The Indigestible. Bruegel and the European Union
I.
In presence of a sardine, carnival could simply fight lent. Never mind those burial plans; never mind the cyclical tyranny of the calendar. Instead, everyone grab whatever food you find, decide whether it is rather fishy or rather meaty – if it’s fishy, you’re a member of Team Lent, if it’s meaty, you’re Team Carnival. And then let’s get started; let feast fight fast, furiously.
The war of the tragic graphism of ash against the sultry abundance of honey must be fought in an improvised chaos. Lent must ambush carnival before Ash Wednesday, drop austerity like a mortar grenade; and carnival should try and conquer at least half of the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter, install a garrison and then put up a banquet in the most barren of territories.
Or so Bruegel seems to say, in 1559, in that Little Dark Age a few years before the Gouden Eeuw, the Dutch Golden Age.
II.
A part of this painting serves as the frontispiece of the English translation of Luuk van Middelaar’s Pandemonium. Saving Europe (2021), in which the author traces or, rather, celebrates the EU’s response to the plague years – not the ones back in the Dark Age, but the ones that started in 2020. The original Dutch edition opts for abstract colour blocks (if I’m not misreading it, that is), but maybe the Bruegel placement is nevertheless not a simple gesture of “This book says so much about society, and it’s by a Dutchman, let’s put some Bruegel on it”. And it's not just an allusion to the European economic think-thank that's equally named Bruegel.
Or maybe it is, but still I would argue that there is more to it.
Now, the first thing to know is that Middelaar’s opinion matters not because of its inventiveness or refinement, but simply because of his position. This is what his website says:
Luuk van Middelaar (1973) is a political theorist and historian. He is a professor of EU law at Leiden University and a political commentator for NRC Handelsblad. The author of the prizewinning book The Passage to Europe, he published more recently Alarums & Excursions(2019) and Pandemonium (2021) – all available in multiple languages. Van Middelaar published his first book, Politicide, in 1999. He was the chief speechwriter and a close advisor to European Council President Herman Van Rompuy (2010-2014). Since 2018, he is a member of the Dutch Advisory Council on International Affairs and the Chair of its Commission on European Integration (CEI).
His interpretation of these roles makes him one of Europe’s major court painters, and a happy one at that – like, say, Anthonis van Dyck: yeah, it’s just a living image of the sun, but look how close I’m standing to it; yeah, it’s a chain, but look how golden it is.
But, you will say, but: van Dyck, and court painters in general: isn’t that a 1600s-thing? And isn’t Bruegel 1500s? Isn’t –
YES YES YES JESUS CHRIST GIMME SOME TIME, I’LL COME TO IT.
Luckily, Perry Anderson has already devoted some 19’000 words to Middelaar’s career, and if there is something that means you probably don’t need to say a lot more about a topic, it’s Anderson having written 19’000 words about it. Yet I still want to say something about it, because I think that there’s something both Middelaar and Anderson are missing; something about Bruegel, maybe.
But first, let me give you the shortened version of what you could read in Anderson, because maybe you’re not in the mood for a (very) long text of the grandseigneurial British Marxist, or because you hit the ever-fickle LRB paywall.
As you might have gathered from the website excerpt, Middelaar’s academic recognition rests on four books, all of which are concerned with politics in Europe: 1999’s Politicide. The Murder of Politics in French Philosophy argued – partly creatively, partly crudely – that some time in the early middle of the 20th century, France birthed a strand of thought that ranges from Alexandre Kojève to Jean Baudrillard and that was so infatuated with grand notions – master, slave, death, disappearance – that it killed any sense of Realpolitik, leading to only glorifications of impotence and/or terrorism; ostracizing French thought from the pragmatist field of compromise that was the stuff of European politics in the latter half of the 20th century. So far, nobody has translated that book into French.
His second publication is his most famous: The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union (2009; English translation 2013), a history of the EU from its inception to the (then-)present; Anderson’s discussion is mainly concerned with this book, which garnered its author a number of prizes and accolades. It was followed in 2017 with Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage, and then, 2020, with Pandemonium: Saving Europe, completing a kind-of-trilogy on works dealing with the political anatomy of the EU.
The tone of the works is remarkably consistent: Where in his 1999 book, Middelaar railed against grand-concept-talk and a priori notions in favour of a Machiavellian pragmatism and in-situ-decisionism – politics as an art of virtuoso improvisation, a surfing on the waves of contingency and compromise – his EU-trilogy works, as virtually every reviewer has noted, as a Bildungsroman in which the European Union slowly, but surely learns to get away from the grandiloquent, large-scale and long-time, but ultimately apolitical gestures of its early years (partly designed by one of the ‘French’ philosophers Middelaar had attacked in Politicide, Alexandre Kojève) and comes to an understanding of politics as a matter of meddling and middling. I will refrain from making the pun with his name.
True to his disdain for ‘pure’ theorists – be they Baudrillard or Rawls – Middelaar has never been shy to rub shoulders with the powers of Realpolitik, as, again, you might have gathered from the website-excerpt.
