The EU’s crisis has been multifaceted. Vitriolic invective has at times reached unprecedented levels between national governments in some areas of policy; economic strains persist; barriers and controls are reappearing at borders between member states; and the unsettling possibility of a populist-driven turn to more insular and intolerant identities discolours politics across the continent. The existence of so many different elements of crisis together suggests that there is something structurally amiss with European integration.
This chapter outlines the different strands of the poly-crisis. It assesses how far the crisis represents a systemic challenge to the current template of European integration. My aim here is not to delve deeply into each individual area of policy, but rather to explain how each dimension of the crisis reveals common, structural faults in the process of European integration – and to show that these systemic failings persist, even now that governments and EU institutions feel that the worst is over. This is the chronicle of the EU’s near-death – if not precisely foretold, then certainly a long time in visible gestation.
There has, of course, been exhaustive commentary on the UK’s vote to leave the EU. What is relevant to this book is not the detail of the Brexit campaign per se or internal post-referendum debates in the UK, but how Britain’s decision rebounds on the broader process of European integration.
Many EU leaders and officials insist that Brexit both requires and enables the Union to accelerate towards deeper integration. Since the summer of 2016, a number of proposals have been forthcoming for a rapid move to political union. The French and German foreign ministers released such a plan in July 2016. Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and party leaders in the European Parliament have forwarded this line of argument many times. Some experts are also convinced that the only solution after the UK’s decision is to move ahead with political union, against public opposition if necessary, and leaving aside more flexible integration templates.1
The increasingly acrimonious politics of Brexit have made many EU elites dig in their heels ever more firmly against flexible adjustments to the integration model. Key players such as Juncker, Council president Donald Tusk, chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and European Parliament party leaders have all explicitly insisted that the scope for à la carte, pick-and-choose flexibility must be drastically limited as a result of the UK vote. Their logic is that the European project must now be shored up by ensuring that Brexit does not open the way for any broader questioning of the EU’s existing cornerstone structures.
The positive line of thinking is that Brexit represents an opportunity for the EU, removing the most contrarian member state and clearing the way for deeper and more effective integration. Optimists note that polls carried out since the referendum suggest that citizens in other countries look at the chaos in Britain and now reject any idea that leaving the Union could be good for their country.2
Behind the official views, however, Brexit has also widened differences between member states over the EU’s future. Some politicians have put forward a contrasting line, namely that integration needs to slow down and be rethought while the EU acts as flexibly as possible in constructing a positive relationship with the UK. Central and Eastern European countries have been vocal in pressing for a repatriation of powers to national governments and insisting that France and Germany be prevented from using Brexit as a platform from which to accelerate moves to political union.
Brexit forces European leaders to decide more clearly whether the European project requires more or less flexibility. Given that the UK already had several opt-outs, some say that Brexit shows that so-called differentiated integration ultimately cannot work because of the tensions that flow from having different memberships and decision-making arrangements across policy areas. Others say it makes such flexible arrangements even more necessary. Many feel that if the EU had shown the British government greater flexibility in the months prior to the referendum then the UK would have voted to remain – a sobering lesson of possible relevance to other member states.
In a sense, Brexit forces differences between other states over the EU’s future direction into the open. The UK is no longer the protective scapegoat for other doubters to hide behind, and this reveals more clearly that in nearly all policy areas there are one or more member states that object to deeper integration. An ethos of difference and divergence has dominated debates since the referendum, militating against a clear new momentum towards any refounding of European integration.
Notwithstanding the rhetoric about Brexit being harnessed as a catalyst for deeper integration, governments’ debates are for now still embryonic. German chancellor Angela Merkel seems to have gradually backed away from firm commitments to political union since the referendum. Far from leading a clear EU-reform agenda, Germany and France have, at least until mid-2017, been in ‘wait and see’ mode, unsure about how to adjust their own partnership in light of post-Brexit uncertainty.3 As we will see later in the book, French and German ambitions may be set to rise in the latter months of 2017. But for now, most member states are eager to find ways for Brexit to proceed without a general process of treaty change, as any such revision would open a Pandora’s box of governments adding different demands to the necessary process of reform.
Cutting across such differences, the UK’s decision certainly puts aspects of the European project on the defensive. While the referendum’s outcome was the result of peculiarly British concerns and the idiosyncrasies of UK domestic politics, it raises questions applicable to other countries too. To many, Brexit symbolises the dysfunctional nature of the EU system of governance and how this was unable to react in a flexible way to allow a member state narratives and institutional arrangements more tailored to its particular needs. Even if one believes that British voters simply made a terrible decision, Brexit has shone a harsh spotlight on the aspects of European integration that have become problematic in a more general sense across the continent. Some writers argue that it reveals the EU’s broad failure to grasp and deal with the social adjustments required by EU policies.4
No clear line has taken shape on how to address such challenges. The UK’s June 2017 election failed to clarify the likely parameters of Brexit. As the Conservative government hung on without an overall majority, these questions about the relationship between Brexit and the general shape of future EU integration were even further from being broached. The apparently dire situation into which Britain has now dug itself renders this failing increasingly and painfully apparent.
The significant point in the context of this book’s subject matter is that the UK referendum could have helped usher in a new incarnation of European integration, but in practice has had almost the opposite effect. With most of the focus on the nitty-gritty of trade and migration rules, so far neither the UK nor any other European government has forwarded ideas for how Brexit might ignite a new vision of cooperation involving a full range of different institutional possibilities.5 British politicians are somewhat parochially immersed in the details of the UK’s own future relationship with the Union – the balance between so-called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Brexit in the matters of trade and free movement. And for their part, EU leaders appear to be more nervous about any fundamental rethink and indeed more confident that this is now less necessary. Much European commentary now takes the form of harshly berating the UK for its follies and asserting that the EU is in much better shape than Britain, with much less critical self-reflection on how European integration itself needs to change.
