This article titled “What can save the European Union?” was written by Julian Coman, for The Observer on Saturday 10th May 2014 19.30 UTC
Entering the central courtyard of the European parliament in Strasbourg, the visitor is surrounded by a collection of giant larger-than-life posters from which smiling faces gaze out. One striking, bohemian-looking couple catch the eye. “On 22 May,” reads the legend above their black fedora hats, “Jens and Sedsel will choose who’s in charge in Europe. And you?” Below their feet is the slogan: “European elections 22 May 2014. Act. React. Impact.”
Perhaps the Strasbourg assembly should be careful what it wishes for. Jens and Sedsel may be signed up to the programme. But across the continent, those who may not have the best interests of the European Union at heart are marching on the parliament, from both the right and left of the political spectrum. The insurgents are certainly looking to “act, react and impact”, but not in the way that the designers of the Strasbourg posters may have hoped.
In Britain, Ukip’s Nigel Farage, pint in hand, has already pulled British politics to a place close to the EU exit door. But euroscepticism is no longer a curiosity of these islands. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s Front National, has even grander designs than Farage. Le Pen plans to use the forthcoming elections to form an alliance dedicated to wrecking the “monster in Brussels” from within. Her party is on course to top the polls in France.
In Italy, an ex-comic, Beppe Grillo, whose anti-establishment shtick has its origins in the anarchic left, ridicules the recent succession of Italian prime ministers who have “become the slaves of financial interests and economic decisions taken elsewhere”. The Five-Star movement which he founded in 2007 is second in Italy’s polls, predicted to win 25% of the vote. The Greek socialists of Syriza are riding high from Athens to Alexandroupoli on the back of a promise to roll back crushing EU-imposed debt repayments.
Even in the land of Borgen, where consensus politics provided an unlikely template for cult television viewing, rebellion is in the air. The Danish People’s party – anti-EU, anti-multiculturalism and anti-immigration – is pledging to “assert Denmark’s independence and to guarantee the freedom of the Danish people in their own country”. The DPP, which like Ukip has profited from popular resentment at the extension of welfare benefits to immigrant workers, sits in first place in the polls, also with a share of 25%. In the Netherlands, Austria, Finland, and across much of eastern Europe, it is a similar story.
Two weeks from the elections, it seems possible – probable even – that Eurosceptic parties could gain up to a third of the total vote and up to 200 of the 751 seats in the next European parliament. Given that less than half of the Union’s electorate are likely to vote at all, those figures suggest an overwhelming majority of Europeans are either apathetic towards the ongoing project of a common borderless European home or actively hostile. Never mind Jens and Sedsel. If they were still among us, Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Altiero Spinelli, founding fathers all of the EU, might be wondering: “How did Europe lose its way?”
Left behind in the ‘global race’
EU officials in search of an answer could do worse than travel to Forbach in the region of Lorraine, at the historic core of the union. A former mining town, Forbach was there at the birth of the European dream, one of the dynamos of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) brought into being after the war by victorious France and defeated Germany
The ECSC, proposed by Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister at the time, and inspired by the visionary French diplomat Jean Monnet, was created in 1951 by Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The unprecedented pooling of sovereignty over vital resources was a statement of intent: the western half of a devastated continent was determined that the wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 should never be repeated. By 1957 the ECSC had morphed into the European Economic Community, or Common Market, and the road to the European Union had begun. But six decades on, blue-collar Forbach is no longer a showcase for the federal dreams of Schuman and Monnet. In fact, it’s about to vote heavily for the self-styled patriots of the FN.
The last mine here closed in 2004 and nothing much has taken its place as France has been gripped by economic stagnation and austerity following the crash of 2009. At the well-funded Musée les Mineurs, newsreels from the postwar glory days are shown on a constant loop. A narrator in 1947 asks: “How could the miners not feel proud of what they represent? The reconstruction of France!” But in the Forbach of 2014 unemployment stands at 14% and is far higher among the young. Vandalism and car-burning is common in the town’s bleak suburbs, where refugees and migrants now occupy the postwar estates built for generations of miners. Shops, cafes, even the last bookshop, have disappeared. The town is dying.
The sorry tale of decline is repeated in industrial and manufacturing towns across the EU, where the economic crisis of the last five years has finished off communities that were already losing their place in the new global economic order. China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam are where the new Forbachs are to be found. Ageing, economically insecure and fearful for the future, more and more Europeans are listening to populist calls for retrenchment behind old borders and old certainties. A generosity of spirit towards the outsider is being replaced by an embittered “welfare chauvinism”, and an insistence that French, Danish, Austrian or British workers come first.