In the early 1990s, he joins the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), a Dutch liberal party – or so says Anderson, Middelaar disagrees, saying he only joined by 2004 (and left it by 2010). He is still writing on his thesis (which would become Politicide), but is (understandably) already eyeing the position of spin doctor rather than philosophical doctor. 2001, he lands a position in Brussels, then,
he became political secretary to Jozias van Aartsen, Bolkestein’s successor as leader of the VVD in The Hague. There the muffled world of the Binnenhof, where the Dutch elite transacted discreet business between consenting parties, was revealed to him – it was an eye-opening opportunity, he explained to a friend, to dwell for a time at the centre of power. Van Aartsen, averse to Bolkestein’s tranchant, came from the temporising moderate wing of the party, to which van Middelaar readily adapted, rising high in his chief’s confidence. When a commission including Ankersmit was formed to produce a new manifesto for the party in 2005, van Middelaar wrote the final eighty-page document, For Freedom, a carefully weighed composite of (classical, social and neo) liberal themes. Ingredients included a flat tax and clearing beggars off the streets, a directly elected prime minster and the curbing of quangocrats, private pensions and strict compliance with the EU’s Stability Pact, help for the neediest but no truck with a basic income. ‘The primary responsibility for material well-being lies with the individual himself. (Anderson, “The European Coup”)
For Freedom is a remarkably arrogant text, expressing a number of the tropes that Dutch schoolyard-bully-liberalism (I’m not taking your lunch money; I’m just not giving it to you) would go on to celebrate in the following years, if not decades. Not at last, it includes a telling passage in which Middelaar makes clear the VVD’s take on Dutch history, impossible to differentiate from his own:
The origin of our country does not lie in an elusive distant past, as in the case of England or France. Nor was the country forged from above by a strong will, like Germany or Italy. No, our country was born at the end of the 16th century from the tough, concerted effort to wrest freedom from the authority of a tyrannical Spanish king. Freedom and tolerance ignited the light of our Golden Age. These two enabled the miracle of a country inhabited by barely two million people that left every other European country far behind in entrepreneurial spirit, culture, science and political-philosophical wisdom. (For Freedom, quoted in Anderson, “The European Coup”)
This is a bizarre view only worth quoting because here, Middelaar, in his limited wisdom, puts up an ideological tent in close temporal proximity to what we bluntly subsumed under the proper name of Bruegel: “our country was born at the end of the 16th century”, when “[f]reedom and tolerance ignited the light of our Golden Age”. “Every country has its own brand of smugness”, Anderson coldly remarks.
The nationalist chauvinism of the passage also exemplifies how Middelaar’s disdain for grand-gesture politics is not at all born out of an anti-elitist sentiment. The problem of the early EU, to him, wasn’t ethical, but epistemological; it wasn’t that the leaders did not care about those they lead, but that they thought they could plan how to lead them for the next ten, or twenty, or hundred years; and that they had no stronger sense of ‘leading’ than ‘legislating’.
In other words, Middelaar dislikes the great grey owl of the early EU, Kojève, not because of the stratospheric height of its flight, but because of its wingspan.
The thing that resulted from the love for abstraction and planning – in other words, from the love of administrativerules rather than political ruling – Middelaar argues, was a gigantic, but historically anaemic construct, less a global player of its own right than a group of states loosely subsumed under the most formulaic of administrations, protected and overshadowed by the USA, as theoretically grandiloquent and politically impotent as any given French philosopher.
This Aufschub of all things political – this large-scale politicide, in Middelaar’s heavier term – had made some sense in the immediate aftermath of the Third Reich, Middelaar concedes, but then it remained in place long after. First, they did nothing; then, they kept doing it.
The result, Middelaar argues, was something profoundly boring, that is, something unlikely to instil passion in the hearts of its subjects, or draw the contours of a European identity – not because it was “above the people” or something like that, not because it did not care for its citizens (those aren’t questions Middelaar is very concerned with), but because it had a boring conception of history: as something stable, governed by rules translatable into political rules, which are in turn identical to legislation, and, as Kojève – drawing from Hegel and inspiring Fukuyama – famously taught: coming to an end. This conception is boring because, Middelaar argues, it is not modern.
In Alarums and Excursions, he calls the theorists of the early EU “medieval prophets”, echoing the “distant past” of his For Freedom, and similarly opposed to the Golden Age of the Dutch (him). They were medieval because, in his view, they had not yet passed what could be called the Machiavelli Threshold, which separates the Dark Ages from That Which Is Modern: The recognition that history is not something that can be politically governed from a top-down position, but a violent stream of contingent events constantly upturning established rules, forcing political players into a position of improvisation. This recognition means, to Middelaar, a proper secularization, as the metaphysics – indeed, the theologies – of Keynesian realism, Hegelian idealism, Marxism dogmatism, etc., find themselves and their prophets terminally demystified. As metaphysics crumble, the common experience of fateful crises transforms what has been a loose functionalistic network into a passionate community of fate, a real political actor in a modern world, with its own weight and character. The Middle Ages are over. The Middel Age can begin. (Now I’ve done it after all.)
III.
Anderson shows how this favouring of Machiavelli doesn’t come von ungefähr, as they say. Rather, it bespeaks the legacy of one of Middelaar’s teachers, Frank Ankersmit, who appeared earlier on, in the long quote I gave from Anderson’s account. Ankersmit’s reputation as a historian rests primarily on his role in the linguistic turn of the field; in his early and middle work, he developed a (broadly speaking) narratological study of history, in which the meaning created in a historian’s representation of events works as a substitute for the absent meaning in the events themselves. Historical facticity, in other words, is an effect of its linguistic representation (e.g. Narrative logic. A semantic analysis of the historian's language, 1983; History and Tropology. The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, 1994).
In the second part of his work, Ankersmit extended the reach of this thought onto the question of representation in politics proper; Political Representation (2002) marks the first full-blown exposition of what his work in the late 1990s had laid the groundwork for. Pushing political philosophy “beyond fact and value” – the subtitle of a 1997 book of his – Ankersmit proposed a conception of politics as a completely aesthetic mode. Political representation, to him, did not at all imply a linking of similitude (of opinion, for example): rather, political representation means the absence of the represented, indeed, its virtual obliteration in favour of a new sense altogether, one developed exclusively in the interplay of the representations. Being represented means, whether historically or politically, to be pushed into an absolute darkness. Your representation proves that you’re meaningless, but in turn, the darkness you’re pushed into is the darkness of the audience room in a theatre. You’re cordially invited to watch the representations in front of you under the condition that you recognize that whatever sense arises there is absolutely independent from your agreement. In turn, you will want to be thrilled, because in one way or another, you paid for your ticket.
