Down the coast from the pre-rolled spliffs and 10am starts of a columnist in Los Angeles is the Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy. As for the kind of armour that flies rather than floats, Joan Didion liked to remind this part of the world just how much of its economic development hinged on aerospace contractors. California, whose name even sounds like a synonym for “pleasure”, has a blood-and-iron side to it.
If the good life coexists with brute strength here, the lesson isn’t being lost on places that are far more exposed to events. When I return to Europe this summer, it will be to a continent that is racing, not just edging, to the same balance.
Last week, at the instigation of German chancellor Olaf Scholz, a charade ended. It had been going on for a human lifetime. Having evolved beyond the use of force, Europe has acted on occasion as though the outside world has done the same, or will catch up any day now. What began as a “culture of restraint” in postwar West Germany became a wider continental faith in aid and diplomacy as not just necessary in world affairs but almost sufficient. To judge by Berlin’s plan for a permanently larger military, and its €100bn downpayment to that end, a certain idea of Europe is over.
No doubt, the trope of the continent as a passive “Venus” can be taken too far. The militaries of Britain, France, Poland and Norway all inspired respect in Washington during my more than three years there. So did what is known, in the dry idiom of that town, as their “strategic culture”. Germany itself has overcome psychic burdens that scarcely need spelling out to intervene in the Balkans and beyond.
It is just that there is no getting around the numbers. Australia, with less than half the population, and every geographic reason to shirk, has about the same defence budget as Italy. There is no forgetting Europe’s cringing reliance on American wares and logistics either, which was as conspicuous in Kabul in 2021 as it was in Kosovo in 1999. An end to this kind of dereliction has been promised before, of course. But never with the clarity of the past week. And never with neutral Sweden making its own gestures in the same vein.
This is a political moment, but no less revealing as a cultural one. It is a reminder that the lifestyle for which I bang the drum in this column — and which finds its highest expression in Europe, where you can visit another country for lunch — relies on its opposite. It relies on uniformed men and women and the backstop of coercive force. Passing off a large part of that burden to the US doesn’t make it less true. The EU’s soft power is as awesome as claimed (see the long-shot membership bids of Ukraine and Georgia) but it rests on a steel base.
The quality of European living depends on more than direct physical security. There is an implicit subsidy at work, too. The paid leave, the clean cities, the high social minimum: Europe funds these things, in part, with the money it saves on defence. It is entirely possible to have guns and butter, of course. France pairs a serious military with a serious welfare state. But it does so by having a serious tax burden. If the continent is going to tool up and remain a “lifestyle superpower”, it will face trade-offs that it has fudged since the end of the cold war.
In its blend of Tuscany and Prussia, California is not weird at all. There is no innate contradiction between the pleasure principle and hard power. The one is dependent and even parasitic on the other. The question is who has the moral authority to tell a continent that has been resistant to that truth. Fifty years before Scholz spoke, almost to the day in fact, a Republican president paid a call on a Chinese communist and changed the world. Perhaps, as they say, “only” Nixon could have got away with it. Perhaps only a German Social Democrat could have roused Europe from its dream.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
Follow @ftweekend on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first
The debt that pleasure owes to power
Pinoy Variant