Prior to the Brexit referendum, the EU was already reeling from the challenge of absorbing an unprecedented wave of refugees and migrants. In 2015, more than 1 million refugees and migrants came into Europe, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and high numbers continued to arrive throughout 2016 and into 2017. This influx has further eroded the foundations of EU solidarity and cooperation, unleashing bitter recriminations between member states. The Financial Times called the refugee and migrant surge ‘the most serious emergency in the EU’s history’.6
The crisis overwhelmed the EU’s so-called Dublin asylum system, under which refugees are supposed to register in the member state where they first arrive. As this became impossible for Greece and Italy to manage, interior ministers adopted an alternative package to relocate 160,000 refugees across member states. However, most governments have declined to implement this agreement, which was passed by majority vote, not unanimity. Central and Eastern European countries, in particular, have objected to the way that the larger member states imposed the deal on them. Most states have refused to support a longer-term comprehensive mechanism for distributing refugees and migrants within Europe; they blocked the Commission’s latest proposals for a quota-based system in summer 2017.
In the midst of the influx, many member states rushed to find a way of controlling their borders – the very antithesis of the EU’s core ethos. Hungary, Austria and Slovenia have built fences; Hungary has extended its fence significantly in 2017. Eight Schengen countries – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Slovenia and Sweden – either reintroduced or strengthened border controls (some external, some internal to the Schengen area). After extending these measures several times beyond their initial time limit, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Norway still have the controls in place in 2017. In May 2017, the Commission said the five states could extend their border controls for another six months; while this was set to be the last such renewal, Denmark said it would keep controls indefinitely.7 Angela Merkel won plaudits by initially opening Germany’s borders to refugees, but other countries then closed off the so-called Balkan route to make sure that in practice refugees could no longer get through to Germany – a move that caused chaos in states further south.
Even the EU’s most open and liberal states have implemented curbs. All Nordic governments tightened asylum rules over the course of 2016. Sweden introduced checks at its border with Denmark, and Denmark imposed controls at its border with Germany. Sweden, Finland and Denmark placed severe limits on their intake of asylum seekers. Driven by concerns over migration and refugees, in December 2015 the Danish people voted against their country joining the EU’s justice and home affairs policies, in a referendum whose result was widely interpreted as another blow to the wider European project.
A chain reaction spread south. As northern member states introduced border controls, this caused bottlenecks of refugees in central Europe that in turn restricted crossings from southern member states, who became angry that the responsibility for managing the refugee surge was being pushed onto them. Several EU states threatened to eject Greece from Schengen to stop refugees moving northwards. Some accused southern member states of simply pushing people into northern Europe.
Much of the challenge of dealing with the influx has fallen on the EU’s most broken state. The Commission proposed 700 million euros of aid to help Greece manage the refugees. However, when Greece asked for flexibility on its crisis-related bail-out conditions in order to have more funds available to manage the inflow of refugees, Germany refused to grant this. The Commission was harshly critical of Greece for its record in managing arrivals, just when Greece itself was overwhelmed and appealing for help.8
In early 2016, Austria organised a ministerial meeting with all Balkan states, pointedly without either Greece or Germany, insisting that unilateral measures were necessary due to the lack of an EU policy. In a move of unprecedented symbolism for how far the Europe project had fractured, Greece recalled its ambassador from Vienna. In February 2017, 15 central European and Balkan states met again to draw up plans to strengthen further measures against border crossings.9 Germany tightened up its rules dramatically, granting only a quarter of Syrian refugees the right to remain in 2016, down from 99 per cent in 2015.10
Citizens in the member states most affected by the refugee flows today say they attach more priority to the control of their national borders than to the principles of European solidarity, believing that the latter have failed them in this crisis.11 More broadly, polls show that a large majority of French (72 per cent), Germans (66 per cent) and Italians (60 per cent) support the re-establishment of border checkpoints.12 Citizens have reacted highly critically to the EU losing control over refugee and migrant inflows.13
Italy has proposed a common EU migration bond to help spread the costs of managing such large numbers of arrivals; other states have not agreed to put funds into such an initiative to help southern states. Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi threatened to veto the whole EU budget in protest at member states’ lack of solidarity with his country. In preparation for the March 2017 sixtieth-anniversary summit in Rome, which was supposedly aimed at reviving the EU, the Austrian government threatened to stop financial contributions to member states like Hungary and Poland that refused to accept their migrant quotas. And indeed, in June 2017, the Commission moved to impose sanctions on the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland for refusing to take their share of arrivals. As of summer 2017, only 18,000 of the promised 160,000 refugees had been relocated.
In February 2017, more than 200,000 people demonstrated in Barcelona because the Spanish government had accepted only 700 refugees out of its 17,000 quota. Showing how internal debates have come unhelpfully to mix up questions of free movement, migrants and refugees, Eastern European states feel angry that they are being pushed into accepting refugees by the same northern countries that refused access to Eastern European workers for a decade after accession. Northern states insist that the hypocrisy runs the other way: while the likes of Poland and Hungary celebrate free movement for their own workers, they refuse to apply a similar logic of hospitality to migrants coming into their economies. When French politicians have been especially critical of the Visegrád states (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), the latter have responded angrily that they are paying the price for reckless and unilateral French policies in Syria and Libya that have contributed to the wave of migrants coming through central and Eastern Europe.
