Europe is in an unprecedented state of flux. After decades of virtual inanition, the continent is being convulsed by a ferment of change and conflict; the overused cliché “seismic” is, for once, appropriate. This turbulence might not be instantly discernible to a visitor travelling across Europe: the public institutions of government appear to be functioning normally; there is little overt sign of upheaval; at the Berlaymont building in Brussels it looks like business as usual. Yet a traveller in Europe might have registered the same deceptive perceptions in June, 1914.

Too many people talk about “Europe” when they mean the European Union. That misconception is particularly inappropriate in Britain. The UK is not a member of the European Union, but it is very much a part of Europe, culturally and historically. Add to that our trading links with many European partners and it necessarily follows that any convulsion in Europe has significance and potential consequences for Britain.

That is especially the case in the present instance, since the shock waves that are engulfing the continent are so multifarious and deep-rooted that they affect not only the institution of the European Union, but the very identities and destinies of individual nations, independently of the Union to which they are parties.

The assassination attempt on Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, might be regarded as an aggravated symptom of the present unrest. While the alleged attacker is being described as a “lone wolf”, the significance of the event lies less in any conspiratorial background than in the emerging reality that it is becoming open season on politicians. Last November, Alejandro Vidal-Quadras, a former vice-president of the European parliament and a co-founder of Spain’s Vox party, was shot in the face in Madrid.

Assassination attempts are hardly new to European politics – Gavrilo Princip’s killing of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife in 1914 provoked a domino effect, leading to the First World War and millions of deaths. In the post-1945 era, however, it was hoped that was one phenomenon that had been left behind. Without in the remotest way condoning the return of this barbaric practice, politicians should surely ask themselves whether it is, to any degree, a consequence of their own desire to control, ever more intimately, all the details of ordinary citizens’ lives.

An assassination attempt on a European head of government adds to the swirling turmoil of continent-wide disorder. Much of that turbulence is electoral and therefore legitimate. For more than a decade now, a process has been taking place, inchoate and piecemeal at first, but rapidly becoming more focused and formidable: the growth of so-called “populist” political parties across Europe. 

Their aims are often divergent, but one broad sentiment unites them: suspicion of the European Union’s integrationist ambitions, of its policy of inviting mass immigration into Europe, of its extravagant net zero climate prescriptions and of its attempts to impose a cultural agenda of so-called “European values” that in reality collides with the cultural sensitivities of many member states.

The key to this crisis, as it has now become, lies in the EU elites’ coining of the term “populist” as a pejorative description. Since it means “of the people”, and is effectively a synonym of “popular”, this word tellingly conveys the disdain felt by elites for the opinions of the people they govern. In that sense, it is amazingly indiscreet. It suggests that, behind the endless rehearsing of the term “democracy” (also from the same root meaning), the pro-globalist European establishment, epitomized by Davos Man, is contemptuous of popular sentiment.

That conviction has galvanised support for those same parties, ineffectual at first, but now drawing increasingly close to grasping the levers of power. If there was one individual, after Nigel Farage, whom the EU demonised and believed must at all costs be excluded from power, it was the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders. Yet he has now reached preliminary agreement on a four-party right-wing coalition to govern the Netherlands. By relinquishing his own claim to serve as prime minister – an extreme act of self-abnegation by a leader of the largest party in a coalition – Wilders seems poised to enter government.

If he and his colleagues do succeed in taking office, it will be a transformational moment for the EU. If there was one government that epitomised Brussels’ ideal, it was the Dutch government of Mark Rutte. In pursuit of net zero and on the plea of a supposed “nitrogen crisis”, Rutte set out to purchase compulsorily 3,000 Dutch farms, many of which had been in families for generations, and to reduce the “polluting” agricultural sector drastically. His ambition was to eliminate half of all Dutch farming, in the interests of “rewilding”, i.e. reversing the progress in food production over the past millennium.

Since the Netherlands is the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products – Dutch farmers keep 100 million chickens, 11.4 million pigs and 3.8 million cows – the consequences for global food security would have been catastrophic. The other motive for eliminating farmland was to provide housing for 400,000 immigrants per year admitted by the Rutte government. With that record, it is unsurprising that Rutte is no longer in government.