Thrills, however, can only come from events, from ground-breaking, earth-shattering moments; and these can only happen in the secular states first described, according to Ankersmit, by Machiavelli; before that, the local metaphysical burps of alleged miracles adorned a stable a priori world where nothing would ever really shatter anything (eventually, some eschatological plan saves any day): the Middle Ages. After that, God tumbles down, the polis becomes finite; chance and virtue (fortuna and virtu) become indispensable as the world begins to resemble an incomprehensible and dangerous ocean. Politics lead theology into a dark alley and kick its face in.
Carnival fights Lent, Lent fights Carnival, and the only victim is the calendar.
Welcome to the casino, this was once a church.
In all of this, Ankersmit draws richly from Foucault (just as he had done in his earlier, historio-narratological work) – where the eventual ‘victory’ of representation over similitude is what marks the threshold from the Renaissance to the Classical Age – but even more so on Machiavelli (1469-1527, thus Renaissance) and, even more importantly, Gabriel Naudé (1600-1653, thus Classical Age).
Naudé is somewhat of an enigma of an author, and, I would argue, an indispensable predecessor to Foucault (and others). He is a marvellous writer of the French Baroque, obsessed with two topics in particular: (1) coups d’état, and (2) what he calls le discours. He was court painter… uh, court librarian of first Cardinal Richelieu and then Cardinal Mazarin, creating one of the largest libraries of his time. His Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état is a dark and strange book – “Qu’y faire?”, the 19th-century critic Sainte-Beuve asked: What to do with it, with this book, that starts with a “Mais” (but) and then only gets wilder?
Taking it as the first properly modern treatment of politics, Ankersmit’s answer goes. Again, you can get a lot of this from Anderson, who traces Ankersmit’s reception of Naudé with great economy, I’ll just give you the even shorter version, which is basically this quote (by Naudé, quoted by Anderson):
[I]n coups d’état one sees the thunderbolt before one hears it growling in the clouds, it strikes before it flames forth, matins are said before the bells are rung, the execution precedes the sentence, everything is done à la judaique – he receives the stroke who thought to give it, dies who thought himself quite safe, suffers who never dreamed of pain; all is done at night, in obscurity, in fog and darkness.
This is without a doubt peak Baroque, including that absolutely weird "à la judaique", which leaves completely open any question of whether we’re dealing with some crude anti-Semitism or with an actual and admiring recognition of the characteristic inverting structures of Talmudic law (recall that Naudé was a librarian).
What’s important at the moment, anyway, is that to Ankersmit, this is the structure of that which could be called the modern political moment proper: it must be sudden, overwhelming, paradoxical, and it might just entail a bit (or: a lot) of violence. The same goes for writing about politics, obviously – as it supplants, in Ankersmit’s view, politics, it becomes almost an ethical goal to create and marshal, in writing, the characteristics one would like to see in politics; not although, but because there is neither a mimetic nor a causal relationship between the two: Ankersmit’s writing, much like Naudé’s, is out to ambush you, to use a paragraph of smoke and mirrors only to speedily jump out, deliver a punchline you never saw coming, but understood before you saw it, and then re-disappear.
But I digress.
Ankersmit inherits from Naudé a focus on (and celebration of) (1) the overwhelming, violent suddenness and (2) the paradoxical character of the true and truly modern political event; and, moreover, the conviction – which follows almost as a consequence from (1) and (2) – that politics must be practiced without any recourse to moral questions. “The well-being of society can sometimes only be achieved by crime”, as Ankersmit coolly states in Sublime Historical Experience (2005). I leave it to Anderson to tell you how this makes Ankersmit our contemporary Burke, etc. And I will also not try and really combine the early and the middle Ankersmit with the late one, or make a general argument of how old (white) men seem, with age, to suddenly be interested in notions of the event or presence, or immediacy, or intensity, in a way that is much dumber than what they did earlier in their career, and how squarely this invites a psychoanalytic reading –
– and instead allow myself, again, a blunt summary: Middelaar, although an entirely more mediocre brain than his Sith Lord, is ankersmitten enough with all of this (I owed myself that one) that he injects it more or less directly into his analysis of the EU. Sudden, overwhelming crises are what turns a conglomerate into a community, and simultaneously pushes it across the boundary between the Middle Ages and a possible Golden one.
More or less directly, I said. What I find funny is that Ankersmit has a conception of politics almost exclusively based on terror (in a wider sense) and framed as an exclusively Aesthetic mode, both of which evoke more than just a few right-wing-vibes, and he openly identifies as a “Conservative Liberal” – which he opposes to Liberals, because they’re idealists, and Neo-Liberals because, you guessed it, they’re, to him, actually Neo-Medieval; while Middelaar is the living proof that to any Conservative, you will find a Liberal who easily out-baboons him or her. Ankersmit is not elitist, Middelaar is; Ankersmit is difficult in all senses of the word, but quite refined in his arguments; Middelaar tries desperately to come across as charming, but in 2001, he writes:
Can human rights spread globally without the action of a Napoleon? The answer is no. Anyone who thinks that it can has a moralistic view of reality. Anyone who thinks that good may impose itself on the world without struggle or the use of power is mistaken. Anyone with a basic understanding of politics knows that what is good does not come automatically. That may require an army. A Napoleon. Or a George W. Bush. A price must be paid if we want human rights to spread. We should not blame Napoleon for using violence, but for not going far enough. Napoleon’s mistake was that he employed freedom and equality as symbols to help his army win battles rather than incorporating these concepts in sturdy institutions in the constitutions which [sic] he scattered across Europe. To continue the analogy: our hope must be that Bush finishes his job thoroughly, dragging Afghanistan into modernity with bombs and abundance.
This is some bootleg Ankersmit (the paradoxical violence of the last phrase) combined with everything that will make Ankersmit’s thought look like the idiocy it maybe is – and then, for reasons absolutely unknown to anyone except, perhaps, himself, Middelaar defends these lines by characterizing them (and others, like “Sure, colonial crimes occurred – rape, torture, institutional racism – and yet, what a beautiful body of work [colonialism was]!” – is there a curse available for our Lying Dutchman?), in 2019 as “youth poetry” (he was 28 at the time).
Just the sort of stuff a white male academic can get away with, in these trying times of cancel culture.
