Eyes On The Past.(Special Report)(Cover story)

Byline: Mark Lilla; Lilla is Professor of Humanities at Columbia University

Europe's '68ers are forever fighting yesterday's battles.

When Germany was in the throes of what we now call "the '60s," conservative commentators coined an unlovely term to describe the unlovely radicalism of the time: verspatete Widerstand. It means "delayed resistance." The thought behind it was that the young Germans kidnapping CEOs, throwing bombs and beating up policemen were unwittingly acting out the drama of resistance to Nazism that never took place in the 1930s. They viewed politics as a kind of pantomime in which public officials were fascists, businessmen were collaborators, schools

were prisons, soldiers were murderers, and parents were the secret police. They could not see that Germany had become a healthy liberal democracy, a pillar of the West. In fact, they weren't terribly interested in the present. What excited them was the chance to re-enact the shameful history of modern Germany, casting themselves as heroes of a cinematic remake in which they would redeem the fatherland.

Delayed resistance goes a long to way toward explaining the psychodynamics of this European generation. Accepting the peace and prosperity of the new Europe seemed to entail forgetting the reality of fascism and genocide in the past, burying it. Anger about this massive cover-up manifested itself in the '60s with the student left's contempt for Western liberal democracy, along with a romanticization of Third World tyrannies. Many of the young people in those fetching pictures of street demonstrations in Paris and Berlin shouting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh," while wearing Che Guevara T shirts and carrying Mao Zedong's Little Red Book meant what they were saying: they would have preferred Ho, Che or Mao to their democratically elected leaders. Only in the late '70s, after Cambodian and Vietnamese boat people brought out tales of butchery, did they experience a crisis of conscience.

Now the talk was of universal human rights and the need to defend them, through velvet revolutions if possible, with international armed forces if necessary. In the '80s and early '90s, this ideal did some good. Western European governments timidly chose not to side publicly with anticommunist movements in Eastern Europe, for fear of angering the U.S.S.R., but the '68ers openly supported the protesters of Poland and Czechoslovakia. When the Balkans descended into war, they argued for intervention. But this was delayed resistance, too. The '68ers were resisting their youthful selves, those long-haired naifs who cheered for Che and jeered at soldiers, no matter what they were fighting for.

Today the most difficult issues facing Europe -- immigration and terrorism -- have little or nothing to do with these ancient squabbles. European countries find themselves host to millions of new immigrants, predominantly Muslim, and have not managed to assimilate them or their children into mainstream society. This is an unprecedented situation in modern European politics. And if ever there was a need for fresh thinking, it is now. Yet once again, the '68 generation is mired in the past -- and more than one past. For the past three decades, the European left has viewed the immigration problem exclusively through the lens of past anti-Semitism and colonialism. Immigration was to be welcomed as a way of making up for past sins. Anyone who raised doubts about integrating the newcomers was branded a racist, or worse. Expressing frustration with the changing face of Europe fell in the '80s to unsavory right-wingers like Jean-Marie Le Pen in France or Jorg Haider in Austria. Solidarity with the immigrants seemed the noble course, and the '68ers could be found arranging asylum for those ...