Reports of the EU's Demise are Somewhat Exaggerated
But so, frankly, were the reports of its existence
I have a friend who’s a gifted writer, yet doggedly determined to remain in the shadows. It chaps my hide, because he always has interesting things to say, but I can never persuade him to go on the record. For today’s purposes, I’ll call him Bilibin.
He sent me (along with a few hundred other friends) this email the other day:
The project of a united Europe has never been objectionable to me, despite its status as an object of reflexive loathing on the American right. We’ve forgotten just what a bloody and dangerous font of violence Europe used to be—costing hundreds of thousands of American lives in the process—and so we forget that a deadening bureaucracy suffocating the Continent is a much preferable alternative to the historical precedent.
The European Union then is preferable to the bloc politics and subjugation that characterized most of European history. Churchill understood it, and the French strategists who saw the value in a superstructure tying Germany to themselves understood it.
Nevertheless the EU is dead. Consider:
The European Union was unable to prevent or persuade against the secession of one of its largest constituent nations.
The European Union was unable to play any meaningful role in a pandemic that ravaged several of its member states.
The European Union was unable to prevent or preclude a Russian military mission entering one of its major member states.
The European Union was unable to prevent, or bring consequences for, one of its member states from sliding from democratic liberality to authoritarian dictatorship.
The European Union was unable to muster the political will to withstand pressure from the Communist Party of China.
The European Union was unable to provide credible security guarantees to its member states as NATO went into precipitous decline.
The European Union is dead. Something will arise in its place. But this is Europe: we should be prepared for the possibility it will be something worse.
Is Europe Dead?
It’s geopolitics week here at CBIIT, so let’s examine these propositions.
Europe, the geographic entity, will persist, obviously, as will the larger, better-established nation-states that dominate it. In doubt is the future of the EU and the fate of the smaller, newly-independent countries—the ones where liberal democracy never took root in the way we’d imagined, the countries and regions the Kremlin now covetously eyes as once and future Russian satellites.
Bilibin is absolutely right that our best hope for Europe—within the confines of reality—is something like the EU. The realistic alternative is certainly not a continent of peaceful and thriving independent liberal democracies allied enthusiastically with the United States. Nothing in Europe’s history suggests this is possible.
I discussed this problem in this book, which I published in 2007. In some ways the book has held up surprisingly well, but in other ways, it is now painful for me to read. I lived in Europe when I wrote it. I believed I was writing about problems particular to Europe, but they were not. I was observing a Western crisis, not a uniquely European one; my concerns for Europe would seem, within thirteen years, almost quaint compared to my concerns about the United States. Nonetheless, Europe remains a critical region; liberal democracy has no future unless that future is secured in Europe.
I can’t look at that book without regretting the title. It had called it Blackmailed by History. But the sales force disliked it, and told me they couldn’t sell books with the word “history” in the title to a mass audience. I was naive, and grateful to have a publisher at all, so I gave in.
I shouldn’t have. The title they gave the book was absurd. Not only does it not tell you what’s in the book, it places the book—deliberately, I now suspect—in the wrong genre. There was an efflorescence of books at the time devoted to whining about Europe’s weakness. I didn’t realize this was a sinister trend, or that the new title allowed my book to be sold as a companion to these other whiny books. The attitudes these books suggested, or the sentiments they reflected, were clearly a harbinger of Trumpism. I should never have relented on the title.
So if you order the book, kindly print the cover above, and tape it over the silly one with the burning car.
Then please go to Chapter Nine, where I write about the fantasy of a United Europe. My point still seems to me roughly right. I wrote,
It is an old fantasy, of course. The great peace of Innocent III was the expression of just such a fantasy: the notion that the Catholic Church was finally in a position to introduce the City of God into the fractious European political arena. That attempt lasted no more than a generation. Why should this one last longer? No effort to unify Europe has ever succeeded. Most have ended in blood.
… the European Union is historically nuts. It does not reflect the will of a single nation-state, or the will of an empire, based on the ability of a central political entity to dominate its periphery, or some form of established European national identity with deep historic roots. Even the Austro-Hungarian Empire had in Austrian power—diminished as it was after 1866—a stable and powerful center. All of European history—all of world history—argues against a federation with no force to back it up and no way to impose its will upon member states. …
The EU is, in effect, an empty empire. The only national identities up for grabs are the old national identities of the chief nation states of Europe.
I was right, of course. But many readers took this descriptive passage to be normative, which is obviously insane. Bilibin is correct; the European Union became for inscrutable reasons an object of reflexive loathing on the American right. Usually, phrases like “deadening bureaucracy” are involved, but I have no sense that those who deploy these phrases have had any personal contact with this bureaucracy nor any idea, really, what they’re talking about. I myself don’t believe I’ve come into contact with this bureaucracy even once in some thirty-odd years of life in Europe.