IV.
Not every attempt of Middelaar’s to inject Ankersmit’s cantankerous Conservatism into what is more or less an open eulogy of the EU in all of its aspects – surely not a Conservative project by any standard – went as disastrously bad as the one above.
Indeed, throughout his remarkably successful EU trilogy, there are instances where Middelaar seems to identify the oft-criticized bureaucratic formalism of the European Union as its greatest modernist strength; in his argument, he frames the contracts, talks, meetings, etc. as a huge monotonous fog of war, behind which the sovereignty of whole states could be ambushed; the fact that nothing about the EU looked like actual, down-to-earth-politics was the perfect camouflage to basically stage one coup after the other. Where others deploy radar jammers, the EU deployed a conference, and then ravaged enemy territory between paragraphs. Nothing looked like anything, and then, in true Naudéan fashion, they receive the stroke who thought to give it. But the problem really was, in the first two instalments, that this required quite the amount of generosity; not only because the EU didn’t really seem like the great ninja warrior Middelaar took to portraying it as, but also because Middelaar himself could not always decide whether to eulogize the EU or to hype it up; that is to say, whether to claim that the important victory was already won (the threshold between the Dark Ages and Modernity already crossed), albeit in some unimposing offhand decree, whose seeming insignificance betrays the quality of EU smokescreens; or whether to, rather, vaguely gesture at a wealth of untapped political potential and then stress the fact that the EU will surely seize all of it, in time.
In the third instalment, Pandemonium, this changes somewhat. Middelaar had credited a number of crises with bringing the EU closer to the Machiavelli Threshold – the Suez Crisis, the Yugoslav wars, the 2008 banking crash, and the refugee crisis among others, forced the EU to experience something as an event, as a lightning strike of fate, rather than as just another expression of an underlying pre-stabilized harmony of history – but naturally left it open whether they actually pushed the EU fully across it; in the third instalment, however, it is, in plain and clear terms, the Covid-19-crisis that finally pushes the EU over the MT and into a possible Golden Age.
Clutching his gold chain, eyes firm on the audience, finger almost touching the sunflower, Middelaar sings the song of EU pandemic response. Precisely as nation states closed their borders, he argues, the European Union – paradoxically, at first sight, that is to say: in modern fashion – triumphed. Chief among EU achievements, he names the spectacular and unprecedented amount of financial assistance, which came naturally and easily, Middelaar argues, apparently forgetting that the very party he once penned a manifesto for, the VVD and their leader, Rutte, threw such a huge tantrum that they almost sank the whole thing. Lent almost won, and Middelaar is celebrating Carnival only the harder for it. Which kind of makes sense, I suppose.
In the end, the European Union finds itself still in pandemonium, but Middelaar has learned from Ankersmit that this is a Night Of The Political Moment: yes, this is chaos, people improvise, everything seems to be held together by chewing gum and hope only, things happen before they happen (or so); but as the pandemic violently shakes the dust off both the EU and the other major global players, a new arena rises from the smoke, a LEVEL UP!-sign appears over Europe: it is an established player now, it has farmed enough unity points during the pandemic to now be able and required to fight against its foster parent USA and against the Two Towers of the East, Russia and China.
One bossfight is over, here comes the next – but now it’s about who enters the Golden Age.
There is a scholarly debate about whether Bruegel is the last painter of the Flemish Renaissance or the first of the Dutch Golden Age. Maybe, his paintings mark – or rather: are – some sort of threshold.
Maybe his placement on the frontispiece of Pandemonium has less to do with placement in space (in the Netherlands) than with placement in time (just before the Golden Age, or, perhaps, in slight ways, already a part of it).
V.
All of this is, obviously, blindingly masculinist, inexcusably so. But it gets worse. Kind of.
Luuk van Middelaar fancies the EU, from a right-wing-perspective. Perry Anderson has a bone to pick with the EU, from a left-wing-perspective, so he sweeps down from his intellectual heights (“Perry” is short for Peregrine, after all) to dismantle Middelaar’s points – in part: he disagrees with the eulogizing, but agrees with Middelaar’s notion of politics as a reaction game to what happens in the ocean of very material contingency that is history (which is also Ankersmit’s notion, or Althusser’s), he agrees with the diagnosis that EU behaviour has aspects of a coup, disagrees with the idea that this is a good thing, and so forth. Middelaar comments the review, delivers politeness (no idea whether of the honest kind), finally sort of invites himself to have dinner with Anderson. Anderson defends his points and then implies that he would have a glass of wine with Middelaar. Someone else, from Brussels of all places, asks if this is a yes or a no to lunch between Middelaar and Anderson. Anderson answers: “a glass of wine, sufficient to dispel a terminological confusion, normally accompanies rather than precludes a meal”.
And then I, in my idiocy, write about all of that.
Elsewhere, I have written that abstract homoeroticism is the stuff of (at least) what’s called Western Civilization.
VI.
All said and done? Let’s get drunk? No! Early Ankersmit will come back to bite you all in the ass.
Maybe the geographical location of Bruegel matters after all.
Let’s see what Ankersmit says in History and Tropology, in a chapter quite beautifully entitled “The Pull of the Frame”, in a complex and intelligent passage that I will happily quote in full:
Pietro Aretino tells us that he learned to see the beauty of the Venetian twilight only through the paintings of Titian. Similar remarks about landscapes are found in Ruskin, Nietzsche, and Wilde. Such statements do not involve a recognition, as if the painter made us aware for the first time of a landscape which we had always known. Nor is it a matter of seeing the same thing through different eyes, as in Jastrow-Wittgenstein's famous Gestalt. There is an investment in the new way of seeing which excludes the optional aspect of the Gestalt. Through the loss of this optional aspect it is as if the world chooses a world view rather than vice versa. There is no longer a place for the traditional dichotomy between what is (realistically) seen and the (idealistic) interpretation plus all the consequent philosophical strategies. More than anything else one is reminded of what Freud indicated by the technical term cathexis —and that too is a concept which loses everything by being interpreted in either a realistic or an idealistic sense.
