Opinion Sur
If presents trends continue, Europe will become, as Spain once was according to Ortega, a geopolitical invertebrate: an animal lacking a backbone, like a big mollusk.
The dictionary defines the status of emeritus (a position I now hold) as a person retired from professional life but permitted to retain as an honorary title the rank of the last office held. In this article I wish to use the term to characterize a bloc of nations –the European Union– and explain how and why it came to be that way.
The great German thinker Hegel had an inkling of this threshold in reference to European philosophy. In his Preface to The Philosophy of Right, he wrote: “When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a form of life grown old. Philosophy cannot rejuvenate it, but only understand it. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.”.
Much has been written by pundits of all sorts in the world press and in the media in general about the impending doom of the EU. To the surprise of these doom sayers, it endures. However, as the Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa sang with a beautiful voice in Corazon libre: “ Durar, no es estar vivo corazón, vivir es otra cosa.”[1] (To last is not being alive, dear heart; to live is something else).
With the founding of the European Union, old Europe tried to rejuvenate itself. But as Hegel predicted, it could not be done. Instead the Union was born old. As opposed to Europe itself, the EU looks old without ever having had a youth. It was born that way. It’s a rare case of posthumous birth. In its premature old age it has been beset by maladies: economic crises, dissent, resentment of some members, and on the part of several, a desire to leave. Today it survives, and sometimes has a reprieve, as with the “good news” of the revival of economic growth. An old person has fewer arthritic pains on a good dry day. However, to last is not to live.
How does the EU last and why cannot it more forward? I will answer these questions by listing seven principal weaknesses of the Union as a geopolitical bloc.
The first is a crisis of representation. To put it bluntly, in most European countries people do not feel represented any longer by the established political parties –and even less by the European Union as a whole. As in the US, that sentiment is strongly felt by people in the working class and people who have fallen out of employment and cannot easily get back into the mainstream economy. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries these were called the proletariat and the lumpen proletariat. Today they are called the precariat and the structurally unemployed[2]. The result is the rise of what some political scientists call an “anti-party sentiment.” Theirs is a politics of anti-politics. The voters flee towards anti-establishment parties, both of the right and of the left, although the main beneficiaries are hard-right parties like le Front National in France, the Lega Nord and Cinque Stelle in Italy, and the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany.[3]
The political system becomes both fragmented and polarized, and the result is the inability to address major challenges such as a financial crisis (European sovereign debt crisis in 2009), a member’s risk of default (Greece in 2015), a military attack (Russian anexation of Crimea in 2017), or a secessionist initiative (Catalonia in 2017-18). As of this writing, the most pressing issue facing the European Union is immigration from the Middle East and Africa. The EU meekly tries to muddle through.
In a polarized political universe, if there are two main parties, government becomes deadlocked. If there are many parties, government becomes unstable through brittle and shifting coalitions. Each of these scenarios provokes further defections by voters, and more populist flight to the extremes. It is a vicious circle.
Moreover, when established parties fall apart or decline, the new parties that replace them do not have an institutional memory or a practice of statesmanship[4] to guide them, and the system as a whole is wobbly. Despite their defects, traditional parties were the gatekeepers of democracy –they selected leaders and filtered as well as articulated popular demands. But that kind of gatekeeping requires that parties have the strength to enforce discipline within their own ranks and the popularity to maintain voter good will. As Europe’s mainstream parties crumble, their gatekeeping capacity has, too.
Without these parties and their filters, a democracy fueled by social movements and referenda, starts –to borrow a line from Lou Reed’s song– “to walk on the wild side.”[5] Max Weber had this in mind –albeit in a milder form– when he wrote about a “plebiscitarian leader democracy.” In the end, liberal democracy breaks down without recourse to a coup. Instead, it backslides in stages, as demonstrated quite well in a recent study by Levitsky and Ziblatt.[6] Viktor Oban, the current prime minister of Hungary, calls it “illiberal democracy.”
