Ideas European elections 2014

Are the eurosceptics a boon for Europe?

The anti-EU wave predicted by the polls on the eve of European elections will not sweep away the institutions. On the contrary, it marks the chance for a tired political class that lacks ideas to regroup and find a way forward.

Published on 22 May 2014 at 16:08

Should we be afraid of the Eurosceptics? Will European institutions be demolished by the colourful wave of all those questioning the policies and the very existence of the European Union, who will pour into the polls during the next European elections? The answer to both questions is no.

Rather we should hope that the eurosceptics will gain at the incoming elections, and the political classes of the greater countries, together with the Brussels establishment, be seized by the fear of being out of sync with a large proportion of public opinion. These words are not written by a Eurosceptic, quite the opposite. However, one cannot turn a blind eye to the gap between the many positive achievements of the European Union and the inability on the part of decision makers, both at national and at European level, to involve citizens in the European project and to give it new impetus.

The European Union had a great opportunity to make a decisive step forward, but missed it. The wave of protest that is mounting – and that combines both the souveraniste, who do not want to surrender national powers, and the enemies of the austerity "imposed" by Brussels – is the result of the closed minds and blindness of the elites in the face of great crisis.

The crisis, first financial and then economic, was slow to hit Europe. There was plenty of time to predict the outcome and prepare countermeasures. But in order to do this, a common vision was necessary. A glimmer of hope came when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, amidst the inertia of European leaders, pointed to a way out during the G8 and G20 summits, in October 2008. Unfortunately it was a fluke.

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The political weakness of Brown coupled with his estrangement from the inner circle of the Euro buried the hope for an intelligent and balanced management of the situation. Since then, the crisis has worsened and Europe has descended into a spiral of national self-interest, with at the forefront a German chancellor who lacks strategic vision and knowledge of history. Perhaps, if she had frequented the dissident circles of Eastern Germany – and Europe – in her formative years, she would have fully understood the importance of solidarity, even at a continental level. But this has not been the case.

Paradoxically, the difficulties of the years following 2008 could have provided another opportunity to make progress in the building of Europe, just as has happened many times in the past when, on the brink of disaster, Europe has found a way to overcome it. Even in the face of the most dramatic manifestations of European impotence, such as the unleashing of violence and the eruption of war in Yugoslavia in 1991 – although with dramatic and culpable delay – the Union knew in the end how to react: by accelerating the process of integration of the central-eastern countries.

It has now been six years since the financial crisis, and apart from the work of Mario Draghi’s ECB (not Jean-Claude Trichet’s), no one proved able to move on a single digit – I am not saying to resolve the crisis, this would be asking too much, but at least to give Europe a positive role in managing the continental economy. Europe seemed inert, inept, even an evil stepmother. The punitive treatment inflicted on Greece is totally inexcusable, if not even perhaps supported by subtly racist arguments.

This is quite the opposite of how a community should behave, even with its most dissolute member. Selfishness, pettiness, narrow and tortuous paths of national reaffirmation have broken the sense of solidarity, out of which the European project was born. Faced with the spectacle provided in recent years of a plethora of pompous and empty declarations, of an infinite number of meetings punctuated by many high-sounding commitments, how is a public, exhausted by the increasing difficulties of everyday life, supposed to react?

What should it feel towards the European Union, when it sees neither solidarity nor planning? It’s hard to believe that the “fiscal compact” or the monetary union will encourage trust and provide an “identitarian” cement. Sure, they are important achievements, and we know that integration has been achieved with small, intermittent steps. But the strenuous mediations that come out of European councils lack allure.

The last real mobilising momentum, one able to inspire hope, dates back to more than a decade ago, when the EU bravely (for once) decided to expand its borders to the east. Even then, however, the fear of ‘Polish plumbers’ – i.e. the fantasies of an invasion of cheap labour and migrants – neutralised that momentum. In the midst of economic crisis, frustration for the supposed or real shortcomings of the Union in protecting citizens from the crisis, an increasingly explicit reaffirmation of national interests, the effort to give impetus to the construction of Europe is enormous. And it is all shouldered by those who still, stubbornly define themselves Euro-enthusiasts.

It's a very difficult task because the mental short-cuts of Euroscepticism are much ‘easier’: in a time of uncertainty, it is an easy and safe option to identify a scapegoat – and all the better if it is as distant and opaque as the gnomes of Brussels and their courts. Far more difficult is to point out the successes of integration, which are so much under the eyes of everyone and of such dazzling clarity to the point that they have become invisible. Let’s close the borders again, eliminate the Erasmus Program and its descendants, let’s restore Customs and Excise, let it every country go its own way, and see into what hell we descend!

This must be said to the eurosceptics. We must remember what Europe was before the European Coal and Steel Community, before the Treaty of Rome, of Maastricht and then of Lisbon, to name but a few of the milestones. We must remember the four freedoms of Maastricht, the four "unions" of the European Council of June 2012 (banking, fiscal, budget and, finally, political union).

But above all we must remember what a Europe in ruins was like after the Second World War.

Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi understood it before and with more clarity than anyone else: the evil of Europe, and not only of this continent, lurks in nationalism. The identification of the enemy in the foreigner, the different, the 'other', who is beyond the pale (the limen, as Romans said), has devastating potential, and has proved it terribly in the early part of the century.

The time bomb of nationalism is always ticking. To remind us, since the war in Yugoslavia was not enough, we now have the enemy within. Yet this new, difficult, and even lopsided architecture, nonetheless represents an attempt not to mark impassable thresholds on such a vast territory. This is the architecture the eurosceptics want to upset. The return to the small homelands, the recovery of economic sovereignty, the closing of borders, are all regressions towards a deceptively more prosperous, serene and orderly past.

Illusions are dangerous because they are unattainable, and especially because they are detrimental to this new, messy European order, founded on a commonality of principles and intentions. Of course, in all these years, Europe has sunk to becoming a mere space for free trade, to a steamroller economy, to a contraction of communitarisation: it has completely forgotten its mission. And we’re surprised if euroscepticism is in full swing? If there is a wave of rejection, in the face of the cracks in public opinion about the Union, opened by that very vision of the European project? The eurosceptic parties are the offspring of the shortcomings of the European political class. Therefore it is up to them to find ways to defuse the eurosceptics’ arguments for European break-up.

Moreover, and fortunately, the eurosceptics, despite riding high, are separated by several fault lines: for example, the nationalist-populist Front National and the Lega Nord have nothing to do with the feisty but democratic UKIP party of Nigel Farage or Beppe Grillo’s 5 Star Movement – not to mention the neo-fascist Jobbik in Hungary. And thus they do not constitute a coherent and united entity; it is unlikely they will be able to find a common platform in the next European Parliament.

Even were they to win, the institutions of the EU as such would not be at risk. However, that feeling of detachment and distrust, which has been circulating in European public opinion for some time, is manifested for the first time by a strong political expression. In the end, ex malo bonum: may a healthy shock arise from all this for a political class which lingers in the corridors of Brussels’ plush palaces or in the more frantic but nonetheless inattentive ones of the European capitals.

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