The inflow of refugees eased after mid-2016, largely due to the EU striking a deal with Turkey. This accord allows the EU to return refugees to Turkey, in return for accepting asylum seekers through legal routes and a hefty 3-billion-euro aid package (with another 3 billion promised to Turkey for a second stage of cooperation). However, the crisis is far from solved. One year on from the deal, in March 2017, fewer than 1,000 people had been returned to Turkey and more than 60,000 were still trapped in Greece. Migrants moved towards central Mediterranean routes in 2016 and the early months of 2017. Far from helping Italy with this, France and Austria tightened border controls to prevent refugees leaving Italian territory. As Italy, in turn, has tightened controls and brought down the numbers arriving on its shores by September 2017, arrivals into Spain through west Mediterranean routes have begun to increase. Pierre Vimont, who led preparations for a key migration summit in November 2015, acknowledges that even if new controls have brought inflows down from their peak, they have not stemmed the mounting antipathy between member states.14
Many politicians, policy-makers and commentators have suggested that all this reveals fault lines in European integration that extend well beyond the refugee issue itself. Jean-Claude Juncker warned that if the principle of free movement collapsed, other areas of EU cooperation would fail too. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, ventured that the refugee crisis posed ‘a risk of disintegration’ and of the EU committing ‘suicide’.15 Angela Merkel argued that the impact of the refugee crisis would be felt on the whole process of EU integration.16 Some polls showed that by 2016, citizens saw the refugee influx as by far the most serious challenge to EU cooperation.17 Prominent writers on EU affairs concur that the refugee issue has weakened some core pillars of the whole integration process.18
The refugee challenge has gone hand in hand with heightened concern about security. Terrorist attacks shook Paris in January and November 2015, killing nearly 150 people. Attacks in Brussels in March 2016 killed more than 30. An attack in Nice in July 2016 was followed by a series of smaller incidents in Germany and France over the summer. Attacks of a somewhat different nature then took place in Berlin at the end of 2016, London in March and June 2017, Stockholm in April 2017, Manchester in May 2017 and Barcelona in August 2017. Radicals linked to Islamic State (IS) were responsible for all of these attacks, and the organisation regularly threatens a wave of further violence.
The EU agreed a new European Agenda for Security in 2015 and by 2017 had introduced six implementation packages to take this forward. It appointed a commissioner to oversee a new concept of ‘Security Union’, designed to catalyse security coordination. Europol detailed what was a peak in terrorism attacks in Europe in 2015 and 2016 (although overall terrorist-related deaths were still lower than in the 1970s). Polls regularly show that security and terrorism are now citizens’ main worries, especially in France.19
Security challenges are deeply interwoven with other aspects of the poly-crisis. Terrorist experts point out that causes of European Islamist radicalisation overlap with the wider sense of alienation among parts of the European population that has been a driving force of the EU crisis.20 In addition, polls indicate that most citizens see insecurity and terrorism as inextricably bound up with the migration and refugee challenge – albeit on questionable grounds, as we will see later.21 After the Paris attacks, the French government explicitly redefined the refugee influx as a security threat.22 Central and Eastern European states protest that Germany has offered temporary protection status to migrants and refugees without undertaking security checks.
Security services across Europe say they have disrupted dozens of planned attacks. French politicians fear that thousands of French citizens are at risk of radicalisation. The then French prime minister Manuel Valls warned: ‘The European project can die, not in decades or years but very fast, if we are unable to face up to the security challenge.’23 Europe is importing insecurity from elsewhere, while the number of EU citizens going to fight for IS has also continued to rise. Not only has the existing EU model failed to stem the instability encroaching from outside, but in addition Europe seems to be contributing to the underlying drivers of radicalisation and terrorism – a huge dent in the credibility of what is always presented and celebrated first and foremost as a project of peace and security.
The terrorist attacks have raised doubts about some of the core premises of European cooperation. The attacks suggest that the EU has failed to provide basic security to European citizens. The Commission admitted in a March 2017 report that free movement rules allowed the perpetrators of terror attacks in France, Belgium and Germany to cross borders without detection.24 Europol’s remit does not cover law enforcement or core counter-terrorism work; it cannot stop suspects coming into Europe or detain them, but merely facilitate information exchanges on known radicals. EU terrorism legislation in 2016 included a new, sweeping definition of terrorism.
After the Paris attacks, the French government imposed a state of emergency, tightened terror laws and temporarily reinstated security checks at the country’s borders. In June 2017, President Macron indicated that he would lift the state of emergency but make its counter-terrorism provisions permanent. The Polish government said it was the security context that prevented it from accepting its allocated quota of refugees. The Investigatory Powers Act passed into law in the UK in November 2016 dramatically extends the British government’s powers of surveillance. The three attacks in the UK in the first half of 2017 led Theresa May’s government to promise an intensification of security measures. In June 2017 France and the UK agreed new counter-terrorism cooperation, especially to clamp down on the problem of online radicalism. Member states are focusing increasingly tightly on the imperatives of national security.
Fears have intensified of a so-called ‘third generation’ of terrorism, with IS morphing into a more decentralised grouping focused on attacking Europe.25 Even if the perception of danger may exceed its actuality, in some parts of Europe radicalism has intensified a new psychology of fear, mistrust and protective introversion, a new cognitive or identity insecurity. While the EU has always been about the renunciation of security-based ‘bordering’, many now argue that European cooperation needs to change dramatically in order to take on board just such a security logic. Eurosceptics have increasingly used the argument that today the EU project is making citizens less rather than more secure. In a confused way, the EU has become a target for those pushing back against the general notion of multiculturalism.
