The Two Europes: How Jacques Chirac got that way -- and why others (blessedly) are different.

The question was European farm policy, the setting a European Union summit. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, was lamenting the hollowness of the EU's professed commitment to free trade. How, Blair wondered, could the EU justify its lavish subsidies to European farmers?

This was too much for Jacques Chirac. The French president apparently regarded Blair's criticism of Europe's Common Agricultural Policy as a personal insult. (French farmers are among the program's prime beneficiaries.) "You've been very rude to me," Chirac was quoted as telling Blair afterward. "No one has ever spoken to me like this." He was also reported to have accused Blair of being "badly brought up."

You know the "concert of Europe" is seriously out of tune when the president of the French Republic talks to the head of Her Majesty's Government this way. Yet the incident, memorable though it was, was only the prelude to a more spectacular and more protracted dispute -- the squabbling, name- calling, and backstabbing that took place in Europe in the months preceding the Iraq war. That cacophonous melodrama revealed the emergent idea of "Euroland" to be a sentimental myth -- so much intellectual cotton-candy, altogether inadequate to the task of bridging Europe's ancient divisions.

Bouffes though they might have been, these examples of comic theater revealed that there really are two Europes. It's time to abandon the fiction of European unity and admit that Secretary Rumsfeld was right. Europe is divided. And it's time to recognize that the United States has an interest in preserving this division: America will benefit from the continued existence of a severed Continent.

If Britain and other "Anglosphere" nations like the United States and Australia seek to advance free markets and individual liberty, France lies at the heart of another European tradition: It grew up near the center of the old Roman imperium, and in its infancy it absorbed the centralizing, state-glorifying ethos of the Romans. The Greek colonies in southern Gaul, in what is now France, sought protection from the Roman Republic in the 2nd century B.C.; by the 1st century A.D. much of Gaul was Romanized. Southern Germany was hardly less so: The Empire's northern boundary extended to the Rhine and the Danube. The land on which Augsburg, Munich, Salzburg, and Vienna sit was once thoroughly Roman, and the Latin language was for many centuries predominant there. Britain, by contrast, was a remote dependency of Rome, the last of the Empire's European conquests, the first to fall away when the Empire began to buckle.

With the civilizing virtues of Rome's imperium came many vices. Nations like France, Italy, and Spain grew up in what was once the cradle of the Roman world, and they have long cherished collectivist Roman patterns of organization. The Mediterranean ideal of corporate solidarity and communal purpose had, in an earlier era, exalted city-states like Athens to the pinnacle of human excellence; but when the Romans undertook to implement, on a much grander scale, a similarly rigorous program of public power, the result was to stifle liberty. The Romans knew what they were doing: They used the old civic bridles to tame their recalcitrant provinces. First, the Romans broke down the will power of provincial elites. The imperial magistrates artfully seduced their subject peoples with the blandishments of state-subsidized luxury. Passing their days in a voluptuous regimen of baths and lethargy, the subjugated peoples lost their independent spirit, and they shuddered at the wild aboriginal liberty of their cousins who remained outside the Roman imperium. In no place was the disdain for the uncouth barbarians more pronounced than in Gallia Togata (Romanized Gaul), where the toga-wearing elite sneered at Gallia Comata -- the Gaul of the Longhairs, those mountain yokels who had not adopted Roman manners.

The architects of Rome's Empire not only promoted, in their subject peoples, the languid arts of indolence, they also removed whatever incentives to laborious industry remained by monopolizing trade. Roman magistrates brought to the provinces a highly centralized administration and a strict regulation of commerce, as well as trade restraints that discouraged manufactures, slowed the development of an independent mercantile class, and encouraged an early form of crony-capitalism. High taxes enabled the Romans to support a lavish public-arts program; the work of constructing temples and amphitheaters not only magnified the glory of the state, it also absorbed the energies of the artisan classes, those citizens whose useful activity always poses a threat to badly governed states.

The Roman belief that public power does a better job of coordinating human effort than private liberty profoundly affected the subsequent development of Romano-Europe. Good Romans like Caesar and Crassus prepared the way for Good Europeans like Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and Jacques Chirac. In creating French absolutism Louis XIV followed a Roman model. He broke down the provincial elites with techniques that would have been familiar to the Romans: At Versailles the nobles passed their days in a splendid servitude. The Sun King's building projects both kept the artisan classes occupied and promoted the monarch's own cult of personality. The regime's neo-Roman style gave a classical finish to the absolutist government, and the genius of Racine, Poussin, and Le Vau was recruited to glorify the pretensions of state. Under Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, commerce was more rigorously regulated than at any time since the fall of the Roman Empire. According to one historian, no "directed effort to develop a nation's industrial life" on the scale of Colbert's would be seen again until the "inauguration of the five-year plan by the Soviet government in Russia."

