By BENJAMIN STOREY and JENNA SILBER STOREY [from a review of La Pensée Française à l’Epreuve de l’Europe, by Justine Lacroix in the Claremont Review of Books] – Americans have long believed that what happens in the Old World matters to us. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson quarreled bitterly over the French Revolution in part because they both understood the importance of the European example. But recently Europe has become difficult for an American conservative to take seriously. How, after all, could those drawn to the examples of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln bring themselves to pay attention to Europe’s recent endeavors to bring its once proud nation-states under the aegis of an insistently benign European Union—an entity at once ethereal and bureaucratic, not quite a nation, but not merely an alliance, issuing regulations on the ingredients in jam and the volume of Scottish bagpipes but twiddling its thumbs when Russia invades Georgia? While the American Left continues to draw inspiration from European ideals, the scorn many American conservatives reserve for Europe implies that for them the Old World has lost its relevance for the New.

We should not forget, however, that Adams and Jefferson thought European events worth arguing about not only because those events were at the epicenter of world history, but also because European political ideas are drawn from the same wellsprings as our own. The American Founders understood that European experiments in modern democratic self-governance stand to tell us something about possibilities and dangers inherent in our own political form.

Indeed, no student of modern democratic politics should overlook the significance of the current attempts to “construct” a new Europe.

Continued at the Claremont Review of Books | More Chronicle & Notices.