Europe’s national bureaucracies range from deadening to superb; to the extent there is much of an EU bureaucracy at all, it is good enough, as bureaucracies go. Generally, if you are deadened by a European bureaucrat, it is a local one, not a European one; national politicians tend to blame the EU bureaucracy for their own incompetence, but usually, even a cursory inspection reveals who is really at fault. It is France’s own bureaucracy, not the EU’s, that drives French entrepreneurs batty; it is not the EU, but Germany’s own bureaucracy—its Federal Disease Control and Prevention Agency, to be precise—that is now efficiently rolling out Europe’s first large-scale Covid-19 antibody testing program.
I fear observations such as the ones I made in my book succeeded only in reinforcing American prejudices against the EU, whereas my aim was something to the contrary: I sought to explain how fragile, improbable, novel, and easily fractured these institutions really were, and thus how much luck—and determination—it would require to make this peaceful state of affairs continue.
Bilibin is correct to say—of course he is correct to say, he is more than correct to say—that the union of of the European people would be unobjectionable. It would be far more than that; it would be glorious. If brotherhood among men could at last prevail upon this tormented and schismatic continent, it would be a miracle. My point was not that I opposed miracles—only that they are, by definition, unlikely.
If you happen to have a copy of that book, go to Chapter Eight—“Black Market Nationalism”—and read the passage titled, “Doesn't Every Family Have One Like That?”
Bilibin is right.
This is Europe; we must be prepared for something worse.
He is right to say that Churchill understood this; right to say French strategists understood it; and right, though he didn't explicitly say so, that until recently, Americans understood this. That we’ve forgotten it is remarkable—a testament to the cliché that Americans lack entirely any sense of history. That cliché, like most clichés, became a cliché because it is true, and strikes me more and more as I grow older: There is something about the American temperament; it is baked into the cake, it is part of the deep structure of our personality, that allows us immediately to forget the past. This is a blessing, in many ways. But it would be even more of a blessing had we the self-awareness to realize that this is true, to appreciate the ways it may also be a liability, and to take care in some fashion to compensate for it.
I don’t agree with everything John Gray writes in this essay—particularly not with the his generally positive verdict upon the UK’s response to the pandemic, which has been even more shambolic than the rest of Europe’s. But I suspect the judgment he pronounces on the EU is about right:
The EU has responded to the crisis by revealing its essential weakness. Few ideas are so scorned by higher minds than sovereignty. In practice it signifies the capacity to execute a comprehensive, coordinated and flexible emergency plan …
Whether the desiccated neoliberal structures of the EU can do anything like this is doubtful. Hitherto sacrosanct rules have been torn up by the European Central Bank’s bond buying programme and relaxing limits on state aid to industry. But the resistance to fiscal burden-sharing of northern European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands may block the way to rescuing Italy—a country too big to be crushed like Greece, but possibly also too costly to save.
Gray notes the recent ominous warning of the Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte: “If Europe does not rise to this unprecedented challenge, the whole European structure loses its raison d’être for the people.” He notes, too, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic’s thuggish remarks: “European solidarity does not exist … that was a fairy tale. The only country that can help us in this hard situation is the People’s Republic of China. To the rest of them, thanks for nothing.”
The EU’s fundamental flaw, Gray argues—and he is right—is that when push comes to shove, it cannot discharge the protective functions of the state. The dissolution of the eurozone has been predicted time and again; every time—so far—it has managed to hang together. But with each crisis, the stresses accumulate; and these are a new set of stresses altogether. So he is right, I think, to say that the disintegration of European institutions is hardly unthinkable. Free movement, he notes, has already come to an end. Europe has failed completely, despite all the warnings, to formulate a cogent plan to admit migrants and refugees in some rational way, leaving it open to blackmail by Erdoğan, who before the pandemic was endeavoring to shake down the EU with threats to to flood it with millions of refugees. “Another migrant crisis,” he writes, “in conjunction with pressure on the dysfunctional euro could prove fatal.”
All true. This is the conclusion he draws, and my instinct is that it is apt:
If the EU survives, it may be as something like the Holy Roman empire in its later years, a phantom that lingers on for generations while power is exercised elsewhere. Vitally necessary decisions are already being taken by nation states.
He further predicts that with the center collapsing, and the left “wedded to the failed European project,” many governments will be dominated by the far right. I am not so sure.
Perhaps, but I don’t see it as especially likely in the countries that really matter. French and German citizens alike have been horrified by the achievements of right-populists in power in other countries, the United States especially, and I suspect these movements have, in both countries, been discredited sufficiently that while I would not say it’s impossible—I would never say that—I would say it's unlikely. Right-populism, meanwhile, has literally been killed off in Italy. The elderly of Lombardy were the heart the Northern League; those who survived seem unimpressed with populism in action:
As local families have seen elderly relatives dying alone in overflowing hospitals or nursing homes, the League-led regional government, which runs the health system, has faced increasing criticism from its own supporters.
“For us seeing the hospitals full and the ambulances that didn’t arrive was unthinkable,” said Ivan Dallagrassa, who runs a building company in Gorno near Bergamo and lost an uncle and probably an aunt to Covid-19. “At the last elections I voted for the League because I liked Salvini but I wouldn’t do it again.”