Every time "an attempt is made to do away with absolutism," Tocqueville said, "the most that could be done has been to graft the head of Liberty onto a servile body." During the French Revolution, the revolutionaries followed the Roman rules even more scrupulously than the absolutists. The French Republic, Tocqueville observed, exercised "powers wider, stricter, and more absolute than those which any French king had ever wielded. . . . Never since the fall of the Roman Empire had the world seen a government so highly centralized." Patriotic solidarity in the Roman tradition, not individual liberty in the Anglo-American one, was the ideal the revolutionaries cherished. "It is a remarkable fact," Tocqueville wrote, "that of all the ideas and aspirations which led up to the Revolution, the concept and desire of personal liberty, in the full sense of the term, were the last to emerge, as they were the first to pass away." The revolutionaries adopted the Roman belief that freedom lies in the citizen's opportunity to serve the state; they repudiated the Anglo-American idea that liberty lies in the citizen's freedom of action in a private sphere.

The trend toward centralization continued even after the examples of Louis XIV and Bonaparte became obsolete. In the 19th century, French and German thinkers worked out a new program of communal solidarity. The French led the way: Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Enfantin were among the earliest advocates of socialism. But the movement's momentum soon passed to Germans like Lassalle, Marx, and Engels, who worked out a more theoretically elaborate ideal of coercive communitarianism. In Germany the socialists found fertile pasturage for their neo-Roman orthodoxy, for although the German lands beyond the Rhine and the Danube had never been Roman provinces, Frederick the Great, a notorious Francophile, had in the 18th century turned Prussia into an absolutist state modeled on the Sun King's France. Otto von Bismarck began his own epochal career as a defender of Frederican absolutism. In time, however, Bismarck saw that by combining socialism with another revolutionary movement, nationalism, he could create a more popular and durable form of authoritarian government. A decade after he united the German nation, the Iron Chancellor laid the foundation for the quasi-socialist Wohlfahrtsstaat.

Adolf Hitler continued the program of National Socialism. Hitler was by birth and inclination a Romano-European. He always thought of Linz, just south of the Danube, as his hometown; according to Percy Ernst Schramm, who served as historian to the Wehrmacht command during World War II, the Nazi leader "was completely rooted within the cultural boundaries of the old Roman Empire. He clung to the civilization of the Mediterranean and took no part in his followers' grotesque glorification of the Teutons." Hitler was convinced, the historian John Lukacs wrote, that "modern populist nationalism can -- indeed must -- be socialistic." The "Fuhrer" was full of workers'-utopia schemes for Autobahns and Peoples' Cars (hence the Volks- Wagen); he intended to make Berlin and Linz into Roman-style showcases for his regime. (Albert Speer was deputed to design the ponderous neoclassical temples.)

The spirit of the Romans and the Sun King, Frederick and Bismarck survives in Romano-Europe. The German economy sags under the weight of the nation's bloated welfare state. The French Fifth Republic is a neo-Roman state with an imperial presidency, a highly centralized system of interlocking bureaucracies, and a vast and economically ruinous social-welfare establishment. So much bread, so many circuses, so many arts programs. The French leadership is trained exclusively in a few state-run schools that promote the secular cult of "La Republique." (The Roman principle again: Give the elite togas, and they will do the state's bidding.) Those inducted into the upper echelons of the bureaucracy are guaranteed a lifetime of good living, their luxurious joie de vivre financed in part by a system of mandarin cronyism.

The politicians look after their favorite companies, granting them privileges that discourage competition and invite corruption. Sometimes the self-dealing comes to light. Jean-Claude Mery, a French political fixer who died in 1999, claimed that as mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from companies that received state contracts. Former French prime minister Alain Juppe received sweetheart deals on Parisian apartments for himself and his family; one of his apartments was renovated at a cost of over $200,000, though Juppe paid nothing. Officials of Elf Aquitaine, the state-controlled oil company, allegedly gave millions of dollars in kickbacks to the mistress of Roland Dumas, one of Francois Mitterrand's courtiers. (The courtesan in question styled herself the "whore of the Republic.") In the resulting scandal Dumas defended the practice of "retro-commissions," as the bribes are called.

Mandarin cronyism isn't limited to direct pay-offs. Powerful public figures find ways to feed friends and family at the public trough. As a European Union commissioner, former French prime minister Edith Cresson put a favorite dentist on the EU payroll as an "AIDS expert." A true Romano- European chauvinist (she once alleged that a quarter of Anglo-Saxon men are homosexual), Cresson was also rebuked by investigators for presiding over the waste of millions of dollars earmarked for "youth programs."

Corruption is not, of course, unknown in the U.S. and Britain. But French markets, hobbled by restraints, are not nearly as efficient in detecting and punishing malfeasance. When Balzac said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime, he was writing from a Romano-European perspective. The same government interference in business that encourages corruption stifles growth and discourages innovation. Though premised on the idea that centralized public power is less wasteful than Anglo-American methods of coordinating human endeavor, Romano-European governments leave a larger proportion of their populations unemployed. (The unemployment rate in France stands at 9 percent, a figure that does not include the large and unproductive proportion of Frenchmen on the public payroll.) In the absence of opportunity, some turn to scapegoating. The persistence of anti-Semitism in Romano-Europe cannot be understood apart from the region's deteriorating economic prospects.