In addition to terrorism, other security challenges have also intensified and placed strains on European cooperation. Many European diplomats fear that Russia is intent on undermining the core tenets of the whole European security order, well beyond its actions in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Differences exist within the EU over what Russia’s ultimate intentions are, as it builds up its military arsenal, threatens Baltic states with military over-flights and engages more aggressively through propaganda and misinformation in the politics of European states. But there is a general agreement that Russia’s current truculence towards the West constitutes another security dilemma and another strand of the EU’s poly-crisis that governments have struggled to contain in the last four or five years.
Security challenges may provide a powerful fillip to deeper integration. The new EU ‘Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy’, agreed in June 2016, acknowledges how insecurity and vulnerability now impinge upon EU integration. This strategy aims to build a stronger interface between the health of the Union and the way in which the EU addresses external threats. This is very different in tone to the previous European Security Strategy in 2003, which was all about the EU projecting its transformative experiences abroad. The 2016 strategy is more focused on the need for a core defence of the EU itself, through a foreign policy tightly oriented towards ensuring tangible security gains for EU citizens.
When French president François Hollande, Merkel and Renzi met for a mini-summit in August 2016, they homed in on security as the most important area for upgraded cooperation. At the September 2016 summit in Bratislava, leaders promoted a new leitmotif of ‘protection’ as the guiding principle for EU reform.26 Seven Mediterranean member states gathered for their first summit in September 2016 and declared security, the control of borders and counter-terrorism to be the Union’s new top priorities.27 Council president Donald Tusk has been especially adamant that a more effective ability to provide citizens with security must be the leading edge of an EU relaunch.28 Crucially, Donald Trump’s actions have intensified this EU security dynamic. In June 2017, the EU launched major new proposals for a Defence Fund and mechanisms for military missions (these are explained in the next chapter).
With Brexit, insecurity and refugees dominating the headlines, the spark that lit the poly-crisis has receded into the background. The quest to keep the single currency intact has for now succeeded and the EU has clawed itself back from the depths of economic recession. But the euro’s core imbalances and design flaws persist. And the broader implications of the euro saga are relevant to understanding the apparent exhaustion of traditional approaches to European integration. The structural legacy of the eurozone crisis is one of distrust, unaccountable decision-making and a wider divergence of policy preferences.
While the eurozone crisis has certainly prompted national governments to adopt some additional cooperation, it has not (yet) led to definitive breakthroughs in economic integration. Germany has reluctantly agreed to transfer funds to Greece and other debtor member states. New EU financial regulations have reduced the risks of future banking-sector meltdowns. However, most member states lament that the eurozone crisis has demolished any sense of pan-European solidarity. Southern states see the process of economic adjustment as unfairly asymmetrical, relying entirely on their efforts to cut deficits rather than also on creditor states stimulating demand. Debtor states insist the crisis was driven by German surpluses as much as by deficits in the south – and yet the EU has imposed no constraints at all on Germany’s economic model.29
All states have sought to push the costs of managing interdependence onto other member states, either through racking up debts or by competitive deflation of wage and other costs. Each state has been out for itself, and behind much principled rhetoric few have acted primarily with a common European interest in mind. One of the most extensive accounts of the eurozone crisis compares the way it has been managed to an interstate conflict that has left in its wake deep antipathies.30 Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s insider account of the crisis reveals an eye-watering degree of vitriol and enmity between governments (albeit not from a neutral perspective, of course). If governments have pulled the euro back from the abyss they have done so through extremely grudging trade-offs.31
Populations across Europe have different reasons for feeling aggrieved by the politics of the eurozone crisis. Debtor states express little gratitude because EU rescue funds have gone to bail out French and German banks and have simply shifted private-sector losses onto taxpayers’ shoulders. EU help has been given in a way that entails a further redistribution of wealth away from poorer states to the rich, surplus states. Rather than a celebration of European unity, each rescue package has deepened the sense of hostility. The evaporation of solidarity has led to some ironic inconsistencies: the Spanish government pleads for flexibility on its own deficit overruns but has often adopted a hard line against Greece.
Conversely, Baltic states feel that Greece and other debtors have been shown too much leniency. They point out that they are much poorer than the Mediterranean member states and yet have got on with implementing structural reforms without fanfare or assistance. Despite public misgivings and feelings of unfairness, Estonia supported Greece’s bail-out – only to find the Greek government showing no reciprocal solidarity with Estonia’s main concern, namely the need for robust EU unity against Russia. Central European states feel that they get less preferential support than the ‘core’ member states and are still treated as second-class members. In Cyprus, the effect of the crisis was very tangible; after citizens lost a part of their savings, the EU is now associated with unjust financial power and a lack of solidarity.
The European Court of Auditors has criticised the opaque nature of Commission decisions over financial assistance to countries hit hard by the economic crisis.32 Offering money in return for very detailed and unpopular policies has bred discontent among both those lending the money and those forced to adopt the prescribed policies. The crisis has ended the era of depoliticised monetary policy, with long-term and profound implications for the way that European economic strategy is devised.
While the single currency was undoubtedly saved by skilful crisis management at several crunch moments between 2010 and 2015, second-order risks remain. Tensions persist, with governments in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy still resisting many reforms and bitterly resenting intrusive Commission and European Central Bank diktats about how they must cut pensions, health services and education. When Matteo Renzi resigned as Italian prime minister in December 2016 after losing a referendum on constitutional reform, the sense of uncertainty over the euro’s future returned. With the populist Five Star Movement riding high in the polls, a caretaker government has held on in Rome with little power to implement reforms (although it did agree to 3 billion euros of cuts in April 2017). Meanwhile, Portugal’s left-wing coalition government has brought down the country’s deficit by expressly rejecting and reversing EU austerity strictures.