Gombrich summarizes the usual view of the origin of the landscape as follows:
“We hear how the naturalistic landscape backgrounds of fifteenth century paintings swallow up the foreground, as it were, in the sixteenth century till the point is reached with specialists such as Joachim Patinier, whom Dürer calls ‘the good landscape painter,’ when the religious or mythological subject dwindles to a mere ‘pretext.’”
In short, there was a movement away from the mythological or religious center of meaning to the foreground or background and the result was the naturalistic or realistic landscape. […] This revolutionary nature consists in the fact that the movement away from the religious and the mythological is not induced by the pull of a new center of meaning, but is rather a movement in the direction of what has hitherto been without meaning […] Quite characteristic are the contemptuous words that Francesco da Hollanda puts in the mouth of Michelangelo: “in Flanders they paint with a view to extol exactness of such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill […] They paint stuffs, masonry the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees and rivers and bridges which they call landscapes,” and Michelangelo makes it quite clear that he prefers by far the traditional religious and mythological centers of meaning.
The gist of this passage is quite easy: Painters of the Northern Renaissance – for example, in the Southern Netherlands of Pieter Bruegel the Elder – shifted the focus of the painting from a few single individuals laden with mythological or religious meaning in- or outwards to what surrounds those figures – they did not at all addanything; the landscape was already present in, say, Andrea Mantegna; it’s much more like the focus of a camera slowly but decidedly blurring what was in focus before and instead focusing on something else. The discovery of what has been called, in art history, naturalism – the painterly treatment of the everyday, the mundane, and the insignificant – was not an addition of objects formerly absent, but a shift of focus. Bruegel, indeed, was a master of the sliding focus; often, he teases a religious subject and then hides it between shifting lines of perspective, diminishes it against towering landscapes, or buries it in Where-is-Waldo-level populations. Have fun looking for Saul-just-turning-into-Paul in the following painting:
Or take the famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, where the farmer ploughing his field in the foreground, or the shepherd tending to his sheep, or the galleon navigating the ocean, simply have no time for that bundle of religious meaning which just fell from the sky, already visible only as a leg sticking out from the ocean surface, and a bit of wax-covered plumage in the air.
What Ankersmit describes, then, is just this shift of perspective, where meaning changes, as it were, the locus of its investment; instead of being centred, bundled up in a single character or in a small group of characters, meaning lies in the very dissemination of content, its spreading out over and into landscape – landscape that was there before, but subordinate to the semiotic authority of the centre figures.
But then Ankersmit surrounds this kernel of content with different, difficult remarks and allusions, the most enigmatic of which is probably the following: “Through the loss of this optional aspect it is as if the world chooses a world view rather than vice versa”. I’m not at all sure what this even means, but I suspect it is worth pondering. Let’s see what happens if we take Bruegel’s Fight between Carnival and Lent and shift focus, away even from the disseminated meaning that the turbulent crowd still has purchase on – and let go of the figures, disregard their weight (though without obliterating it, far from adding anything new, such a shift of focus “is rather a movement in the direction of what has hitherto been without meaning”, as Ankersmit teaches us).
Let’s, for example, abandon everything in favour of a new pull, the pull of the air, for example, of the atmosphere and the sky – not to turn it, as Ankersmit’s Middle Ages would inevitably do, into a heaven or an adumbration of heaven, not placing angels between the clouds, nor spilling a bucketful of Renaissance putti into the blue – just by shifting the focus in the slightest amount, like placing a sudden accent on the first two syllables of “naturalism” and letting prosody dwell there for a long second; just by adjusting our lens, we would recognize a shade in the air, a tint of the atmosphere, maybe a faint veil of ash or snow, like cobwebs in the brushwork, perhaps fragmenting the evening light into nuances of hitherto unforeseen brilliance, honey pouring out of the dust, “the beauty of the Venetian twilight”, perhaps dimming the sunshine down to an almost gelatinous pale. We would see, in short, no longer the fight between Carnival and Lent, or between the Renaissance and the Classical Age, or between the Dark Ages and the Gouden Eeuw, or between the cyclicality of the calendar and the linearity of progress (although none of these fights disappear, just as nothing is added); rather, we would see the ambience in which all of these conflicts hang suspended: we would see the Little Ice Age.
There is no scholarly consensus about when it began – numerous estimates place its beginning in the early 1500s, but there are others who consider a starting point of around 1300 as more likely – but there is no debate about its existence and little about what it entailed: a phenomenon of relatively considerable and widespread cooling, not in the sense of a globally synchronous Ice Age, but as an interplay of local climate changes characterized by diminishing temperatures. Europe, in general, was heavily struck: Settlements in Greenland had to be abandoned because of advancing ice; villages in the Swiss Alps were crushed by glaciers (an effect of the Grindelwald Fluctuation, if someone is still looking for a band name); in the early 1600s, it began to be normal for the river Thames to freeze over during winter. Summers were wet, winters were harsh, with snowstorms being a regular phenomenon in Lisbon and Rome, and disastrous consequences for farming. The combination of humid summers and brutally cold winters was an ideal breeding ground for diseases, which ravaged an already weakened population. Crop failure meant widespread food shortages, which in turn led to bread riots and other local uprisings. As agriculture faltered, violence flourished: some groups placed the blame for bad harvest on the already-underprivileged – witch hunts were very much a Little Ice Age phenomenon, as Wolfgang Behringer has shown; similarly, Jewish communities were accused of poisoning the ground and the wells, and persecuted; some Protestants blamed the Catholics, some Catholics blamed the Protestants. Indeed, there are arguments that the Thirty Years War was ignited by Little Ice Age factors, which had created a dangerous concoction only waiting for an igniting spark.