What the Romano-European political classes fear most is a revolution like that Margaret Thatcher led in Britain. If their subject peoples -- frustrated by high unemployment and limited economic growth -- ever did rise up and overthrow the coercive Romano-European governments, a lot of powerful people would be out of togas (not to mention luxury apartments). Such a revolution is not implausible; the support which Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar offered the United States during the Iraq crisis must have caused the well-coiffed hairs of courtiers in the Elysee Palace and the Quai d'Orsay to stand on end. In its heritage and traditions Spain is as much a Romano-European state as France, but on the question of Iraq it broke decisively with its Romano-European cousin. Italy, too, offered the United States valuable assistance during the crisis. The ability of the mandarin castes in Romano-Europe to maintain power depends on their ability to preserve the illusion that their system represents a viable alternative to the Anglo-American model that many in "new" Europe, less rooted in the Romano-European tradition, seek to embrace. In challenging the United States over Iraq, President Chirac surely knew that he stood little chance of persuading President Bush to change course. Yet here was a means of demonstrating to the world that, whatever its faults as an engine of economic progress, the Romano-European state nevertheless embodies a higher type of civilization than that of the Anglo-Americans.

Chirac shrewdly exploited the old conceit that the Romano-European peoples are more spirituels than the barbarians from the north. Nietzsche once said that France was the "seat of the most spiritual and sophisticated culture in Europe" -- Gallia Togata. Nietzsche viewed Romano-Europe as a bulwark against the English, who with their "shopkeeper's" philosophy, their "profound normality," their lack of "real profundity of spiritual perception," had brought about an "overall depression of the European spirit," the "doltification of the world." By opposing the Americans and the British, Chirac let the world know that Romano-Europe was still fighting the good fight of the togas against the "rosbifs."

It was an inspired exercise in salesmanship. Intellectuals of various stripes rallied to Chirac's standard and argued that Romano-Europe -- the same civilization that gave the world absolutism, Bonapartism, socialism, National Socialism, fascism, and Francoism -- is somehow morally superior to the coarser civilization of the "Anglosphere." Writing in the English Spectator, Gerald Warner suggested that contemporary Islamic civilization, with its "close-knit family life" and "spirit of martyrdom," is in many ways superior to the civilization that America -- the "self-imposed . . . arbiter of the New World Order" -- seeks to impose: "McDonald's burger bars, rap music, sexual license, individualism demolishing family life and consumerism banishing all sense of religion." As long as men like President Chirac can persuade the chattering classes that in defending Romano-European traditions they are resisting a shallow American materialism, they will find useful support in their effort to prevent would-be Mrs. Thatchers from rising up to take them down.

We know now that the fall of the Berlin Wall was not the "end of history." One of the critical conflicts of the modern era -- the struggle between Anglo-American and Romano-European systems of governance -- goes on. In order to protect its own domestic regimes, Romano-Europe will continue to undermine American efforts to introduce prosperous forms of order in the world's troubled places. Local elites in the Middle East and Africa will naturally be attracted to Romano-European models of government: Such models, while they give subject populations enough freedom to satisfy Western aid criteria, enable the old pashas to maintain their privileged places. The republics of central and south America, which exhibit some of the worst characteristics of Romano-European political organization, are also natural allies for the decrepit regimes of "old" Europe.

It is in America's interest to frustrate Romano-European initiatives wherever practicable and to resist the aspirations of the principal Romano- European states, France and Germany, to hegemony in Europe. A corollary of this is that America should seek to preserve a divided Europe. If a European superstate were to emerge from the current Brussels-based EU bureaucracy, it would almost certainly be organized on collectivist Romano-European lines. The resulting marginalization of Britain would be a terrific blow to the cause of liberty; at the same time, the United States would confront a vast continental power constructed on principles in many ways inimical to America's own. Such a power would undoubtedly find sympathizers. It might, for example, succeed in organizing the Greens and the anti-globalizing fringers into a fifth column dedicated to the preservation of Romano- European communitarianism. China would of course be a more formidable potential ally for the new Europe; were China to choose the Romano-European model as more suited to its Confucian traditions than the Anglo-American one, Romano-Europe would be back in business as a world-shaking historical force.

America can forestall these bleak possibilities by exploiting divisions within the Romano-European community itself. It is too soon to tell whether Spain and Italy are indeed ready to break with traditions of mandarin cronyism masquerading as social solidarity. The legacies of Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy will make the task of house-cleaning difficult. Silvio Berlusconi offered President Bush support during the Iraq crisis, but at home he stands accused of engaging in the kind of corruption that is so familiar a feature of the Romano-European system. And yet the willingness of Aznar and Berlusconi to break with their cousins in France and Germany is nevertheless significant, and may indicate a genuine desire for change.

President Clinton's instinct was to paper over differences between Romano- Europe and the "Anglosphere." The "Third Way" was an attempt to find a middle ground between the coercive solidarity of France, Germany, and Italy and the free-market liberalism of the United States and Margaret Thatcher's Britain. Yet such compromises are always dangerous. During the last century the inheritors of classical liberalism in both the United States and Britain responded to the challenge of Romano-European socialism by compromising their own principles of liberty. Nanny-state liberals in both countries wove socialist threads into the fabric of their free constitutions. The results were unfortunate. Rather than make peace with the Romano-European tradition, America should seek to bury it.