On the corpse of a liberal democratic system, nationalist and populist parties multiply like maggots. Different parts of Europe have nationalist parties with different ideologies and goals. Most nationalist parties in Western Europe are described as right-wing populists. According to the European Council on Foreign Relations “as antisemitism was a unifying factor for far-right parties in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, Islamophobia has become the unifying factor in the early decades of the 21st century.” Some are left wing or civic nationalist parties, which advocate regionalism. Some have come to power, as in Austria, Poland and Hungary. Others have failed in the attempt for the time being, as in France. But all have a decisive influence in European politics –whether the populist dog wags the tail of a nation or the tail wags the dog.[7]
There is worse: many European countries simply cannot form durable governments at all. Twelve months ago, Northern Ireland found itself without a government of its own, after deputy first minister Martin McGuinness walked out in a row over a botched energy scheme. Germany has not had a new government installed following its inconclusive federal election in late September 2017, and the chancellor is still trying to patch up a coalition. It could still be months before new ministers are in place. In Belgium, a record for the longest period without an elected government in a democracy was set in 2010-11, after wrangling between Flemish and Walloon figures led to a 589-day vacuum. Spain spent the first 10 months of 2016 without a government, a hiatus which only ended when the opposition socialists effectively voted to allow the conservatives to form a minority government. The United Kingdom has a government that barely functions after the Brexit referendum.
What is true for the parts is true for the whole: the European Union does not know who or what it represents any more.
The second structural weakness of the EU has to do with economics. I place economics in second place for two reasons. On the one hand, I’d like to balance the overemphasis on the economic dimension of everything by the punditry and by public opinion, which often forget the reality of other dimensions of human life like pride, security, identity, mobility, and community. Quite some economists do not know how to deal with them; sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists do, as well as creative writers. The other reason is that an economic overview of Europe (also of the United States) helps me correct the first and more common impression of the populist surge.
Like the regions which resent being “left behind” prosperity and that feel threatened by migrants, sexual minorities, and liberal mores, the more prosperous and economic dynamic regions in Europe and the United States (more open to migrants, sexual minorities, and liberal mores) want more autonomy too, but for opposite reasons. The nation state –whether ensconced in Paris, London, Brussels, or Berlin/Frankfurt—often taxes their output and sends the receipts to other areas. Ask Catalonians, or ask people in the Veneto or in Lombardy, and they will tell you they are tired of subsidizing Galicia (via Madrid), Sicily (via Rome), East Germany (via the Bundestag), and other regions which are the equivalent of Appalachia or Mississippi in the US, in their relation to Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Seattle, Wall Street, or Boston’s Route 128. At the supranational level, ask German tax payers what they think of helping Greece. Some of these dynamic regions sometimes want to bolt out of their nation-states in the name of their own identity and high productivity. They may well benefit from self rule.
In short, under the umbrella of the new populism there are two very different and often antagonistic constituencies: vibrant post-industrial cities and regions on the one hand, and deindustrialized heartlands on the other. The gap between them has widened and the political upshot is paradoxical. Both resent a central political establishment –some for not doing enough for them; the others for doing too much and not too well at their expense. The result: both the idea of a national state and the idea of a supranational state are weakened. This is often (wrongly) described as “the end of globalization.”[8] In my view, globalization is here to stay whether the nation-state survives or not.[9] Trumpians beware: City dwellers may in the end revolt against the regions that hate them and yet enjoy political over-representation and an economic free ride.[10] American conservatives should be careful of what they wish for in their insistence on state rights. If California were to secede, Arkansas would lose much more than viceversa.
In the absence of cultural or ethnic homogeneity –as in Norway– “automatic fiscal stabilizers mark out a nation”[11]—as in the U.S. At the geopolitical level, it is precisely the absence of automatic fiscal stabilizers that has been the perennial weakness of the European Union. It has always been a federation of states and not a united states of Europe.
A single currency (the Euro) without fiscal consolidation is a recipe for trouble. This is the root of Europe’s economic difficulties. When launched in 2002, the single currency allowed the richest countries to lend to the poorest in a most profligate manner. This worked for a while –until the peripheral members of the Union maxed their credit and were on the brink of default during the larger world financial crisis. Without automatic fiscal stabilizers, the crisis became more acute. The creditor nations refused to suffer the penalties that follow bad investments or reckless lending schemes. Instead, the bailout of countries like Greece became a “bail-in”: make their people suffer in order to save the banks. Thereafter, the European Central Bank issued money in order to re-capitalize the banks through bond purchases that sterilized the giveaway from the spigot of fiat currency under its control.