In May 2017, the Greek government reluctantly accepted further spending cuts worth 2 per cent of GDP to unlock its next tranche of support. This agreement came only after a tense, months-long stand-off during which Germany resisted IMF pressure for Greece to be granted large-scale debt relief and finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble suggested Greece might be better leaving the euro. Including a hefty 18 per cent cut in already-lowered pensions, the deal was met by protests involving more than 10,000 people in Athens. With the Syriza-led government resting on a wafer-thin majority and a general strike called against the new cuts, the deal’s implementation was far from guaranteed.
Frustration has grown over apparently politicised decision-making. In summer 2016, the EU decided not to impose sanctions against Spain and Portugal despite deficit overruns in these two states. While this suggested a welcome degree of new flexibility, Greeks asked angrily why they had not been offered such clemency. Wolfgang Schäuble was reportedly instrumental in this move, keen to help his fellow conservative, Spanish premier Mariano Rajoy. Spain’s deficit rose because Rajoy had made a deliberate choice to increase spending to improve his chances of electoral success in a December 2015 vote – exactly the kind of opportunism that EU rules were supposed to stop. Economist Daniel Gros concluded that the decision not to impose the fines made any talk of completing economic and monetary union ‘meaningless’ as it was ‘now clearer than ever that EU member states prioritise domestic political imperatives over common rules’.33
The euro’s governance structures are still largely those that existed before the crisis and are unlikely to prevent the next one.34 While important new rules oblige creditors to accept write-offs when banks hit serious problems, neither full banking union nor fiscal union has advanced. The so-called Five Presidents’ Report on completing economic and monetary union – a template published by the presidents of the Council, Commission, European Central Bank, European Parliament and Eurogroup – gathers dust.35 At the end of May 2017, the Commission published a paper setting out the series of steps still needed to complete a banking and financial union.36 While President Macron has revived calls for deeper economic union, member states’ positions are yet to converge in a way that would enable such an agenda to advance. (This dilemma is explored in the next chapter.) More broadly, the crisis has increased some member states’ resistance to deepening and extending the EU internal market.37 France has sought to use the so-called ‘Posted Workers Directive’ to place restrictive conditions on companies moving workers between EU member states.
The pain of austerity does not appear to have resulted in significant structural gain. The Commission noted in early 2017 that, even after three years of economic recovery, Spain had levels of poverty and inequality higher than when the crisis started and youth unemployment was still above 40 per cent.38 The overall level of indebtedness across the EU is now higher than at the outbreak of the crisis.39 Banks’ balance sheets are more, not less, exposed and the regulations on capital requirements introduced after 2008 have been rowed back. European Central Bank intervention may have saved the euro, but many people see its role as protecting large banks, not European citizens.
The euro is held together partly by the fear of how costly a break-up would be – not a healthy launch pad for future economic cooperation.40 One particularly thorough academic study concludes that governments and EU institutions have ‘done little to resolve the core issues and imbalances at the heart of the crisis’.41 Noted economists argue that the crisis has left Europe more fragmented and divided, and less well equipped to meet long-term economic challenges.42 The debate has been about more versus less austerity, not one centred on the underlying changes needed to reverse the continent’s declining competitiveness. Short-term crisis management has pushed Europe away from designing a better model of political economy.43
These different dimensions of crisis have together unleashed a wave of so-called populism across Europe. Even after Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential elections, this remains a potent and unsettling legacy of the poly-crisis. This is not a book about populism per se, a topic on which numerous works have appeared in the last two years; but it is concerned more specifically with the relationship between the populist surge and debates about the model of European integration.
Populism is in part a result of the poly-crisis, and in part driven by its own dynamic, which itself aggravates the crisis. Parties commonly defined as populist are situated on both the right and the left, with both poles of Europe’s ideological spectrum now asking more demanding questions of EU integration. Crucially for this book’s subject matter, different populists react against different parts of the European project and their proposed remedies differ accordingly – the prevailing tendency to hold populism as synonymous with a blanket, uniform anti-Europeanism is inaccurate.44 Many leftist populists want an EU that protects vulnerable communities from economic globalism; many rightist populists want one that helps protect a sense of local community, place and order.
Radical right-wing populist parties have risen to wield notable degrees of influence and political representation in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and the UK. The victory of the Law and Justice party (known by the abbreviation PiS) in Poland’s October 2015 elections provides one of the starkest illustrations of the drift in public concerns – as will be explained further in the next chapter. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland made dramatic gains in regional elections in 2016 on an anti-refugee and anti-euro message. The 2016 Austrian presidential elections very nearly handed victory to the far-right Freedom Party. The Croatian Democratic Union government took power in Croatia in 2016 on a deeply illiberal platform. So-called ‘identitarian’ groups have appeared in a clutch of member states, even more militant than rightist populists. Unsurprisingly, conservative populists felt emboldened by Donald Trump’s election victory.
What are conventionally labelled as populist parties follow a range of stances on Europe. The UK Independence Party played a significant role in pushing Britain out of the EU. Nordic populists expound a slightly different narrative of preserving the traditional Scandinavian welfare and state–society model against change associated with the EU.45 The Danish People’s Party wants a looser and more limited EU model, based on sovereign states and select areas of pragmatic cooperation. The Sweden Democrats want to renegotiate membership. In Belgium, Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) wants EU policies to be based on more democratic engagement of regional entities and a more limited range of policy competences. While not victorious in the Dutch election of March 2017, Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party finished second on a commitment to take the country out of the EU; the less well-known Forum for Democracy also attracted support for its more limited pledge to take the Netherlands out of the euro.