In March’s mayoral elections in Forbach, the FN’s plausible vice-president, Florian Philippot, won the first round of voting, before losing narrowly in the runoff against the incumbent Socialist, Laurent Kalinowski. In the European poll Philippot is all but certain to become an MEP for the region, elected on a platform of reinstituting border controls, withdrawal from the euro and French jobs for French workers.
A graduate of the elite École Nationale d’Administration, the breeding ground for France’s political elite, Philippot represents a new generation of FN politician, which came of age during “La Crise”. A youthful, articulate 35-year-old, he is a far cry from the motley crew of neo-fascists who used to assemble under the banner of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Philippot’s political hero is General Charles de Gaulle.
“The surge in support for the FN is a protest vote, a cry of pain,” says Jean-Claude Flauss, a retired archivist and local historian. “What is being done to this town is shameful. A population, having been exploited, is now being left to rot; a community is in the process of being dismantled. And a place which gave so much, which gave so many resources and so much wealth, is being abandoned to its fate.”
Flauss insists that xenophobia is not behind the local support for Philippot, although he says the decision to place hundreds of refugees in the town’s struggling suburbs has been “a problem to add to all the others”. In the “global race” constantly invoked by Europe’s politicians, Forbach feels ignored, forgotten and left behind.
“The people of Forbach are not racist,” says Flauss. “This has always been a place that welcomed strangers. In the 1920s it was the Italians who came. They fled Mussolini to come and work in the mines. They arrived with helmets in their hands, ready to work. In the 1930s it was the Polish. After the war, workers arrived from the Maghreb. This is a place with a history of openness and tolerance. No one really thinks withdrawing from the euro would be practical. Over 100,000 people cross the borders around here to work. But it’s not hard to see why the FN would want to implant themselves in the town. People are desperate and want to show the world they are very, very fed up.”
Emil Dolic’s father was one of those foreigners who came to work in the local pit, fleeing Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1958. Dolic himself worked down Forbach’s mine for 25 years, having grown up in the suburb of Behren-les-Forbach, where last month disaffected youth attacked the mayor’s offices and the town was woken up by circling police helicopters. He thinks Philippot is a “good man – not like Jean-Marie Le Pen who was just crazy”, but cannot bring himself to vote FN. But he is deeply pessimistic about the future of the country that gave his father a new start: “The Chinese can do everything more cheaply now and they don’t have the welfare costs to worry about. We can’t compete with them. When people are vulnerable and suffering, that’s when the FN can exploit the situation.”
Throughout the region, Marine Le Pen’s party is doing just that. In nearby Hayange, the famous Florange steelworks closed a year ago when the Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal took his investment elsewhere. An FN mayor – a former radical socialist – has just been elected there.
Nationalism reborn?
At the Front National’s annual May Day parade in Paris, the talk is of France’s latest industrial embarrassment: the potential sale of another “national champion”, the energy and transport giant Alstom, to America’s General Electric. Lorraine loyalists are out in force. The favoured chant of the day is “On est chez nous!” (“We are in our own home!”) which reverberates through a marching crowd drawn from Provence, Franche-Comté, Burgundy and beyond. The slogan is an angry assertion of what should be the case but isn’t, as open markets and cheap labour from eastern Europe allegedly cut a swath through traditional French life.
Among the ancient flags of Brittany and the Vendée and the fleur-de-lis which is a traditional symbol of French royalism, other banners ram home more contemporary points: “Europe is our prison!”, “- EU and + France”, “They toast each other in Brussels at our expense!”
Walking past the Palais Royal, a new chant goes up: “Ni gauche ni droite: Front National!” (“Neither left nor right: Front National.”) Thierry Gaulot, a newly elected FN council member for Metz, around 35 miles from Forbach, insists that this is no longer about the old preoccupations of the French royalist right. In its efforts to break through, the FN has gone ecumenical, both at home and abroad, where it hopes to become the standard-bearer of a new “Europe des Peuples”.
“This is now a party that is based on a patriotism that can appeal to the left as much as the right,” Gaulot says. “There are plenty who have joined us from parties of the left. Nigel Farage says we are antisemitic? People who talk about racism or fascism are just not opening their minds. Listen to that chant, ‘on est chez nous‘. It’s about sovereignty; about the global economy being run on the terms of the multinationals who can up sticks to go where they can make more profit.”