Populism, as I mentioned before, is particularly useless in a real emergency.
But certainly, Gray is right to warn that Russia will exert growing and ever-more overt pressure on Europe. As he notes, Putin has played his hand well in his showdown with the Saudis. The Saudis can only maintain a functional state when oil is at $80 a barrel. But Russians pride themselves in their genius for suffering; they can hold their state together at half that price. Russia has now consolidated its position as Europe’s energy overlord. Absent the kind of risk-taking and visionary policy for which Angela Merkel is not known, Europe will henceforth be locked into a subordinate relationship with a Russia that uses energy as its tool of choice for blackmail, and a Turkey that uses desperate human beings. As Europe continues to fragment, Russia and China will expand their influence. Why anyone on the American right would see much to welcome in this vision is beyond me; perhaps it’s simply as Bilibin says: Hostility to the EU has become an irritable mental reflex.
I do not believe the EU will collapse in some spectacular fashion. No, I think Gray is probably right. It will persist as a ghost empire—not unlike the Austro-Hungarian Empire Stefan Zweig describes, which in fact it has always resembled. It may continue to serve a few useful functions; it may persist as something like the UN, in so far as the UN may be used, by more powerful states, to provide legitimate cover for its actions (as, for example, in the Korean War).
Real power will be exercised by the states. This has always been so. The EU may continue to be used as a vehicle to stand up common trade policies, or common market standards. But Europe’s nation-states never abandoned their sovereignty in the way Americans imagined. After the terrorist attacks of 2015, for example, France sent a polite note to the European Court of Human Rights explaining, regretfully, that it would be unable to uphold its treaty commitments. It faced absolutely no repercussions for it.
The pandemic will accelerate the removal of fig leaves and make evident the principle that real power lies, as it always has, with Europe’s states. The process is already well in motion. Macron has been giving stirring speeches about repatriating French production lines and never again allowing France to be dependent upon other countries for medical equipment.
Germany has performed well precisely because it never expatriated those lines in the first place. The story of this is more complicated than people realize; I wrote a thread on Twitter explaining this the other day. History is destiny. France is preparing, too, to go full dirigiste, and I suspect this will be more popular than it should be. I suspect—particularly with the UK out—that the EU will somehow rewrite the rules to permit France to do as it will.
But the much more interesting question is the future of the Euro. Everyone now realizes it’s a failure and an albatross. But is there any way to get rid of it? Is it one of those things that, once done, can’t be undone it in a way that does more good than harm?
I’ll take up this question tomorrow. It is really now the question, and the future of Europe—whether it is the same, better, worse, or much worse—depends very much upon getting it right. Because the future of the United States, like it or not, depends upon getting Europe right, we would do well to offer our technical and diplomatic assistance.
Of course we are not likely to do so. Trump is in office, and his irritable—and irritating—mental reflexes are invariably instincts toward chaos, not order; he seems to take special pleasure, even, in pushing our allies toward chaos so better to gift-wrap them and hand them to our enemies on a platter. But perhaps some organs of the federal bureaucracy are working quietly and unnoticed to make themselves useful. One certainly hopes so: The world in which we grew up is at stake.
In a foreign policy discussion group Tuesday (to which group I have forwarded your article) I postulated that we can't predict what will happen in Europe except that we will be caught unaware and surprised. That we have no choice other than to act as a broker/friend seeking to reduce chance of European war; as a promoter of international collaboration to address international problems (migration and refugees, climate change, nuclear arms control); as a champion of self-determination (even if a populace determines to embrace autocracy.) We should replace militarism with diplomacy, offer refugee sharing and aid, seek to reduce dependence on NATO, renew START and the missile treaties, and banish political-money ambassadorships (no more of Sunderlands and Grenells.)
None of this will happen under the current administration and not quickly under the "defense" industry lobbying pressure. We must change the administration and the Senate by next January. Even then, change in our NATO and European policies will be a fight.
My fellow discussion group members accused me of being a woolly-headed naif hearkening back to wishful liberalism. But what other choices do we have?
The EU today is the same sort of diplomatic congregation of independent States that the US was under its Articles of Confederation. If the EU wants to survive as a nation-state, those independent States are going to have to surrender significant sovereignty to a central government that will have more authority than the Continental Congress had or today's EU governance mechanism has.
There is, though, another barrier at least as tall to the formation of a serious pan-European nation-state. That is the utter lack of homogeneity in political philosophy and in economic philosophy. North and South Europe, excluding France, Great Britain, and eastern Europe from either, have radically differing views of the role of government in men's lives, even of the purpose of money.
Europe would do much better as three, or so, separate nation-states, each consisting of like-minded current nations, then the few tied together in a pan-European free trade zone.
Several generations later--5? 10?--the idea of a single pan-European nation-state could be revisited with some possibility of success.
Eric Hines