Debt and fights over debt restructuring will be the Achilles heel of the European economy as long as the EU lives. The current disquiet is not over.[12] In the end, revolutions (especially bourgeois revolutions but working-class ones too) do not stem from the angriest people that are left behind, but from the more productive sectors that feel abused by a system that feeds on social and cultural regression[13].
The third serious weakness of Europe from a geopolitical standpoint is social and twofold. It may be reduced to two related issues: the inversion of the demographic pyramid (the ageing of the native population) and immigration.
As the population ages, the social services destined to nonworking seniors must be paid by the contribution of a shrinking pool of young productive workers. This demographic and economic deficit is managed with difficulty by a combination of an immigration policy and public debt. Both are problematic.
The public debt burden of European states is already very high, and the balooning of entitlement programs strains budgets and treasuries. The migrant flow of populations from the former third world to the South of the European continent is far from a good fit in terms of skills. In addition it produces ethnic, racial, and religious tensions, as the cultural and social integration of the immigrants is far from given.
To make matters worse, and for the reasons mentioned before, dysfunctional political systems have a hard time producing coherent plans or taking decisive and coordinated action. The result is, once again, political elites that muddle through in a context of disquiet and discontent. Because of its enlightened traditions of openness and liberal democracy, most European societies cannot envisage the illiberal migratory practices of the rich countries of the Middle East. The latter bring in large contingents of poor workers from Asia and Africa, keep them in segregated camps, and send them back when they wish, or when they have finished building the shining palaces of the oil emirates. A distinguished sociologist and colleague, upon returning from a tour of Abu Dhabi, described the emirate to me as “a police state in a shopping mall.” If the emerging illiberal democracies in central Europe ever succeeded in reproducing such model, because they lack the wealth and frontier mentality of petro-states, they would produce “a police state in a museum.”[14]
The fourth fault line that risks weakening and fracturing the European Union is the massive influx of migrants from war-ravaged lands and very poor countries. More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015, sparking a crisis as countries struggled to cope with the influx, and creating division in the EU over how best to deal with resettling people. The situation has continued to the point of this writing, although the flow has diminished recently. On the influx of refugees alone, the figures ad charts speak volumes about the dimensions of the problem.[15]
Here I will limit myself to debunk the notion that migrant flows have had a negative geopolitical effect. On the contrary, it is the geopolitical conflicts and their mismanagement by major powers –foremost the US and Russia, but also Israel, Iran, and other world powers—that have produced the displacement en masse of populations. Geopolitics determine migration and not the other way around, although there is a return in the equation. The strategic fiascos of the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, the opposite strategic error of non-intervention in Syria, the botched “regime change” in Libia, and the opportunistic meddling of Russia, Turkey and Iran in their aftermath, have made Europe the “collateral damage” of their games. The chart below, taken from the cited series published by the BBC will illustrate my argument. Local and outside powers play war games in the Middle East; Europe pays the price. The mutual recriminations, the beggar-thy-neighbor attitudes, xenophobia and Islamophobia inside Europe are the result. Bit by bit, Europe loses some of its core values, and the final upshot may very well be a Schengen agreement in reverse –an agreement to keep people out and in place instead of in and moving freely.[16]
Europe bears a serious historical responsibility for the tragedies in the Middle East. At present however, it is not a major player in the wars within the region: it is one of the victims of other powers’ ambitions and misdeeds.
As for military strength (the fifth point of reflection), on paper the EU seems to be fairly well matched with the US, except for two crucial factors. First, the US has troops, missiles, and bases in Europe and Europe has none on American soil. Second, the US has a unified command over its military forces, while Europe has a serious problem of coordination and compatibility between 27 different defence forces. For those who wish a graphic comparison of strength, I recommend the following website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCFkSvR1_1c.
