising. Those who believe that they are denied the right to work, as well as those who fear losing the work they still have, are likely to perceive themselves as an oppressed lower class - again, some in proletariat terms that we would recognize from the past, but others in terms of an underclass characterized by an angry cultural anomie rather than a specific political ideology. The crisis of work is already a likely source of the "many factors encouraging populist politics in Europe today", as Anthony Hartley described it. "Economic despair and xenophobia bring violence in their wake. . . . All countries need totems. Their destruction by . . . a corrosive skepticism confuses peoples who require national landmarks by which to navigate." And surely national social landmarks will be destroyed wholesale when those who have work and intend to retain it behave as an upper class committed to the preservation of its privileges.
As Hartley's reference to xenophobia intimates, racism will also inevitably play a role in future crises. Here, too, the European experience may be more severe than that of the United States. That may at first seem paradoxical, because the legacy of slavery, the partial extermination and subsequent segregation of Native Americans, and continuing eruptions of racial conflict are such well known aspects of American society. However, despite all the problems involved, the United States is well on the way to becoming a multiracial nation in which Americans of European descent will - within the next century - become the largest minority rather than, as in the past, the absolute majority of the population. In the much more homogenous nations of Europe, however, where the new era of work as a privilege will arrive first in full severity, the priority certain to be claimed by the indigenous majority in every country will inevitably produce racially discriminatory treatment of foreign immigrants and residents, including demands for the expulsion of foreigners. Already anti-immigration parties - the Italian neo-fascist movement, Le Pen's National Front in France, and especially Jorg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria - are gaining ground all over Europe. At present, while the world in general and Europe in particular have yet to recognize the key challenge lying ahead, and are busy treating seemingly disconnected symptoms in lieu of recognizing their common cause, it is impossible to be certain how the Continent will ultimately react to the coming crisis. But there are reasons for believing that the responses to the challenge are more likely to be authoritarian than democratic in nature. Human beings are dependent on order and predictability in their environment. A crisis that causes prolonged and acute disorder and uncertainty therefore engenders an ever more urgent priority for the most rapid and complete possible restoration of stability and predictability. The quickest and most effective response to that priority is authoritarianism.
Beyond the human need for order is the fact that the very technology that is leading to the crisis of work and leisure augers in favor of authoritarianism. The unprecedented surveillance and tracking capabilities of the electronic communications technology are well known. In the future it may become literally impossible for a human being to escape surveillance. As for leisure as a burden, there is already evidence that among the first human responses to an abundance of leisure and unused energy is a craving for sedation. In part such sedation may be the product of entertainment. In part it may also be the product of what we have come to call substance abuse, be it alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, or Prozac. In a society where no one can hide and in which any malcontent can willingly or unwillingly submit to sedation, the temptation to totalitarian control would appear to loom large.
The second and more important reason for anticipating an authoritarian response is best termed civic. If huge numbers of adults never have to take real responsibility for making their own way in the world, if their education comes to consist entirely of tutorials in aesthetics and leisure, if their families no longer serve as production units in every traditional sense, then the very values and attitudes that undergird democracy - independence of spirit, responsibility, resourcefulness, honesty, moral integrity - will simply never develop. A majority of people devoted to their own entertainment and idle-time management would far more resemble H.G. Wells' hapless Eloi in The Time Machine than the robust practitioners of liberty and self-reliance captured in the writings of Tocqueville, Locke, Montesquieu, and Mill.
This is not, of course, to maintain that the doom of European democracy is certain. Indeed, democracy may well be a prerequisite for solving social problems of the sort and magnitude described here, in the sense that only with a broad political base willing to sacrifice and experiment with new forms of social organization will leaders be able to lead effectively. Neither can one ignore the power of historical memory and political culture. Europe's experience with authoritarianism in this century may well serve to prevent its revival in the next. Democracy is to some extent a habit, and habits, good and bad, are not easily broken. Democracy is also part of Europe's self-definition, and the exertions of new democracies to the east may even have the surprising effect of bolstering by example democracy's prospects farther west.
The only certainties are that the transformation of a key aspect of the human condition is challenging the technologically most advanced nations; that Western Europe in particular is less able to cope with this transformation than the United States; that the required restructuring of society is so radical as to engender social conflict; and that the manner in which Europe resolves this conflict, while unpredictable, will be of utmost consequence to the human future.
Essay Types: Essay