Europe is not done, it is reimagining itself and will rise again
The historian Tony Judt, author of Postwar, a monumental survey of Europe between 1945 and 2005, did not include Ukraine as, properly speaking, part of his remit. He acknowledged its desperate history in the first half of the century and rather admired it for standing up to Russia and declaring its independence in 1991. But he devoted only three pages, out of 831, to its story before moving on, even more briefly, to the “poor, marshy region better suited to livestock-rearing than large-scale agriculture,” that was Belarus.
To Judt, the “real” history of modern-day Europe, beginning with the defeat of Hitler and the rise of the Stalinist imperium, centres on France and Germany, with Britain – his country of birth – accorded honourable mention. He gives short-shrift to the European Union, viewing its pretensions as ancillary to the narrative of competing nationalisms that, ironically and in spite of everything, have always provided the continent with a coherence – cultural, political and economic – greater than the sum of its parts.
The same remains true today. You only have to look at the map to realise that France and Germany hold the keys to the enterprise – whatever the enterprise might be. Italy and Spain are bolted on to the south, linked to Greece and the Balkans by the expanse of the Mediterranean. The Benelux countries form a kind of Franco-German annex while the five Scandinavian nations look down on the rest of us from their perch adjoining the Arctic Circle. Britain – stand-offish as ever – holds fast to the west, both linked to and separated from the mainland by its 26-mile-wide moat.
But look again at the map. Poland is huge, bound to its neighbours of the one-time Warsaw Pact as well as to the tenuously free Baltic states bordering an irredentist Russia. If Poland isn’t central to the story of Europe, then something strange is going on, rooted in the Soviet experiment that swallowed up once-proud states and, in effect, wiped them from the memory of generations living west of the Oder-Neisse line.
Today, the East is back, asserting its existence not merely as an obvious fact of life but as one of Europe’s principal guarantors. As the tragedy of Ukraine continues to unfold, Russia refuses to go away. By any reasonable economic (or even demographic) measure, it is ridiculous that our continent, with its advanced economy and 500 million inhabitants should once more have to measure itself by its relationship with Russia, a vast, creaking and three-quarters-empty agglomeration simultaneously dirigiste and feudal. But, as our friends in America would no doubt remark, the situation is what it is and the US is no less a victim.
The amount of blood and treasure being expended by the West on ensuring a future for Ukraine as an independent country is staggering, running into hundreds of billions of dollars/pounds/euros and Zlotys. Yet the outcome remains uncertain. Protected from the full force of Nato by its nuclear umbrella, Russia can do as it pleases, at least until it runs out of resources or – one would like to think – engages in a benign repeat of the October Revolution.
For the last thousand years or so, debate has continued over whether or not to include Russia as part of Europe. The phrase “European Russia” was devised to define the triangle bounded roughly by Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), Saint Petersburg (Leningrad) and Rostov-on-Don, with Moscow at its heart. But the rest of the country, with its more than one hundred minorities, 31 of them living in autonomous regions, goes on and on into the mist and snow until it finally disappears amid the ice floes and volcanoes of Kamchatka.
Back in actual Europe, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and the Czech Republic are powering ahead and are predicted to surpass the UK in GDP per capita sometime in the next ten years. Bulgaria appears to be more stuck in its ways and will take longer to join the party. Hungary, meanwhile, remains something of an outlier, dominated by its populist prime minister Viktor Orban, who, while counting Vladimir Putin as a friend, hates the EU and everything it stands for but is happy to take all the money Brussels will throw at him.
In normal times (if such a description means anything anymore), Poland’s place as the undoubted leader of the reconstituted East Bloc would have to overcome the scorn shown by Brussels in the face of its repressive government, dislike of a free press, opposition to Muslim immigration, anti-LGBT agenda, strict abortion laws and contempt for the judiciary. But all of the above have been trumped by the courage and determination displayed by Warsaw in the face of Russian aggression. President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki are now among the most influential leaders in Europe and, just as importantly, are well received in Washington.
Such are the fortunes of war.
Further west, beyond Austria and Switzerland (both keeping their heads down in the face of adversity), Europe’s outgoing inner-core of Germany, France and Italy are weathering a storm that shows no sign of abating. Not for them the fortunes of war. Instead, they pay the bills.
Germany, which for decades was viewed as the sheet anchor of the EU economy, holding everything in place, has ended up marooned in the past. Judt (who died in 2010) points out that the source of the former Reich’s postwar prosperity (other than Marshall Aid) was its adherence to the economic recovery plan devised by the Nazis in the 1930s, based on communications, armaments, optics, chemicals, light engineering and, above all, vehicle production. The social market economy of Ludwig Erhard in the 1950s and ’60s had its roots, he tells us, in the policies of Albert Speer, pursued, free from SS direction, all the way from 1948 to the financial crash of 2008.
