Neither centrists nor populists can solve Europe’s worst crisis since the war
Three years ago, or maybe a little more, Europe was quiet. It wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the state of things. There were issues. But It was, by the measure of the previous seven years, content. At any rate, whatever problems there were didn’t impinge much on most people’s everyday lives.
The EU was once more purring along. It had more or less sorted itself out after the shock of the 2008 recession, a contagion that, after all, had its origins in America and was by no means confined to the Eurozone. There was still work to be done on shoring up the single currency, the weaknesses of which had been cruelly exposed. Greece – hardest hit by the financial crisis – had a way to go, and Italy was showing mounting signs of stress. Against that, Spain, Portugal and Ireland were over the worst and on the road to recovery. In short, the lid had stayed on and growth overall was the story of the day.
In the UK, on course for a referendum on EU membership that just about everybody expected would be won by Remain, sterling had bounced back from the losses suffered in 2008-9, as had most of the nation’s banks. The unemployment rate was down to 5.4 per cent cent, and with the country’s growth rate the highest in Europe Britain boasted the fifth-largest economy in the world.
Balmy days. We didn’t even notice that winter was coming.
The first thing to hit us was an exponential rise in islamist terrorism (remember that?). Paris endured the worst of it. Hundreds died. There were also serious attacks in London, Brussels, Nice and a number of other European cities. For a while, the Continent lived in fear, giving rise, inevitably, to an outbreak of islamophobia.
Next came mass immigration from the Muslim world, torn apart as it was by war and insurrection. Wave after wave of small craft, filled with refugees and would-be migrants, set sail from Libya and Turkey, ending up, for the most part, in Italy and Greece. The resulting upsurge in resentment of this Arab Spring tide increased further when Angela Merkel, the then all-powerful Chancellor of Germany, decided, off her own bat, to admit one million Muslim refugees into the Federal Republic.
Populism, previously just simmering across Europe, began to boil over, not just in Germany and France, but in Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Scandinavia. To the East, the so-called Visegrad group (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) united to proclaim themselves Christian states that would not, under any circumstances, admit Muslims – a stance they have since maintained.
Populist leaders were not to prove the greatest economic thinkers of their day. They were shrewd enough at diagnosis (not enough public spending, too much taxation, too many immigrants), less gifted at how to put things right. There were several scares. It was forecast (wrongly) that the Dutch would vote in the right-wing lunatic Geert Wilders. But then they didn’t. In France, the Front National leader Marine Le Pen appeared set to make major gains – except that she didn’t. Italian voters flirted with the anti-immigrant right headed by former comedian Bepe Grillo, only to leave the government in the same less-than-capable hands that had steered them into their present predicament.
Next, however, came Brexit, a seismic shock so great that it almost went off the scale. Nobody had expected Leave to win. Surely, resentment of migrant workers from the East wouldn’t be enough to unpick 43 years of intimate association. I mean, who would have thought it? Suddenly, the European Council and Commission, presiding over the continent’s difficulties like a pair of clucking hens, began to shriek blue murder.
The British had to be brought to heel. If they were really serious about quitting the EU, they must be made to realise the sheer depth and breadth of the consequences. On the other side of the Channel, the competing camps, post-facto, stepped up their campaigns, with Leavers first exultant, then grim-faced, finally betrayed and bewildered, and Remainers desperately trying to row backwards, hoping against hope that sense would prevail and disaster be averted.
Eventually – eventually – a formula was devised that, if approved by the British Parliament, would keep the UK half-in and half-out of the European market. It was this that finally united the nation – against the deal. Leavers now wanted a No Deal, bare bones exit, while Remainers demanded a second People’s Vote that would (they surmised) render Article 50 null and void. In the meantime, the clock kept ticking and nobody knew what would happen next.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing in all this was that the UK’s impending departure turned out not even to be the most urgent question facing the EU. For, as ill-luck would have it, the arrival in Germany of Merkel’s million had given rise to a new party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the success of which in regional and federal elections emasculated the Chancellor and, in so doing, left the biggest economy in Europe rudderless at a time of escalating economic and political threat. Who, as 2019 hoves into view, would look to Berlin to bring order to Europe’s chaos?
Simultaneously, Italy began to implode. Its economy – beset by corruption, greed and incompetence – had been in decline for years. Now, however, with immigrant boats arriving on its southern shores practically on a daily basis, it was ready to burst. Which it did. A new coalition government, made up of the anti-immigrant, libertarian Liga party and the wildly populist Five Star Movement, took over in Rome, determined to shut the floodgates against immigrants regardless of the humanitarian cost and to spend billions of euros it didn’t have before, in effect, sending the bill to Brussels and Berlin.
Even then, not all was chaos. Thank God for France! was the cry that now went up. In Paris, a new leader, the 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron, had been elected President, crushing not only Marine Le Pen but the other traditional parties of right and left – so much so that he appeared to have carte blanche to to do as he pleased with a nation that, while grumbling, had yet to blow its top.
This year it blew its top. Macron, though insufferably arrogant, was bright, energetic and articulate. He was the darling of the chattering class and of the international community, which could recognise a saviour when it saw one. Sadly, the former banker’s reach far exceeded his grasp, and in his haste to revolutionise France and overnight make it “modern” along Anglo-Saxon lines he ended up alienating just about everybody. As President for the Rich (from whose ranks he came), he created a coalition of Forgotten France, calling into being the gilets-jaunes – the working class, the unemployed, struggling middle-earners and the over-stuffed public sector’s rank and file – who rose against him en masse and descended on Paris as an avenging mob. The City of Light became a battleground.
Can Macron recover? Can he learn from his mistakes? Possibly, Maybe. What is certain is that he can never hope to regain his swagger. The next time the French leader meets Angela Merkel or Theresa May, they will have the edge on him. You would have to be a member of the European Commission not to laugh.
But Schadenfreude can only take us so far. Given the accumulation of calamities of the last three years, where can any of us hope to look for succour? Who knows? is the answer. Not since 1945 has the world’s most civilised and sophisticated of continents been in such a mess. Those who talk of the sovereignty of nations don’t have the answer. Nor, it seems, do the integrationists. For the next five years, and possibly for a lot longer than that. Europe will be feeling its way. Good luck to us all.