The radically illiberal Jobbik for many years pushed to get Hungary out of the EU but has recently re-evaluated its position on the grounds that EU politics are now moving in its direction. The country’s ruling Fidesz party is highly critical of the EU but more accepting of Hungary’s membership. In Bulgaria, Attack advocates a similar agenda of social conservatism and pushback against neo-liberalism but is more unequivocal in wanting Bulgaria out of the EU. In contrast, the ‘outsider’ victor in Bulgaria’s 2016 presidential elections, Rumen Radev, advocates a more pro-Russian policy but is not in favour of an EU exit. Several populist Czech parties want to leave the EU, while others seek a looser union. The Conservative People’s Party of Estonia wants deeper security cooperation, in particular to stand up to Russia.
In France, all eyes have been on the National Front, as Marine Le Pen competed for the presidency in 2017 on a strongly anti-euro and anti-EU platform. Alternative für Deutschland wants Germany to leave the euro, but remain in a more streamlined EU based on cooperation between sovereign states and more citizen influence. The Austrian Freedom Party wants more subsidiarity and an end to assistance for southern member states and freedom of movement. In contrast, Italy’s Liga Nord (Northern League) calls for deeper political and economic union with a bigger centralised EU budget, and a more formalised role for regions.46
While left-wing populists tend not to be so explicitly anti-European, scepticism is rising on the left, for example from within the Dutch Socialist Party, former communist parties in Eastern Europe and Die Linke (the Left) in Germany. Communists and the Left Bloc, born from anti-austerity protests, were brought into a minority Socialist government in Portugal, giving leverage to many anti-EU voices within these two parties. In Slovakia, prime minister Robert Fico has developed an anti-Brussels, anti-Muslim, illiberal agenda, all from a nominally centre-left, social-democratic perspective.
Podemos has assured voters in Spain that it would reverse austerity, increase public spending and ditch labour-market reforms, going against EU rules to do so. While formally Europhile, the party ran its 2015 and 2016 electoral campaigns around ‘sovereigntist’ slogans widely seen as having a somewhat EU-critical tone. The party’s momentous internal elections in February 2017 pushed an anti-capitalist wing to the fore, with an agenda incompatible with the most basic of EU commitments. Italy’s Five Star Movement is hard to pin down ideologically, combining elements from both leftist and right-wing populist parties; while opposition to Italy’s membership of the euro is at the forefront of its manifesto, at the end of 2016 it softened some of its anti-EU stances and sought to join the Liberal group in the European Parliament. The Nuit Debout protests that spread across France in 2016 were aimed against labour-law reforms, but gradually took on a more anti-EU line.
While leftist populists may reject the illiberal identity politics of rightist populists, they question some of the EU’s foundational tenets of economic openness. Research shows that in the European Parliament opposition to neo-liberal austerity has gradually become more closely associated with Eurosceptic positions – and this trend is evident on both left and right.47 A June 2016 Pew Research Center survey shows that in some member states voters on the left have a more favourable view of the EU than those on the right, while in others (including Sweden, Greece and Spain) it is the other way around, with people on the left defining themselves as more anti-EU than those on the right. In other states (like France, Hungary and Poland) there is virtually no difference, with hostility to the Union rising among those on both left and right.48
Despite the differences between populists, there is some convergence among rightist and leftist ends of the spectrum and a shared disappointment in the European dream. For example, politicians at both ends of the populist spectrum tend to be economic nationalists, whose economic programmes sit uneasily with the rules of an open European market. Of course, rightist populism places more emphasis on racial and nationalist identity and tends to be more overtly and uncompromisingly anti-EU; it posits a three-way split between nationals, elites and foreigners, whereas left-wing populism rests on a more binary division of the people against the elites. Yet rightist and leftist populism make many similar charges against the prevailing model of European integration.
A broad consensus has taken root that populism now represents another layer of threat to the European project. Despite the relief felt when Emmanuel Macron won the 2017 French election, in the first round of this contest more than 40 per cent of the French people voted for candidates who fundamentally questioned the country’s place in the European project (Le Pen and, on the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon). Alternative für Deutschland’s third-place finish grabbed headlines in Germany’s September 2017 election and the Five Star Movement has been set to do well in Italy’s election, due in 2018. Populist movements have built transnational alliances that have shaped public discourse across Europe. Populism unsettles national political systems, but is even more damaging to the EU because it puts in doubt the Union’s whole rationale for existing.49 A rise in illiberalism goes hand in hand with rising Euroscepticism, with the two phenomena feeding off each other.
If populism is a new spoiler for European integration, however, it also holds a mirror up to the underlying causes of the EU crisis. Populists may be simplistic in dividing society into the ‘good people’ versus the ‘bad elite’, but they have hit a nerve in emphasising the extent to which citizens seem to have lost influence over EU and national elites. When EU elites talk about ‘defeating’ this phenomenon to protect the European project, they merely reinforce widespread anger at how unresponsive those elites have become to the democratic will.
Populism has put down roots in countries that are doing well economically as well as in those that are doing badly, those with high levels of immigration and those with very little immigration, in big, powerful member states and small, newer ones – a ubiquity that suggests a profoundly structural problem. Statistical testing shows that the rise in populism is more strongly correlated with a cultural backlash against liberal and internationalist norms than simply with economic problems (far-right parties have not emerged in some of the states hit hardest by austerity, such as Spain, Portugal and Ireland).50 Experts stress that Europe’s populism is rooted in decades-long social changes, reinforcing the point that some fundamental rethinking will be needed to dissolve the phenomenon.51
The summary of these different policy domains and political trends reveals deep-cut structural shortcomings to the current model of European integration. These include citizens’ lack of voice, a growing divergence of policy preferences, spiralling mistrust and a creeping feeling that the EU now functions in a way that deepens all kinds of vulnerabilities rather than insulating citizens from them.