Germany’s weakness, which has only become apparent in recent years, has been its unwillingness to move with the times, so that its once-dominant auto industry, on which so many people’s livelihoods depend, has ended up in the doldrums. Things change and Worsprung durch Technik is not what it was. In parallel with this, the country’s place in the world of IT and screen-based start-ups is well to the back of the queue. Industries that have earned steady profits for the last 70 years are having to reassess what they do for the first time since Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Only a fool would bet against their succeeding, but retooling an entire economy will take time as well as money.
In France, there has been greater flexibility. Emmanuel Macron is often seen as a failed president because of the social upheaval that has accompanied his attempts at social reform. But on the quiet he has overseen an effective update of the French economy, injecting state subsidies where permitted (and sometimes where not) and encouraging both startups and the growth of Paris as a global financial centre. He hasn’t worked miracles, but unemployment is down and growth has been maintained. National infrastructure, including rail and roads, has been boosted and the speed of the move to energy independence, based on both nuclear power and sustainables, has been impressive.
It could be that Macron will be followed into the Élysée in 2027 by none other than Marine Le Pen, at the head of the National Rally (formerly the National Front), but should that be the case the chances of a violent lurch to the right are felt to be slim.
Italy, similarly, is not the basket case that the media likes to pretend. Italian manufacturing is on the upswing and growth this year, at 1.2 per cent, is expected to top the European average. Giorgia Meloni, the new populist prime minister may not know much about economics, banking or industry, but she knows how to charm and butter up her fellow leaders and looks to be canny enough not to do anything daft.
Spain is a bit lost right now, unable to decide the best way forward. But, as last Sunday’s elections showed, it is not quite ready to take to the streets. It just wants all sections of society to be listened to and for the country to pull together – no easy task. But the economy looks to be sound. Immediately post-Covid, growth in Spain was running at 5 per cent. This year and next, with lockdowns lost in the rear mirror, that lightning pace is projected to fall to more like 2 per cent. Who in the UK, or Germany, wouldn’t take that?
Portugal, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, little Luxembourg and the Scandis are all chundering along, with Norway, the ultimate green energy hypocrite, plausibly on course to claim the title of World’s Richest Country.
And then, of course, there’s Britain, “of Europe but not in it,” or possibly the other way round. Britain, post-Brexit, has seriously lost its way and accumulated a mass of problems. But we have been here before and the likelihood is that by 2030, or thereabouts, we will have come out the other side and begun once more to prosper. Whether we will be richer and more influential as an independent country than as one of the EU’s most important member states is debatable. We are not currently regarded as a close friend of the family, more as the uncle at your niece’s wedding whose demeanour and decorum after a few drinks cannot be assured. But with the rise again of the nation state within the EU, the chance is there to insert ourselves once more into places which once seemed ours by right. We should seize it.
Put all this together and Europe ceases to resemble a patient etherised upon a table. There are serious issues to be resolved, not least the impact of climate change and the drive towards sustainable energy. Mass-immigration cannot be wished away or dispatched to Rwanda. It is not just the followers of Meloni and Le Pen and the citizens of Poland and Hungary who fret about what are too often depicted as the “migrant hordes”. Germans are equally concerned, as are the Spanish, Dutch, Belgians, Austrians, Swedes and Danes – even the Irish – to say nothing of the Swiss, whose Alpine heights have long since been bypassed.
But neither forest fires nor illegal arrivals by sea are confined to the nations of Europe. The twin phenomena are universal and require universal solutions.
It may have struck the reader that in this analysis of the continent we call home I have, like Judt, paid scant attention to the role of the European Union, most obviously the European Commission. This is because the EU is, in my reading, going through a much-needed period of re-evaluation. Events in recent years have shown that national governments look to themselves first and foremost when the chips are down. Brussels has proved itself a useful co-ordinator and facilitator, as during the financial crash and the pandemic. It plays an important part in promoting action on climate change. But its role in the Ukraine crisis has been marginal at best. It was Nato that stood up to Putin, not the Commission. It was to America, and to a degree Britain, that Europe turned instinctively when the skies darkened over Ukraine. The memory of that will last for years into the future.
What comes next in terms of EU institutional development is unclear. Macron says he wants “more Europe,” with himself, one imagines, as the putative number one giver. Germany’s Olaf Scholz may even go along with this, though not without looking over his shoulder. But Meloni and Le Pen are not alone in wanting less. Martin Amis once observed of the interminable prose of Don Quixote that there is no such thing in Cervantes as “next,” just “more”, which is the trap into which the EU could too easily fall. It is not inconceivable that a consensus will emerge in which the Single Market and the Customs Union, and all that go along with these, including tight market regulation and the Single Currency, should be the high watermark of “Europe,” with close cooperation in foreign affairs and the environment as a bonus. Who knows?
In conclusion, Europe is not “done”. It is not finished. It is not ready to accept museum status. America may be rushing ahead, powered by oil and gas and its astonishing ability to think big and act fast. China may be obsessed with overtaking it to become World Number One. India, East Asia and Africa are experiencing massive growth that will surely transform their status in the century ahead. But do not discount the Old Continent, Britain included – a family like no other. For the best is yet to come.
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