When Marine Le Pen appears to speak in the Place de l’Opéra, she is dressed in marine blue. Behind her is a backdrop depicting a giant Joan of Arc, blowing away the yellow stars of the European Union flag. Le Pen has big ambitions for these elections, hoping to use the Eurosceptic surge across the continent to form an “enemy within” the European parliament, in alliance with the Dutch far-right Freedom party leader, Geert Wilders. To form a “European Freedom Alliance” in Strasbourg, she and Wilders will require a minimum of 25 MEPs from seven member states. Up to now, Farage has insisted that Ukip will not be joining. But the Austrian Freedom party and Vlaams Belang, the Flemish nationalist party, both appear to be on board. The Danish People’s party and Italy’s Northern League are also allies. Judging by the current polls, the threshold of 25 MEPs will be easily crossed.
Once installed, the alliance will become an awkward, obstructionist presence, committed, in the words of the Northern League’s Matteo Salvini, to “a different Europe, based on work and peoples and not in the one based on servitude to the euro and banks, ready to let us die from immigration and unemployment”.
In Paris, in a Wagnerian downpour, Le Pen laments the betrayal of France. She inveighs against the “gravediggers” of Brussels, whose austerity measures are held responsible for the scourge of mass unemployment and economic stagnation. France’s new Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, is denounced for introducing a new round of cuts – €11bn from welfare payments, €10bn from healthcare – in order to lower France’s budget deficit to satisfy the European commission. “Manuel Valls has no idea how to govern France,” Le Pen tells the crowd. “The destiny of this country is being decided in Brussels.” President François Hollande is little more than “the little governor of the province of France”.
At the same time, she says, mass immigration, attributed to the EU’s “ultra-liberalism”, is undermining the nation’s sense of identity. Immigrants must accommodate to French culture, not the other way round. “The French people no longer control anything: banks, money, borders.” The coming EU-US trade deal is an invitation to American farmers to put their French equivalents out of business.
“States have a lot in common with human beings,” Le Pen concludes. “A state which controls nothing becomes a depressed state.” As the microphone conks out in the deluge, she joins the crowd in an impromptu mass rendition of La Marseillaise. Then there is one final message for Brussels: “In other countries, other peoples are rallying to our side. We want to build a Europe of free and sovereign nations. A Europe of peoples.”
A strange kind of democracy
It was an early 19th-century utopian socialist who first dreamed up the idea of a European parliament. As the continent suffered the ravages of the Napoleonic wars, Henri de Saint-Simon pleaded for the creation of an elite assembly to run the continent along less sanguinary lines. The body would be attended by 21 “delegates of humanity” – a council of experts selected in England, France, Germany and Italy. “As soon as elections have been held to the Supreme Council and to the Councils of individual nations”, wrote Saint-Simon, “the scourge of war will be banished from Europe.”
The modest dimensions of that original vision now seem somewhat quaint. Directly elected since 1979, the EU’s parliament is a Goliath among the world’s democratic fora. In two weeks’ time, 750 MEPs and one president will be elected to represent an estimated electorate of 501 million people in 28 countries. However, the ways of the EP have provided some open goals to its critics.
The parliament has no tax-raising powers but rewards its representatives with a notoriously handsome package of salaries, expenses and grants. There is little obligation to furnish receipts. And Farage, recently embarrassed over the hiring of his German wife as a secretary, is not the only MEP to discover that a seat in the European parliament can become a family concern.
Good ideas at the time have become expensive anomalies. In recognition of the historic reconciliation between France and Germany after the second world war, MEPs still trek once a month from Brussels to the parliament’s official seat in Strasbourg, at a cost of €180m a year. Acknowledging that such needless expense is meat and drink to enemies of the European idea, MEPs led by the parliament’s vice-president, Edward McMillan-Scott, have launched a “Single Seat” campaign to abandon “Alcatraz”, as the Strasbourg building is known to some of its inmates. But such gripes are small beer compared to the biggest problem for the parliament: a continuing lack of credibility among the electorates of Europe.
The two major groupings in the assembly, the centre-right European People’s party (EPP) and centre-left Socialists and Democrats (PES) have little purchase on voters who tend, when they vote at all, to use the quinquennial polls as an opportunity to sound off at domestic governments.
MEPs have no power to initiate legislation, which is the unelected European commission’s job.
During the three-year melodrama of the eurozone crisis, they were concerned bystanders as the “troika”, composed of the commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, imposed an eye-watering level of austerity in bailed-out and indebted member states such as Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, where youth unemployment rates have soared above 50% in some regions.
Endlessly, parliamentarians have battled for a greater say, recently gaining new legal powers over immigration and policing. And they did eventually show their teeth over the troika, releasing a highly critical report in March. MEPs’ support was also crucial in establishing a eurozone banking union designed to avoid taxpayer bailouts of banks in the future.