Combine the different trends together and they present a profound challenge to the very foundations of the European project, a general political crisis extending well beyond a few areas of difficult policy decisions. Certainly, there is widespread agreement among politicians and experts that the poly-crisis has been deep enough to raise profound questions. Jean-Claude Juncker took office as Commission president saying this was a ‘last chance’, make-or-break moment for the European project. The then president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, warned: ‘No one can say whether the EU will still exist in this form in ten years.’52
In the depths of the poly-crisis, barely a day went by without a media article predicting the EU’s disintegration. Academics also agree that the whole European project has at moments come close to unravelling. Loukas Tsoukalis writes that member states are less united than ever before, leaving the EU project ‘as fragile as a glasshouse’.53 Historian Mark Mazower is of the opinion that ‘Stepping back and thinking about the EU’s long-term evolution is now almost impossible […] the EU is living on borrowed time.’54 Some believe that the EU must pull itself back from a wholesale crisis of ‘constitutional disorder’.55 Pol Morillas suggests that the so-called Monnet method of incremental progress in integration almost went into reverse: a step-by-step deconstruction of the EU that threatened to take on a self-sustaining and inexorable momentum.56
The effect is played out within the two biggest member states. One German analyst warns of a watershed change in German aims: ‘European unity for Berlin seems no longer to be an objective in and of itself […] Germany’s Europapolitik has become Realpolitik.’57 This trend is deepening as other member states increasingly challenge German policy preferences. France has long been the most enigmatically contradictory player, being the member state most representative of the standard, establishment model of integration but also an increasingly strong bulwark of the nation state against the myriad failings of the European project. The poly-crisis has accentuated the contradiction and pulled France in both directions simultaneously. Emmanuel Macron’s stirring victory does not in itself resolve this. And while Marine Le Pen was defeated, France’s election revealed deep unease with the whole design of the integration model, to the extent that the role of one extremist party in one election in one member state could easily have put the whole EU at risk.
Polling evidence confirms how steep a climb the EU faces to recover citizens’ trust. Eurobarometer polling shows that for many years more citizens trusted than distrusted EU institutions until the crisis started; by 2013 the share of people saying they did not trust EU institutions shot up to 60 per cent, double the 30 per cent who said they still trusted EU institutions.58 There has been a significant shift away from citizens feeling they have both a national and a European identity and towards their laying claim only to a national identity.59 Citizens’ faith in European institutions has fallen dramatically and continually from 2004 – albeit recovering slightly from late 2016.60 And none of this can be blamed on simple popular ignorance: polls show that citizens’ satisfaction with the EU has decreased as their knowledge and understanding of its policies has increased.61
In a 2016 survey of ten EU countries, 42 per cent of respondents said they want power returned to national governments against only 19 per cent who want more powers transferred to the EU level. Benign views of the EU have plummeted: 69 per cent of French citizens had a favourable view of the EU in 2004; by 2016 this figure was only 38 per cent. In 2006, 80 per cent of Spaniards had a favourable view of the EU; this has declined to only 47 per cent.62 A November 2016 Demos–YouGov poll confirmed that support for ‘reducing EU powers’ is now far stronger than support for the opposite or for creating a single European government.63
Even as the general context has begun to stabilise, a potent residue of dissatisfaction remains. On the eve of the sixtieth anniversary summit in March 2017, one poll found that only a quarter of European citizens thought the EU was moving in the right direction.64 Another survey, published after that summit, revealed an ever-widening division between elites and citizens on key issues such as migrant flows, the democratic deficit and whether the EU should have more or fewer powers.65 Confirming these trends, a June 2017 Pew Research Center survey showed a (Brexit-induced) rise in support for EU membership, but also majorities unhappy with the EU’s handling of specific issues like migration, economic policy and trade, and wanting more powers moved from Brussels to governments in these areas; the poll also revealed that more than half of those surveyed wanted national referendums on the EU, due to a persistent feeling that citizens’ voices are not being heard in European debates.66
The key structural change is that doubts have grown that European integration is capable of being a win–win phenomenon rather than one that necessarily involves ever-wider differences between powerful winners and ingrained losers.67 Historian Luuk van Middelaar writes that the rise of identity politics ‘has come as an existential shock’, leaving the EU uncertain over how to switch focus from the positive-sum expansion of freedoms to ‘protecting citizens’.68
Positive trade-offs have given way to a revengeful mistrust that drives negative issue linkages – with disunity in one area generating disunity in another policy sphere. In the eurozone economic crisis, southern member states asked Germany for generous solidarity and felt they did not get it; in the refugee crisis, Germany in turn asked southern states for solidarity and felt it was let down. The Visegrád states used the migration crisis as a means of trying to reassert their general power at the EU level, feeling a structural inability to get their concerns onto the Union’s agenda.69 The amount of zero-sum bargaining on show within EU deliberations has patently increased.