In the past, US contributions to the NATO alliance have overshadowed European contributions. Under the American security umbrella, European nations could devote more resources to their welfare disbursements and to the modernization of infrastructure. Today, the US insists that Europe spend more in defence, while remaining tied to American strategic objectives. This does not augur well for the future of relations between the American hegemon and the European bloc.
In America, the enormous military budgets contribute, albeit in a wasteful way, to maintain the technological edge. The Pentagon is a thinly disguised semi-socialist institution that promotes technical and economic growth (its record of winning wars is however, dismal). In Europe, it is the state that invests in technology and lubricates markets. They are different models with different results.
In the end, Europe may succeed in integrating its military forces, especially when confronting a resurgent Russia, but will ultimate reach an entente with its big neighbor to the East.[17] As with politics and economics, so in military strategy Europe’s weak point is coordination, and the will to fight –when necessary– as a single bloc.
The sixth point leads us back to the first. With increasing nationalisms, both at the level of nation states and in the regions, there is little collective enthusiasm that can provide the indispensable glue to keep Europe together. In looking at the challenges of the future, Europe only looks at its past, and says: “Never again.” What Ortega y Gasset asserted about Spain in the 1920s (anticipating the future Civil War), also holds for Europe as a whole today: without an enthusiastic project that can make populations dream of a common future and an agressive but collective stance towards the outside, the Continent will remain, in Ortega’s expression, “an invertebrate,” an animal lacking a backbone, like a big mollusk.[18]
My seventh and concluding point is very brief. With increasing fragmentation and democratic backsliding, Europe will not fulfill any historic mission and will not accomplish a geopolitical balancing act. Occasionally, it will be united only by fear. But this leads me into the realm of speculation, at the risk of making predictions, which do not have a good track record in the social sciences. Who knows? new prophets may arise, and history may resume its path of providing surprises, this time more pleasant ones. In the meantime, Europe continues to be a great tourist destination –both the common kind and the version of tourism that American undergraduates call “study abroad”– with cultural diversity, excellent infrastructure, an extraordinary reserve of art objects, and good food. As Rick Steves[19] says in his TV program on Europe –“Keep traveling.” Europa emerita pleasantly awaits you.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwS3kd_sogY
[2] Research at the Oxford Martin School estimates that over the next 20 years around 40 percent of European jobs could be replaced by machines.
[3] After studying populist movements for decades in Latin America and beyond, I have come to the conclusion that most populist movements either emerge from the right or drift towards the right even when they emerge from other sources.
[4] In my recent visit to Italy, I was astounded to observe that the leading party –Cinque Stelle—aside from being led by a comedian, is staffed by people who have never held a regular job before. In the USA the incompetence of most Trump’s appointees and of the president himself is remarkable.
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p_cXfdz8Hw
[6] Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2018. New York: Crown).
[7] For a useful guide to the proliferation of populist parties in Europe, the reader can consult the following website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_nationalist_parties_in_Europe#List
[8] Consider Stephen D. King, Grave New World (2017. New Haven and London: Yale University Press).
[9] In the contest between national hierarchies and global networks, networks win. See Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower (2018. New York: Penguin).
[10] My long-term view is that the United States may in the end become a looser American federation. I explain this in my forthcoming book Strategic Impasse (2018. London and New York: Routledge). Here I am dealing with Europe.
[11] Janan Ganesh, “Europe could see more Catalonias,” Financial Times, 24 October 2017.
[12] On the future of European transfers, see
[13] The task of a true leftist party is to formulate a program of redistribution of wealth together with a productive insertion of a new working class. Everything else is right wing populism.
[14] Meanwhile we can expect only a step-by-step consolidation of a modest foreign policy by the bloc. http://carnegieeurope.eu/2017/12/05/is-there-hope-for-eu-foreign-policy-pub-74909
[15] See the charts published by the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911
[16] The Schengen Agreement is a treaty signed in 1985 in which internal border checks have largely been abolished.
[17] War-game scenarios are not favorable to either side. Prolonged stalemate could lead to the enlargement of war into a world war with catastrophic use of nuclear weapons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT7j6xU-Fjo
[18] Jose Ortega y Gasset, España invertebrada (1921. Madrid: Calpe).
[19] https://www.ricksteves.com/
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