Shock Waves from the Brussels Bombing

I've never visited Brussels--just passed through a couple of times. But I feel as though I've spent a portion of my life there. You see, for many years the European Union has been a sort of fantasmatic object for me: the large, progressive, ultra-civilized super-nation that would someday take its place--take our place--as leader of a more humane free world. Climate policy, aid to developing nations, refugee asylum, diplomatic instead of military interventions--in all these ways I imagined an EU that was already taking the lead, or soon would, in building a more suitable version of western civilization. Capital of the EU, Brussels was also for me the capital of this hallucinatory vision.

Except in very selective instances, of course, that humane, progressive EU has never really existed. The Union has been governed more from Frankfurt or Berlin anyhow, and has been the engine for inequality, a financialized economy, German economic imperialism, and the disastrous imposition of the euro on fragile member-states. For every progressive law emanating out of Brussels, it seems that two or three silly bureaucratic rules are bound to follow. Even before its inept responses to crises in Greece, Ukraine, and the migrants on its borders, the EU seemed headed for disunion.

But Brussels remains a potent symbol of something like my own fantasmatic ideal of a progressive West. As such, along with Paris--the cultural capital of that derealized empire--it is therefore something of an ideal target for the Islamist forces that would like to destroy that culture and that empire. Secular, democratic, libidinal, innovative, and yes, infectious--the West is no doubt incompatible with the static, authoritarian, 7th-century fantasm the Islamists would like to replace it with. Something has to give.

I don't know where this will end. Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission, published on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attack, offers one possibility: a denatured, listless West that simply surrenders to a more vigorous, ascendent Muslim culture. I don't expect that to happen soon, though its converse--a violent authoritarianism à la LePen or Trump, leading to some sort of Armageddon-like struggle--doesn't seem as remote now as it did a year ago.

Somewhere in the ideal middle between those extremes--a sort of Brussels of the mind--lies the possibility for a tolerant multi-culturalism, democratic in form but protective of religious and cultural prerogatives. Would such a thing 'fix' the problem? No--it would also require some evolution in the retrograde Islamic quarters that are feeding this existential struggle. There I bow out--my ignorance prevents me from having any useful suggestions. But in the meanwhile all of us in the beleaguered West need to make sure that events like the Brussels bombing are heard as a call for tolerance, understanding, and increased support for Europe's (and America's) alienated young Muslims. Hard as that may seem, the alternatives are much, much worse.