Unheard of. Europeans used to marvel humbly over our astonishing American highway system and the fact that our phones work (or used to). That particular load of manure is now history. The Europeans are happening now, and they know it. 1989 was a pivotal year for them, maybe the most momentous popular upheaval since 1789.
This century has not been a good one for Europe. Since 1914, the European body-politic has been wheezing along on one lung, a mass of fresh scar tissue when it wasn't hemorrhaging blood and bile. But this century, "The American Century," as we used to call it in 1920 when there was a lot of it still before us, is almost gone now. A lot can happen in a century. Dynasties rise and fall. Philosophies flourish and crumble. Cities rise, thrive, and are sacked by Mongols and turned to dust and ghosts.
But in Europe today, the caravanserais are open. National borders in Europe, which provoked the brutal slaughter of entire generations in '14 and '44, have faded to mere tissues, vaporous films, riddled through-and-through with sturdy money-lined conduits of trade, tourism, telecommunications. Soon the twelve nations of the European Community will have one passport, perhaps one currency. They look to the future today with an optimism they have not had since "the lamps went out all over Europe" in World War One. (Except perhaps for one country, which still remains mired in the Cold War and a stubborn official provincialism: Britain. The Dutch feel sorry for Britain: declining, dirty, brutalized, violent and full of homeless--far too much, in short, like their too-close friends, the Americans.)
My Italian acquaintance introduces me to her mother, who is a passionate devotee of Shirley MacLaine. Mom wears an Iranian gold bracelet the size of rappers' jewelry, a diamond-studded knuckleduster. Her husband, the Iranian emigre', is an architect. His family was close to the Shah, and is now a scattered Moslem hejira in a dozen Western capitals, plotting vengeance in desultory fashion, like so many White Russians in 1929. They may have a long wait. Father looks rather tired.
Off the plane, jet-lagged to hell and gone, in Amsterdam. A volunteer for the Image and Sound Festival drives me to The Hague in a very small car on a very large autobahn. Windmills here and there. Days later I inspect a windmill closely, a multistory preindustrial power-station of sailwork, levers, gears and thatch. An incarnation of a late-medieval tech that America simply never possessed. A somehow monstrous presence fit to scare the hauberk off Don Quixote.
The Hague is a nineteenth-century government town of close-packed four-story townhouses. The pavements, built on sand, ripple and warp like the sagging crust of an old pie. Advertisements in the bus-stops brutally abolish any air of the antique, though: "Mag ik u iets persoonlijks faxen? De Personal Fax van Canon. CANON--Meeten al een Voorsprong!" Dutch is close enough to English to nag at the ear, but it's landmined with liquid vowels and odd gutturals. The streets--"straats"--are awash with aging Euro baby- boomers, leavened with a Dutch-born populace of imperial emigres -- Dutch-Indonesian, Dutch-Surinamese, Dutch-Chinese.
On Wednesday, Moluccan separatists bombarded the Indonesian embassy, near my hotel, with Molotov cocktails. A dozen zealots were injured. Nobody outside Holland and Indonesia know much about the Moluccans, an Asian Moslem ethnic group with a nationalistic grievance. They'd love to raise hell at home in Indonesia, but when they do they're shot out of hand by fascist police with teeth like Dobermans, so they raise a stink in the old Mother Country instead, despite the fact that Holland can do almost nothing for them. Europe is full of exiles--and full of its own micro-nations: the Flemish, the Magyars, Gypsies, Corsicans and Bretons, Irish who remember Cromwell, Jews who remember Nebuchadnezzar, Basques who remember Hannibal, all like yesterday.
Ibn Battuta's world was similarly polyglot, and divided into "nations," too, run by mamelukes and moghuls who doted on tossing dissidents to packs of ravenous man-eating dogs. Muhammed Tughlug, the radiant Sultan of Delhi, punished rebels (very loosely defined) by having them cut in half, skinned alive, and/or tossed aloft by trained elephants with swords strapped to their tusks. It was bad news to cross these worthies, and yet their borders meant little, and ethnicity even less. A believer was a citizen anywhere in Islam, his loyalties devoted to Civilization--the sacred law of the Prophet--and then to his native city. Ibn Battuta was not a "Moroccan" countryman or a "Berber" ethnic, but first a learned Islamic scholar, and second a man of Tangier.
It may soon be much the same in Europe--a vague attachment to "Western democratic ideals," while one's sense of patriotism is devoted, not to one's so-called country, but to Barcelona or Amsterdam, Marseille or Berlin. (Cities, mind you, with populations every bit as large as entire nations of the medieval world.) At this period in history, the aging institution of the nation-state is being torn from above and below--below by ethnic separatists, above by the insistent demands of multinational commerce and the global environment.
Is there a solution for the micronations-- besides, that is, the dark horrific example of the "Final Solution?" Maybe. Let the Lithuanians "go"-- give them "freedom"--but with no local currency, no local army, no border tariffs or traffic control, no control over emigration, and with the phones and faxes open 24 hours a day. What is left? City-level government, in a loose ecumenicum.
A good trick, if anyone could pull it off. It's contrary to our recent political traditions, so it seems far-fetched and dangerous. But it's been done before. Six hundred years ago, in another world ... The fourteenth century, what Barbara Tuchman called _A Distant Mirror_.
In Alanya, a city of medieval Anatolia, Ibn Battuta had his first introduction to the interesting organization known as the fityan. He was invited to dinner by a remarkably shabby man in an odd felt hat. Ibn Battuta accepted politely, but doubted that the young fellow had enough money to manage a proper feast.
His interpreter laughed, for the shabby young man was a powerful sheik of the fityan. "The fityans were corporations of unmarried young men representing generally the artisan classes of Anatolian towns ... The code of conduct and initiation ceremonies were founded on a set of standards and values that went by the name of futuwwa ... referring in concept to the Muslim ideal of the `youth' (fata) as the exemplary expression of the qualities of nobility, honesty, loyalty and courage. The brothers of the fityan were expected to lead lives approaching these ideal qualities, including demonstrations of generous hospitality to visiting strangers ... By the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, the fityan associations existed in probably every Anatolian town of any size. In an era of political upheaval and fragmentation ... the fityan were filling a crucial civic function of helping to maintain urban cohesiveness ..."
Far from humble poverty, Ibn Battuta found his medieval youth-culture hosts occupying a fine downtown lodge crammed with pricey Byzantine rugs and Iraqi glassware. The lads were dressed to the nines in long cloaks, boots, knife-decked cummerbunds and snazzy white bonnets with pointed white peaks two feet high. "They brought in a great banquet, with fruits and sweetmeats, after which they began their singing and dancing." He was "greatly astonished at their generosity and innate nobility."