While there is ample documentation for the Little Ice Age – sediment traces, contemporary scientific observation, pollen analysis, and growth rings of trees, for example – it is difficult to identify the factors that led to it. Propositions range from diminished solar activity (which has been proven for the respective timespan) over a virtual collapse of the Gulf Stream due to a too warm period that came just before, to the massive drop in populations beginning in the late 1300s – with the Black Death killing about half of the European human population of the time, widespread diseases in the North Americas, brought there by the colonists, equally killed millions of people – as agricultural activity fell rapidly (due to the farmers dying), carbon dioxide production fell, and forests grew back, simultaneously increasing the carbon dioxide uptake, which depressed the temperatures. Additionally, volcanic activity has been mentioned, with documentation showing a series of massive eruptions, with at least ten eruptions with possible global effects between 1640 and 1830 (when the Little Ice Age comes to an end): Among others, these eruptions let a huge amount of ash escape into the atmosphere, where it builds a layer in the air that filters sunlight and leads to widespread atmospheric cooling.
For one year in particular, this effect has been well discussed in all sorts of scientific field: 1816, the “Year Without a Summer”. The eruption of Mount Tambora in today’s Indonesia had projected so much ash into the atmosphere that it led to a catastrophic year for agriculture. Tens of thousands of people died in the immediate vicinity of the volcano, because of the eruption itself or because of the ash killing the crops and poisoning the ground water. China suffered a massive famine, India equally suffered drought and a Cholera epidemic, there were food shortages all over Europe, there was looting and violence, typhus killed over 60’000 people in one year alone. In the North Americas, a “dry fog” was documented, which persisted, and persisted, throughout the seasons, through wind and rain, and turned the sunlight red. New York saw snowfall in June, both Europe and the USA would see frost in August. Tropical climate regions, such as the North of Latin America and all of Taiwan, experienced large amounts of snow. The high level of tephra – a by-product of volcanic eruption, mainly glassy-ashy particles of cold magma – in the air, the “dry fog” reported in the US, led to magnificent sunsets, intensifying the red and pink hues. The impact a year without any moment of full sunlight must have had on the mental health of a population already just recovering from the Napoleonic wars is barely imaginable.
Food shortage was so bad that many took to eating their riding horses. The sudden drop in mobility items precipitated the invention of the bicycle, in 1817.
In parts of Switzerland and Germany, the recent installation of lightning rods was blamed for creating bad weather.
In June of that year, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe, John William Polidori, and Lord Byron spend their holidays near Lake Geneva, but are forced to stay indoors because of the incessant pouring rain. At a contest of ghost story writing, Mary Shelley comes up with Frankenstein, and Lord Byron, in “The Burial: A Fragment” invents the figure of a vampire able to blend in Bourgeois society.
Art history has intensely studied what effects the Year Without a Summer had on painting, arguing, for example, that Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of the time needed little ‘addition’ of pathos on his part, rather, in 1816, the dark and moody vibe of this quintessential Romantic suddenly happened to be a realistic painterly estimate of what the world looked like – “it is as if the world chooses a world view rather than vice versa”, to quote Ankersmit.
Similarly, the atmospheric tephra content has been credited with spectacular, blazing sunsets, the likes of which J. M. W. Turner would go on to paint; his competitor John Constable, an avid and intelligent observer of the skies, was quick to adapt his palette to what he perceived as an ashy quality of the air.
Fair enough. All of this stuff about the year 1816 corresponds perfectly well with Ankersmit’s (and, by extension, Middelaar’s) conception of history: as a source of eruptive events, volcanic in character, utterly unforeseeable, and destructive; which, in turn, gives rise to a notion of politics as virtuoso reaction. The darkness and fog Ankersmit took from Naudé are most literally present, in 1816, “all is done at night, in obscurity, in fog and darkness”. Romanticism thrives, and art history is ready to concede that, yes, this was an event, that the eruption left the scar of fate in the skin of painting.
But then the year 1816 is a metonymy of a much larger (albeit much slower) phenomenon – the Little Ice Age, where volcanic activity is but one of numerous factors leading to a huge (if temporary) change in Europe’s ecological and cultural face, one not limited to one year, but to several centuries.
What this touches upon, is the question of an event’s size; due to some – at first sight – paradoxical movement, an event seems to stop being an event if it happens over too much time; even though its effects are both similar in quality, and infinitely more disastrous in quantity, the Little Ice Age is considered less of an event than the Year Without a Summer.
So little of an event, in fact, that art history hardly considers it.
That is, it has commented on the fact that Dutch and Flemish – regions heavily struck by the Little Ice Age – painting of the late 1500s and throughout the 1600s has produced a large quantity of winter scenes, and argued that this was due to the fact that the Little Ice Age produced both extended winter months (lots of time to paint winter scenes) and an increased demand for winter scenes (I’m not really sure how this second argument works). One of the most celebrated paintings from this category is Bruegel’s Return of the Hunters from 1565, often characterized as a depiction of the hardships the Little Ice Age brought with it:
And it is marvellous, but just as the Little Ice Age did not start 1564 and did not end 1566, it did not happen only in winter, or only when somebody was painting it.
To my knowledge, the American-German meteorologist Hans Neuberger is the only one so far who has rigorously tried to trace diachronic climate differences through European painting. His 1970 paper “Climate in Art” is a considerable feat of distant reading avant la lettre: Comparing colour palettes – adjusted to the aging of the pigment, which darkens older colour – between 1400 and 1967, i.e. ca. 150 years before and after the high phase of the Little Ice Age, he discovers a considerable drop in brightness and visibility (that is to say, the paintings are darker and more diffuse) and a massive rise in the depiction of low-hanging and heavy clouds for the years between 1555 and 1849, that is to say: during the Little Ice Age.
His survey has an advantage over the ‘classic’ art history view on the Little Ice Age not just because of a massively larger corpus, but because his corpus does not stop at winter scenes: rather, he is looking for a climate, something more circumambient and something simultaneously more transitory and more permanent than the motif ‘winter’ (although that motif does not disappear from his sight, either, just like the clouds don’t).
