Revisiting the London Times' Editorial "The New Europe"

Remarking the anniversary of the signing of the Versailles Treaty in the weeks after Dunkirk and the fall of France and on the eve of what we today remember as the Battle of Britain The Times on July 1, 1940 published an editorial, "The New Europe," that has since been much cited as reflective of how, even with such an Establishment organ as that, in that moment the old order appeared bankrupt, its continuation impossible even if it were desirable, and the world that had to be fought for in the war and built in its aftermath something more just, something more humane. The piece argued the necessity of European federation after the war in some form, and solid new linkages between such a federation and the New World that was likely to play a key part in it, while more radically still arguing for more profound change in the domestic and international and world order than that. As the editorial declared, "[t]he new order cannot be based on the preservation of privilege . . . be that of a country, of a class, or an individual," with "democracy," "freedom," "equality," "economic reconstruction" no longer usefully definable "in purely nineteenth-century terms." The author very specifically held that they could no longer mean just "the right to vote" but "political equality nullified by economic and social" inequality in a context of "rugged individualism" where those who had power were complacent about or indifferent to the problem of distribution, but also "the right to work and the right to live," which could only be assured by a more thoroughgoing eqalitarianism that would extend to "social organization" and even "economic planning."

Of course, if it meant something that such an Establishment organ did publish these words in July 1940, it is undeniable that the authors of the editorial did not speak for the Establishment per se, such that even at the height of the effort to build "a new Europe" the responsible elite fell far short of the standard discussed in the editorial. Indeed, from the start much of that elite unwaveringly fought not to build a new world but to save the old one, and indeed went over from the defensive to the counterattack no later than the 1970s to undo whatever concessions had been made to that vision, the neoliberal-neoconservative vision standing very much for privilege, and for a nineteenth century vision of democracy, freedom, equality, economic reconstruction; for political equality with social and economic inequality taken in stride, for rugged individualism, for sneering at talk of the right to work and live and concern for distribution, and certainly such means as "social organization" and "planning" for realizing it, as it treated the "planning" of which it refused to speak as the exclusive and sacred right of a financial sector with its eyes on its own short-term profits first, last and always. (Capping it all off, what was often mistaken for or cynically passed off as a "left" turned the word "privilege" around, using it not to challenge society's hierarchies but to bash the working people opposing the changes that upended their livelihoods, living standards, communities.)

Considering our present discontents as the world slipped into what only as a courtesy has been called "the Great Recession" and never came out of it, European union and the hopes supposedly held for it foundered, and fascism resurges the world over, it does not seem wholly unreasonable to think that elites' insistence that the fundamentals of human civilization had attained perfection in the nineteenth century has not been irrelevant to bringing us back to the crisis conditions of the early twentieth. Indeed, it seems rather predictable that just as the collapse of the Victorian order faced the world with a particular crisis, the collapse of the neo-Victorian order about us confronts us with a crisis of much the same complexion.