But if the EU’s elected body could not directly determine policy during the biggest crisis in the union’s history, some might ask, what is the point of it?
The steady decline in poll turnout, from 63% in 1979 to a miserable 43% five years ago, suggests a growing number of potential voters have come to the conclusion that there isn’t one. Among the under-25s in 2009, the abstention rate was a damning and surely unsustainable 71%. As the European Freedom Alliance of Le Pen and Wilders prepares to embark on a wrecking mission in the parliament, it feels like a turning-point in the history of a much-lampooned institution.
“Somehow we need to create a European Demos, a European consciousness,” says Anni Podimata, a Greek socialist who belongs to the centre-left grouping. “At a national level we need to explain properly the challenges and benefits of Europe.” But how?
Searching for the great leap forward
How about the first-ever European presidential debates? Last month citizens of Maastricht out for a stroll were treated to an unusual sight in the town’s main square. In front of the Vrijthof theatre, a modest crowd was assembled, soon to be scattered by the arrival of a dark blue coach. Emblazoned across the front of vehicle in huge white letters was the single word “Juncker”. This was the campaign battlebus of Jean-Claude Juncker, the former prime minister of Luxembourg and EPP candidate for the plum role of European commission president.
As the much-discussed “democratic deficit” at the heart of the EU has become a crisis in the age of austerity, the debates are an attempt at a bailout. Or, as the Brussels-sponsored Debating Europe website puts it: “The European Union is run by unelected bureaucrats right? Well it’s not so simple … for the first time ever the European parliament will be putting forward candidates for position of the European commission president, giving citizens a real say in who runs the EU’s executive arm.”
There are six candidates, including Martin Schulz of the PES, the liberal Guy Verhofstadt and, presumably hoping to cause trouble, Alexis Tsipras, the socialist scourge of Brussels-inspired cuts in Greece. The winner will be the candidate whose parliamentary group secures the most votes later this month.
Who knew? Certainly not the average Labour voter, because Ed Miliband has run a mile from Schulz, whose federalist vision of the EU’s future goes way beyond the pale for British consumption in the Ukip era. Labour dissociated the party from Schulz’s campaign, saying: “Martin Schulz’s political priorities in Europe do not represent those of the Labour party. While not being able to support the PES common candidate for this year’s election, we continue to support the principle of having common candidates.”
The day after the debate, Guy Verhofstadt is in a chipper mood. Once the enfant terrible of politics in Belgium, where he was a youthful prime minister for nine years, the polls show him as the clear winner of the evening. “It’s great that this is taking place,” he says. “It’s never happened in 20 years. For the first time a democratic European debate is emerging on the future of Europe.”
Verhofstadt is a founding member of the Spinelli Group, named after the dissident Italian communist who, during the second world war, produced a manifesto for a federal union across the European continent. Founded in 2010, the group calls for a revival of “the European spirit”. But Verhofstadt admits that the union has an image problem. “What is it? Is it a confederation or a federation. Is it intergovernmental, or is it communitarian. Is it a group of 6, 9, 12, 15, 17 or more? Who is in the Schengen agreement [to abolish internal borders] and who isn’t? Who is in the euro and who isn’t? Who is opting out of that and who is opting into this? It’s overly complex.”
For Verhofstadt, the mop-haired bespectacled face of radical federalism for over a decade, there is, however, no going back. A driver of vintage racing cars for a hobby, he believes that only a future United States of Europe can compete in the global race with China, India and the other emerging economies of Asia. If places such as Forbach are to thrive in the 21st century, “you have to reinvent the idea of sovereignty”.
“It’s no answer for nation states to retreat behind their own borders,” he continues. “The eurosceptics have no solutions, just scapegoats. Take energy. America has a common energy policy and they are net exporters. Europe has 28 different energy policies. That gives America a competitive advantage. Show me the person who will say, ‘I want to hold onto national sovereignty even if it means higher prices.’”
When it comes to the great austerity plan, he insists there was no alternative. The cost of borrowing in heavily indebted countries such as Greece, Spain and Italy had become unsustainable. “Budget discipline was necessary and debts had to come down,” says Verhofstadt. But the savage consequences of the cuts could and should have been mitigated by more solidarity between states at EU level. “The Eurosceptics are right that the crisis has been badly handled. Austerity has been dictating policy, but we need to think about growth as well. We should be pooling the debt of eurozone states above 60% and we’re not doing it”.
The future must be about deeper integration. “It’s not about a superstate. It’s about more integration as the engine of growth, unified capital markets, a unified banking system, common debt in the eurozone. There’s no credit union in the EU, so it’s difficult to get credit in another country. That’s crazy.”