In other words, his method manages to accompany the shift of focus Ankersmit identifies as a signature move of early Dutch and Flemish painting by a shift of focus in method; looking at what’s already been there before, now stressing the ‘nature’ in naturalism, fully unlinked from the – however disseminated – narrative content of the paintings, of, say the fight between Carnival and Lent: that which, in all paintings not depicting winter, seems to remain the unique centre of meaning according to art history’s focus, which chooses not to see climate when dealing with, say, the portrait of a queen, even when the sky behind her is positively apocalyptic, or more precisely: pretends to be able to choose whether to see it or not, although, as Ankersmit makes clear, there is a “loss of this optional aspect”. The world is choosing the world view.
VII.
What, then, to make of the Bruegel excerpt on the frontispiece of Pandemonium?
It seems to me that first, it symbolizes a claim from Middelaar’s book: the EU pandemic response has placed the European Union firmly in an Early Modern pandemonium – within the text, symbolized by Machiavelli; on the frontispiece, symbolized by the Bruegel depiction of some Early Modern turmoil, or, if you prefer a less realist characterization, Bruegel’s Early Modern depiction of some turmoil – which is a good thing.
It is a good thing insofar as this pandemonium is the threshold to the Golden Age, which came – and here the historical dimension of Bruegel tilts, tatin-like, over into the geographical dimension – in the case of the Dutch right after the Early Modern pandemonium (the same couldn’t be said for, say, Bohemia); again, this geographical aspect is both symbolized and depicted by Bruegel, who is Dutch and an important stylistic precursor of Dutch Golden Age painting.
But it just happens that this strategy misses the move Ankersmit’s early book had deemed ‘not optional’: it misses to realize what lies really outside centre of Bruegel, what follows his radical dissemination: it misses the fact that the Bruegel painting shows, consciously or not (again, a question Ankersmit deems fully irrelevant), and among other things (which have not disappeared at all, just fallen out of focus): the Little Ice Age.
And I think what is fascinating is that while the frontispiece cannot but document the Little Ice Age, the book misses it on all accounts, thus turning the frontispiece into almost an accusation. In the words of Naudé: “He receives the stroke who thought to give it”. Indeed, a consideration of the Little Ice Age in particular, and the Dutch Little Ice Age in even more particular – but just as Bruegel invites us to – would show that not “Freedom and tolerance ignited the light of our Golden Age”, as Middelaar would like to have it, but that the indeed remarkable economic and cultural boost of the Dutch and Flemish provinces in the late 1500s/early 1600s was predicated on the ruthless military exploitation of the (relatively) new climate conditions, and the equally ruthless economic exploitation of poorer provinces as well as neighbouring and overseas territories (amongst which figure those especially struck by severe storms, etc.), as Dagomar Degroot argues in The Frigid Golden Age. Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (2018).
Now, Degroot, whose politics are about as foggy as an 1816 winter sky, thinks this is a good thing (he calls it ‘resilience’), and of course, it is certainly a good example of quick and unethical political adaptation to a changing historical situation, just as Middelaar – following Ankersmit – considers characteristic and necessary for the transition between the Dark and the Golden Age. Indeed, nothing I could take from Bruegel or Degroot would ever impress Ankersmit, who will simply say: Yes, of course; the Dutch provinces recognized the fateful moment, the dark historical conjecture of perhaps some irregular sunspot, unknown even to them, but known to them in a few of its effects, and seized the opportunity to ambush their neighbours and survive, to establish their Golden Age as an empire of snow built on starved corpses. Why not? “The well-being of society can sometimes only be achieved by crime”, is what he would answer, and go about his business.
But Ankersmit hates neo-liberalism and dislikes the EU in its contemporary form (an “elective aristocracy”, selon his opinion). Middelaar, however, whose book the Bruegel adorns, plays the court painter to the EU, and it’s not easy to see how the bullying regionalist politics of the Baroque Dutch – which in fact transported them from the Renaissance turmoil into their Golden Age – would translate into a manual for a supra-national construction.
Of course, one could say: Well, the Dutch republic was an association of provinces, just like the EU is an association of countries, and the transition into the Golden Age will require a profiteering engagement with the changing climate conditions similar to the one exhibited by the late-1500s Dutch. If the EU plays its card right, it will seize its contemporary moment just like the Dutch provinces did, surprize its competitors, and thrive. So, surely, the Dutch analogy is not at all detrimental to Middelaar’s argument?
Well, at this point, it becomes clear why I’ve said that Middelaar’s book misses the Little Ice Age of Bruegel’s painting on all accounts: To establish a profiteering engagement on the grounds of climate change would require an acknowledgment of changing climate conditions – even if it is a comparatively little change such as the Little Ice Age, during which the Northern Hemisphere only saw a median drop of about 1°C relative to temperatures before and after.
And obviously, everyone knows that we are dealing with a type of climate change very different from the Little Ice Age both in quality and quantity.
And Middelaar does not acknowledge it even once.
He is so caught up with describing the fights between financial relief and austerity, bombs and abundance, Carnival and Lent, between the Dark and the Golden Age (and proclaiming victories everywhere) that he completely forgets to ever shift the focus from those centres of meaning to what lies on all of those fights like dust or snow or ash.
Now, one could say that this is not much of a problem. Not every book must include everything.
Yeah, but well. Middelaar’s trilogy is one of the most ambitious intellectual engagements with the EU, widely applauded, well decorated; to date, probably the defining biography of the European Union, organized as a Bildungsroman in which the protagonist slowly, but surely learns to abandon the “rules-politics” – essentially depoliticizing both in its high-concept (Kojève) and its low-concept variant (say, Schuman) – of its youth in favour of the “events-politics” (both Middelaar’s phrases) of its geopolitical and historical maturity, a progress fuelled by crises – and yet the largest crisis of all hardly even features (in Pandemonium, it does not feature at all).
Then, Perry Anderson, doubtlessly one of the most impressive Marxist critics in Europe, writes almost 20’000 words about the first two instalments of the trilogy, expresses his disdain, yet does not even recognize the large hole gaping in the middle of his opponent’s argument.
