Rupert Cornwell: If only America understood Judt

I never met Tony Judt but I will miss him, badly. First and foremost of course there's the loss of his historical scholarship, his marvellous books and his evident relish of intellectual combat. Our lives, geographically at least, were also not dissimilar. We both lived for long spells on the continent of Europe before settling, by accident or design, in the US.

Then there were the two dozen or so essays-cum-memoirs that appeared in The New York Review of Books in the months before his death last weekend of motor neurone disease. Unsparing, intimate and elegiac, each alone was worth the annual subscription to the magazine. But I'll miss him most of all as the wisest student and interpreter of contemporary Europe on this side of the Atlantic – perhaps on either side.

That, it should be said, is not how he was primarily seen here. Judt was best known for his criticism of Israel's policies and his quarrels with the American Jewish committee. His caricature persona was of the ardent, youthful Zionist who turned into a soggy, self-hating Jew. However, anywhere but in his adopted city of New York, those skirmishes would have been a sideshow. Judt's unique value lay in his ability to explain, and more recently subtly promote, Europe in a land where it is largely derided. But circumstances, above all economic circumstances, are forcing a change in the debate. And Judt, I suspect, will soon be seen as a prophet.

After living for almost 20 years in France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and finally Russia, I've spent the best part of the past two decades in the US. Never have I been more pessimistic about America's prospects. Some argue that Europe must become more "American" if it is to survive and punch its weight in the changing 21st-century world order. Never have I been more convinced that it is America that must move, and towards a more egalitarian European model, where the role of government is stronger, if it is to flourish as in the past.

As both the deficit and unemployment grow unchecked, as double-dip recession looms, and as America's safety net for its most vulnerable citizens seems ever more threadbare, some at least are coming to think that way. Naturally the patriotic drumbeat continues, and not only from conservatives who believe the answer to every problem is a cut in capital gains tax. America, we are constantly reminded, remains the land of unfettered opportunity, the best place to live on Earth.

But tell that to the country's battered "middle class" (about 80 per cent of the population). Or tell it to Thomas Geoghegan, Chicago labour lawyer and author of the entertaining new book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? The right continent in this case being the "Old Europe" that Donald Rumsfeld was mocking not so long ago – and in particular Germany, the country most responsible for the disasters and barbarities that befell Europe in what is rightly known as the American Century.

Many Americans (and many Europeans, too) instinctively still feel a moral superiority to Germany. But Geoghegan argues that for the middle class, Germany offers a superior, less stressful lifestyle, and one at least as prosperous as its American equivalent. And in his pungent, and utterly honest fashion, Tony Judt seemed to agree.

That he was no moist-eyed Euro-idealist only strengthened his case. "It was in America that I felt most European," he wrote in one of the last of those New York Review essays, but the vantage point merely rendered his criticism more acute. The creation of a new Europe from the ruins of the Second World War was a signature achievement of the 20th century (and one, Judt acknowledged, greatly facilitated by the enlightened self-interest of the US as embodied by the 1947 Marshall Plan).

But the creature was far from perfect. Judt worried about the failure of the EU to reach out to its minorities, and its ever-present tendency, as evinced by the refusal to embrace Turkey, of building barriers against the outside world. Even more, he worried that hollow materialism had become the continent's guiding star.

Above all he worried about how even the Holocaust, that defining horror of Europe's 20th century and so powerful a factor in its shared and unifying post-war folk memory, risked being forgotten. For me, Judt's genius as a historian lay in his ability to see the past in the present. His fear was that in Europe's self-satisfied present, the past was inexorably being lost.

The continent, he wrote in Postwar, his luminous history of Europe since 1945, had developed "a serviceable model for universal emulation", not least because it had learnt from the horrors of its recent past. Indeed, Judt ventured, the 21st century might belong not to China or the US, but to Europe. But the post-ideological social democracy it had invented alone would not be enough. "The European Union may be a response to history," Postwar concludes, but "it can never be a substitute".

But can America, more ideologically polarised than ever, yet brought up to believe the future can only get better, learn from its own past? I doubt it. Rather, as Judt feared, the country may be trapped anew in what De Tocqueville called its "perpetual utterance of self-applause". Sadly, he's no longer around to help provide an answer. And that's the biggest reason I'll miss him.

A certain déjà vu

Call it what you will: the silly season, or the dog days of summer. But this year August somehow feels sillier, more dog-like and yet more ominous than usual. It's not silly of course if you're a flood victim in Pakistan, if you're digging yourself out of a landslide in China, or if you're choking in 38C smog in central Russia. But here the news is eerily reminiscent of a certain summer a few years ago. Then, as now, there were shark sightings off Atlantic beaches. Then, as now, there were scandals and mysteries involving various eminent figures in Congress. The August in question was 2001. We all know what happened next.

r.cornwell@independent.co.uk

For further reading

'Ill Fares the Land', by Tony Judt (Allen Lane, 2010)