This in turn feeds into the pivotal structural predicament that the EU can apparently move neither forwards nor backwards. Governments are simply muddling along, with ad hoc policy initiatives addressing popular disaffection at the margins but bereft of ideas for really getting to grips with the EU’s malaise.70 Structurally, this is not like previous crises, which gave a positive prompt to EU integration. Political scientist Jan Zielonka notes that this is because the crisis has undermined the basis of the EU’s ‘modernist credentials’ of shared progress.71
Many experts have in recent years focused on the issue of disintegration – this has become a topic of enquiry in EU debates in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Public intellectual Ivan Krastev senses that ‘the disintegration train has left Brussels’s station’ and that ‘Europe’ has definitively lost its allure as an ideal, against the backdrop of a fundamental shift to more parochial notions of political community. As the whole notion of interdependence is increasingly seen as bringing insecurity rather than security, European identity formation seems to have gone into reverse. From the vantage point of 2017, Krastev cautions against the EU adopting overly ambitious post-crisis plans, when simply surviving will be difficult enough.72
Historians tell us that these trends are more than ephemeral inconveniences to an onward-marching European project. A repeat pattern has conditioned European geopolitics for more than 500 years. Various centralising or unifying projects have often gained traction in Europe for a period of time – the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburgs, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Nazism, communism – but they have always been pushed back eventually. The doubts and tensions that are returning today are less of an anomaly than a reversion to the historical norm.73
Many writers and politicians protest that the EU’s crises have not been as dramatically threatening as widely reported and that if there were potential breaking points these have now been successfully overcome. The EU is still standing after years of experts predicting its collapse. Previous crises have, optimists stress, been just as serious and were overcome with relatively little drama or extensive change. Anti-EU populists have not swept to power across the continent; indeed, after the 2017 Dutch and French elections a common view is that European populism has peaked. Emmanuel Macron’s victory in particular has produced an avalanche of commentary that an EU revival is now well under way – even if Angela Merkel’s weakened post-electoral position may have a more mixed impact. The European economy is reviving and still scores relatively well on global competitiveness rankings; by spring 2017, EU unemployment had fallen to its lowest level since 2009. The refugee crisis may have brought a few passport controls back, but has not torn the whole EU project apart.
Some EU leaders insist that the Union has contained its problems so well and is so favourably positioned that ‘the next ten years can be the European decade’.74 In August 2017, Jean-Claude Juncker declared the crisis over and asserted that there is now ‘really nothing to complain about’ in the Union.75 Many reason that the visible ills that Brexit is visiting upon the UK will bind other states together in tighter harmony. EU politicians and leaders now raise the UK’s unenviable situation to justify and close ranks behind the existing model of integration, which is now much more unconditionally celebrated as providing the stability and economic predictability that Britain appears to have relinquished.
Optimists insist that beneath the dramatic press headlines and febrile summits, a common European identity is quietly taking shape. Many insist that there is no need to revisit any core principles of European integration and that to do so would play into a disingenuous and already-retreating Eurosceptic agenda. Given that radical change is anyway unrealistic, it is better for the EU to stick to minor adjustments to the existing integration model and simply ensure that citizens are better informed about the Union’s achievements.76
To a point, these warnings against hyperbole are well made. Tensions have clearly been worse at previous points in European history. And the change in atmospherics in 2017 is undoubtedly reassuring and significant. We certainly need to take proper measure of the EU’s poly-crisis. However, while it is important not to exaggerate its effects, this poly-crisis has had more pervasively troubling ramifications than previous cycles of disintegration. The current upturn in the economic cycle does not solve the structural drivers of the crisis. Undoubtedly, modest forms of adaptation and low-level coordination have helped sustain European cooperation through the most turbulent moments. But, as one pillar after another has trembled menacingly in the EU temple, so the integrity of the whole edifice of integration has begun to look increasingly shaky. Confusion has weaved such a masterpiece through years of multiple European crises as to make an instantaneous turnaround unlikely.77
Europe’s bleeding may have ceased, but its wounds still need to be healed. A few well-packaged policy changes will not suffice to maintain the EU’s health and well-being over the long term. Many articles urge important policy innovations – for example, in the area of economic support to debtor states or new security and border provisions. My concern in this book is different. There are, of course, many policy responses that European leaders need to take; but I want to probe more deeply into what the crisis means for the broader structure of EU integration. Flowing from this chapter’s discussion of the structural pathologies of the poly-crisis, my aim is to assess the need for a different model of integration – for a new polity, not just new policies.
If the EU really is now on the verge of a reawakening, then it becomes even more important that it qualitatively changes the way it structures integration, rather than simply dusting off previous cooperation plans. While 2017’s more benign context might enable governments to adopt such long-present ideas for deeper integration, these would risk storing up repeat crisis cycles for the future. If, as many now contend, the EU is indeed moving from a dynamic of disintegration towards one of renewed integration, the question is how it will use this opportunity: to advance select areas of cooperation along familiar lines or to rethink the whole notion of integration? Surely politicians need not merely to celebrate the current upswing but to get ahead of the curve and prepare the EU for the next downswing or crisis.
On this score, the EU’s paralysis is quite staggering. It is now over a decade since French and Dutch citizens rejected the text of a proposed EU constitution. This shock unleashed much talk of changing the model of integration and ‘bringing in the citizens’. Yet nothing effective has been done to this end in all the subsequent years. For governments that are unsure how to reform the EU, the business-as-usual option is a dangerously seductive temptation. When times are bad, leaders say it is not possible to introduce ambitious and innovative change; when times improve, they feel it is not necessary. In the periodic moments of peak tension, European governments, leaders and citizens clamour for far-reaching change. When the panic subsides, such change appears less urgent. The root causes of the EU’s malaise remain unresolved and calls for radical reform are ignored. Many might empathise with the deadpan humour of the prime minister’s spin doctor in Danish political saga Borgen when he bridles at such unresponsiveness: ‘In Brussels, no one can hear you scream.’