Jewish World Review Dec. 6, 2005 / 5 Kislev, 5766

Ghost of Napoleon haunts Tony Blair

By Niall Ferguson

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | It is in Book III of "War and Peace" that Tolstoy memorably describes the Battle of Austerlitz — "the battle of the three emperors" — the 200th anniversary of which fell on Friday. This was the greatest victory of Napoleon Bonaparte's career. At the time, it seemed far more important than his navy's defeat at Trafalgar two months before. Its consequences are still with us.

By routing the combined armies of Austria and Russia, Austerlitz enabled Napoleon literally to redraw the map of Europe, conjuring up a new Confederation of the Rhine from the Baltic to the Alps.

Moreover, by obliging the Austrian Emperor Francis to renounce the title of Holy Roman Emperor, Napoleon snuffed out an institution that had been at the heart of Europe for more than a millennium.

Napoleon's idea of Europe was double-edged. On the one hand, he overthrew decadent dynasties such as the Bourbons of Naples and established what was to become the model for Continental legal systems, the Code Napoléon. Later, in exile, he claimed that he had "wished to found a European system, a European code of laws, a European judiciary" so that "there would be one people in Europe." Yet, at the same time, Napoleonic Europe was without question an authoritarian empire.

What finally killed Napoleon's Europe was the fatal combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter. Nevertheless, it proved impossible to restore the old pre-Napoleonic Europe.

Napoleon fell; Bonapartism lived on, with the civil code and economic dirigisme as perhaps its most enduring legacies.

And how they have endured! Ask yourself what are the biggest differences between England and the Continent?

The answer is that the Europeans have Napoleonic law and economics, and the English, whom he did not conquer, have common law and the free market.

Which is why Tony Blair must often feel that Napoleon's ghost has come back to haunt him. As prime minister of the country that currently holds the presidency of the European Union, Blair not unreasonably expects to play a leading role in European affairs. Yet his efforts to reform the EU's budget have brought him into collision with almost anyone who has an opinion on this baffling subject.

Frankly, the details don't much matter. But the nonsensical system epitomizes that fundamental non-meeting of British and continental European minds, which is the reason the 30-year cross-Channel marriage has been so troubled.

Yet perhaps, on reflection, it is not quite right to ascribe Blair's difficulties to the persistence of the Bonapartist tradition on the Continent.

For one thing, I am no longer sure how committed the English really are to either their own legal tradition or their own economic tradition. At the same time, on closer inspection, the EU, as presently constituted, looks less like the rationalized Europe of Napoleon's dreams and more like the ancien régime Europe he tried to get rid of.

Voltaire famously said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Perhaps something similar could be said of the EU, which seems less European and less united with every passing year. For how much longer will the EU really be European, given the profound demographic changes that are inexorably increasing the Muslim share of its population — to say nothing of Turkey, negotiating to become its newest and, before long, biggest member?

And is the enlarged European Union really a union, in the sense that the United States or the United Kingdom are, or something more like a Eurabian Disunion? At best it is a confederation. At worst it's a mess of overlapping treaties and jurisdictions.

In our age of attention deficit disorders, 200 years can seem an impossibly long time ago. Yet the bicentenary of Austerlitz is more than a matter of antiquarian curiosity. For remembering how Napoleon killed off the Holy Roman Empire not only helps to illuminate the subsequent divergence of Britain from the European continent, it also may give us an inkling of the future.

Who, I wonder, will be the next Napoleon — the one who rides into Brussels to sweep away the Holy Roman Empire of our time?