The already announced programme of the Wilders coalition encompasses severe restrictions on immigration that, if implemented, will demonstrate it is perfectly possible to control immigration if there is a political will to do so – which will greatly embarrass Britain’s Conservatives and Labour, but above all the government of the Irish Republic which is now blatantly in conflict with its own people over immigration.

Europe is on the cusp. In France, Marine Le Pen is poised to succeed the less-than-Jupiterian figure of Emmanuel Macron. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni is already in office. Viktor Orbán remains firmly in the saddle in Hungary and, although he has, for the time being, lost his Polish allies in the Law and Justice Party, even the government of EU apparatchik Donald Tusk has had to abandon its ultra-EU stance to remain in power. In Slovakia, the government of the hospitalised Robert Fico can provide a substitute for Poland in supporting any Hungarian blocking of EU budgets, for which the veto of two member states is required.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room: Europe is not only troubled by a sclerotic economy, excessive immigration and culture wars, it also has a real war being waged on its soil, in Ukraine. Both for Europe, as a geopolitical entity, and the European Union, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been an unmitigated disaster. It is an existential threat, in the event of a hegemonial Russia defeating Ukraine; the need to beef up defence forces and send assistance to Ukraine is a drain on economic resources; and, above all, it has exposed the lack of proper leadership or united purpose within the EU elites.

To that a new danger has recently been added. The United States – the Biden administration as well as the Trump insurgency – is either taking Brussels at its word, or is affecting to do so, in making clear dispositions to hive off responsibility for European security to the EU. With Donald Trump already threatening to abandon Europe to Russia if member states do not produce the defence spending mandated by their NATO membership, there is either a drift, or a feint at a drift, in Washington towards a semi-isolationism, cynically requiring Europe to stand on its own feet.

Such a policy is, of course, incompatible with America’s commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty, so we may credibly assume it is a diplomatic ploy rather than a strategic posture, but even the perception of it is encouraging to Vladimir Putin, especially when he looks over the German frontier at a country whose armed forces are still visibly the product of the stewardship of Ursula von der Leyen, during her time as German defence minister. 

That was not the biggest failure of German statecraft. It beggars belief that Angela Merkel, lauded for years by the elites as a genius in statecraft who put Metternich, Talleyrand and Bismarck to shame, should have invited a million African migrants into Europe and, when they arrived, attempted to outsource them to other EU member states. Germany and many other nations are still living with the consequences. No wonder the AfD party is expected to do well in next month’s European elections.

Those elections are likely to contribute further to the draining of electoral support and consequently power from the old globalist, integrationist, managerialist elites to the new populist forces. Even the European Council on Foreign Relations is gloomily forecasting “a sharp right turn”. It predicts that “Anti-European populists” will come top of the poll in nine countries (Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia) and gain second or third place in a further nine (Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden).

The Council expects the main winner will be the right-wing Identity and Democracy (ID) group, gaining 40 seats, for a total of nearly 100 MEPs. It forecasts the ID and ECR groups together will account for 25 per cent of MEPs and have more seats combined than the establishment EPP or the S&D for the first time. This, the Council believes, will have a significant effect on EU policy, particularly with regard to Brussels’ “ambitious” action to tackle climate change, i.e. the European Green Deal.

Within the wording of the Council’s report, casually expressed, is a major clue as to how this situation has come about: “While the parliament is not the most significant EU institution when it comes to foreign policy…” There you have it. Unselfconsciously and in matter-of-fact terms, the relative impotence of the one directly elected EU institution, the one that in developed democracies, because of its representative nature, has the final say on public policy, is stated in terms of relief. The fact that, 72 years after its creation, the European parliament remains inferior to unelected elements of the EU supplies part of the explanation for the continent’s current instability.

Britain, though not an EU member, has a dog in this fight. European security and prosperity (or the lack of it) has an effect on our fortunes. For a long time it was assumed that the eventual demise of the European Union would be provoked by its contrived currency, forcing such disparate economies as Germany and Greece into a single regime. Now, with war raging in the Ukraine and Russia looking increasingly like the winner, European unity is imploding under the stress of geopolitical tensions and domestic political particularism.

Whatever the eventual outcome of this turbulence may be, it is difficult to see the “ever closer integration” plan that has been at the heart of the European project since the signing of the Treaty of Rome surviving the now dominant forces of disintegration.

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