The Right-Wing Resurrection.(World Affairs)

Byline: Denis MacShane; MacShane is a Labour M.P. and was Britain's minister for Europe.

Conservatives rule almost all of Europe. What they will do with all their power is an open question.

With Silvio Berlusconi regaining power in Italy, Europe's right-wing parties can look out proudly on a continent they control. From north to south and east to west, Europe is painted blue. Social democrats hold ministers' jobs in coalition governments in Germany and the Netherlands, but governments there are headed by the right. Just three of the European Union member states--Britain, Spain and Portugal--are governed exclusively by the left. The arrival of Gianni Alemanno, a post-fascist politician, as mayor of Rome and the good showing of Boris Johnson, the populist Tory Euro-skeptic, as mayor of London completes the triumphant march of the European right into the corridors of power. In Brussels, a successful attempt by the conservative president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, to become president of the European Union at the expense of the left's leading contender, Tony Blair, would further confirm the dominance of Europe's conservatives as the continent's political masters. (A decision is expected later this year.)

Not since the 19th-century concert of nations, when reactionary conservatives like Metternich, Talleyrand and Wellington stamped hard on liberal and proto-labor politics that challenged kings and emperors, has Europe seen so many right-wing politicians ruling the roost.

A decade ago it seemed very different. A majority of Europe's countries had center-left parties in power. Bill Clinton genially presided over gatherings of Blair, France's Lionel Jospin, Germany's Gerhard Schroder and Sweden's Goran Persson to pontificate grandly on progressive governance. But these left-liberal talkfests produced no enduring political program or vision. True, some center-left leaders like Blair can point to job creation and growth. But they managed only to manage, not change, their nations. The 1968 generation found itself in office but uncertain how to use government power to make its wishes reality.

But now that Europe's conservatives have won so much power, what are they going to do with it? The answer, alas, appears to be not much. Postwar conservatism had big leaders with a clear sense of destiny, like Churchill in Britain, de Gaulle in France and Adenauer in West Germany. They had their differences and limitations but exuded a sense of authority and belief in a value system shaped by the horrors of the first half of the last century. These conservatives created social capitalism, resisted communism and upheld Roman Catholicism and Judeo-Christian values. The big thinkers of the day, like Friedrich von Hayek, showed the futility of the state's seeking to own and plan the economy. Raymond Aron stood as a tolerant rock against admiration for Stalin and Mao by intellectuals and French and Italian communists. Conservative Catholics like Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman created the European Common Market and forced the liberalization of economies, which allowed Europe to post growth rates between 1950 and 1975 that we now see only in Asia. Conservatives forged an Atlantic alliance and ignored the anti-American ideologues who argued that NATO equaled U.S. control of Europe.

Today's conservatives running Europe have plenty of ...