In many ways, the situation would be merely sad and a bit boring, but I think it is actually crucial; crucial because Middelaar’s and Anderson’s mutual blind spot does obviously not derive from an agreement about what politics should be – there, it’s more or less Gliberalism vs. Trotskyism – but what history is.
Middelaar pompously states his notion of modern history – the one that might lead you to a non-metaphysical Golden Age – as one conceived of unforeseeable, fateful events crashing down on leaders, forcing them to deliver virtuoso improvisations which, in turn, might become hidden coups crashing down on the populace. As Machiavelli said: a combination of virtue and fortune makes the good leader. He said it more elegantly, but you get the gist. And Anderson agrees, or seems to; he only disagrees with the way the EU has improvised. The idea of history as an ocean of contingency, however, seems like the only true and properly modern, Machiavellian/Naudéan/Ankersmitian way to conceive of it, no matter the political position.
But somewhere in the dark – in the fog and the night – the Kojèvian grey owl rustles its feathers.
Let me paint you the portrait our very own van Dyck would paint of you. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a political leader. Don’t stand too close to the sunflower, please.
First, out of absolutely nowhere – out of fog and darkness – a disaster happens.
You think ‘holy shit, nobody could have seen that coming’, but you don’t think the ‘holy’ part because that sounds too medieval.
Immediately, you get ready to react, you scramble for resources, find them, push for financial relief for the Countries More Heavily Struck By The Disaster, realize that Keynes was right when he said that everything you can actually do you can afford, wonder if you remembered that one correctly, stop giving a fuck because Keynes is only a theorist – and this, this is action.
You do a lot of things, you alleviate the pandemonium, you save the day.
You order a few drinks to celebrate, you get absolutely shitfaced, and when you get up the next mourning you think ‘holy shit, nobody could have seen that coming’ although it’s like the 10’000th drink of your life, and you don’t think the ‘holy’ part because that sounds too medieval.
Like your hangover, Covid-19 is only an “unforeseeable event” under the condition that you have abandoned the notion of both an intelligible past and a seriously projectable future altogether in favour of “the event”. Far from being a strike of fate, the pandemic is a foreseeable by-product of a globalized capitalist economy – as widespread factory farming and deforestation lead to immensely favourable conditions for zoonosis, it was only a question of when, not if, a global pandemic would occur, just like it’s not a question of if, but only when the next one will happen. This point has been argued over and over again by scientists, leftists, and eco-activists alike, to whom the future was obviously legible enough to give clear warnings.
Of course, the place of outbreak, the respective disease vector, the timing and character of mutations, and the reactions of different nation-states to the pandemic are subject to an element of chance Middelaar is so fond of (although, indeed, definable to an extent), but to say that phenomena which include a stochastic element are utterly “unforeseeable” is a non-sequitur. They’re predictability is limited, yes; they are, to borrow Rumsfeld’s immortal dialectics, an unknown known – but that is a kind of known.
Middelaar does not stop there; not only does he turn the pandemic into something a lot less foreseeable than it was; rather, and, following Ankersmit, he turns the complete absence of foreseeability into the defining characteristic of the event, and the event into the only true reality of politics. All true and modern politics are politics of the event, and the event is the completely unforeseeable, sudden, abrupt, ambush-like moment. Anderson nods.
No wonder, then, that climate change does not even feature in such an account, because obviously, in this framework, climate change (1) is not an event – because it is very foreseeable – and (2) has nothing to do with politics – because it is not an event. The Fight of Carnival and Lent, now that’s an event, lots of little figures caught in chaos, ambushing each other with whatever they can find. The ice and the ash covering every surface, that creepily overcast sky way in the background, that’s not an event. That’s not even history.
VIII.
Thus, the past becomes unreadable, and the present simply a barely conscious fan the future keeps throwing shit at. Nobody could see that coming turns into the very heart of political epistemology, as chance reigns supreme. To leave the Middle Ages, Middelaar, following Ankersmit, recommends a world view in which everything that matters comes from an unimaginable above, as an earth-shattering blow of fate, in darkness.
As if there were no way of shifting focus. Icarus has no way of knowing that wax melts in the sun, so he falls, and we have no way of knowing that there is anything else on that painting except a little leg sticking out of the sea.
If one believes Middelaar, the EU has managed to get away from its naïve, child-like, Dark Age belief in a history governed and governable by rules only by abandoning any notion of predictability altogether. Everyone is always surprised, and if you’re not surprised, it doesn’t matter.
But where the future is completely unreadable, all politics turn into a game of reaction.
One can only hope that the sitter will be more intelligent than its portraitist, and have enough nostalgia for the planning ways of their early years to stay away from Middelaar’s irresponsible Romanticism.
And Ankersmit? He will armour himself with his catchphrase. Surely, only some medieval prophet cares about responsibility, preaching away in his speculative ways. The moderns, however, know that “[t]he well-being of society can sometimes only be achieved by crime”. In a movement as abrupt and paradoxical as befits the modern political actor, the most immoral of acts turns into the most glorious of them all; the irredeemable deed becomes the very image of redemption.
Fair enough, I guess. But this thought is predicated on the notion that a crime is already the most abject, the most inexcusable act.
Ankersmit is fond of the late 18thand early 19th century, the times of Kant and the Sublime, and of Metternich and the Restoration. Well, in 1804, Napoleon, greedy to crush the Royalist opposition within France, orders the abduction of Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon-Condé, Duc d’Enghien, from the latter’s exile in Baden. The Duc has not really had much of a say in any Royalist conspiracy, but Napoleon is out to make an example, and the Duc d’Enghien is unprotected. On March 20th1804, the Duc is tried and convicted. In the early morning of the 21st, he is shot. The Royalist opposition is scared into (temporary) irrelevance, but Napoleon’s reputation with the aristocracy abroad is irreparably ruined. Legend has it that one of his close advisors, Joseph Fouché, commented the whole thing as follows:
C’est plus qu’un crime, dis-je, c’est une faute.
It’s more than a crime, I say, it’s a blunder.