For those content that the eurozone should remain at the halfway house of a single currency with national markets, he has a dire prediction: “If in the end you don’t fully integrate, then you may as well stop with the currency. And that would lead to the decline of Europe. The Europeans would not be able to compete with China and India.”
Will anyone listen to Verhofstadt’s warning? It is true that the history of EU integration is punctuated by crises that have not gone to waste. The horror of the second world war led to the founding of the Coal and Steel Community. The collapse of communism in eastern Europe saw the EU expand eastwards at breakneck speed. But in the Europe of 2014, evangelists of a United States of Europe will have to fight even to get a hearing. Alongside the resurgent nationalism on view in the northern capitals of London, Paris, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, new anti-politics movements are on the rise in the south, born out of frustration with all ‘”political elites”, whether national or European.
Send in the clowns
Beppe Grillo has been described as “the most dangerous man in Europe” by the German magazine Der Spiegel. The rebarbative Italian comic took that as a compliment. For over a year, this satirist-turned-populist firebrand has been laying waste to the traditional landscape of Italian politics. Piazzas have filled from Sicily to Turin, as crowds have gathered to hear messianic calls for a new grassroots, web-based, democratic culture, and a bonfire of the vanities of Italy’s corrupt political caste. Opponents accuse Grillo of a facile moralism and unappealing vulgarity – his rise began in earnest with the organisation of “Fuck Off Day” in 2007, which outed the numerous Italian parliamentarians carrying previous convictions. The comic’s fierce hostility to organised political parties has even been compared to Mussolini’s attacks on parliamentary democracy.
In February last year, Grillo’s Five Star Movement – a loose network of local groups organised online around his own blog – gained an astonishing 26% of the vote at the Italian election. “Send in the clowns,” ironised the Economist. This year the 65-year-old is taking on Brussels, wrapping himself – literally – in the EU flag and touring the country performing a vituperative one-man show entitled Te lo do io l’Europa (“I’ll give you Europe”).
Italians used to be the biggest Europe enthusiasts, seeing Brussels as a means of escape from the dysfunction of the state that gave the world Silvio Berlusconi. But the Europe described by Grillo to his audiences shares the DNA of the “eurocracy” presented to French voters by Marine Le Pen: anti-democratic and, in its pursuit of austerity, economically ruinous.
According to Grillo, from the moment the unelected former European commissioner Mario Monti was appointed prime minister of Italy in 2011, in the midst of the country’s sovereign debt crisis, Brussels has controlled Italy’s economic destiny. “It’s not a mystery,” Grillo writes in his blog, “that (national) governments are created and destroyed in Brussels. It’s happened in Greece, in Portugal, and it’s happening in Italy. Three Italian governments have been decided by the EU. We need to go into Europe to change Italy. Our prime ministers have become servants of financial interests and economic strategies decided elsewhere.” The Five Star Movement is calling for a referendum on membership of the euro and an immediate end to the “fiscal compact” designed to ensure budget discipline in indebted EU states.
If the Five Star Movement can gain 20-30 seats in the Strasbourg parliament, Grillo reckons that “the current balance of power will be turned upside down”. Polls suggest that, at around 25% of the vote, his candidates are on course to reach that target.
Grillo’s MEPs will never join the nationalist front run by Le Pen and Wilders, but their presence in the parliament will open up another flank of dissent. While Europe’s nationalist right is attempting to disinter the nation-state and relive the glory days of the postwar boom, the Five Star Movement has more in common with the anarchic radicalism of the Spanish indignados or the Occupy movement. The anger is representative of a generation of young Europeans who face lower living standards than their parents and little chance of finding a meaningful job.
In Ascoli Piceno, where Massimo Tamburri is standing as a mayoral candidate for the Five Star Movement, the youth unemployment rate is 47%. “The young are just condemned to stay with their families,” he says. “There is just huge frustration. I have friends who have been in a relationship for five or six years but they still live with their parents.”
Rome, says Tamburri, isn’t working, and neither is Brussels as presently constituted. “It’s not a community. It’s not got an egalitarian politics. The only positive things – and they’re not enough – are initiatives like the Erasmus student exchange programme and free movement within the union.”
The celebrated satirist and Nobel prize winner Dario Fo – at 88 one of the grand old men of Italian culture – is one of Grillo’s most impassioned supporters. Fo has spent a lifetime on the turbulent left of Italian politics, arguing with the fanatics of the Red Brigades in the 1970s and satirising the right in plays such as Chain Me Up and I’ll Still Smash Everything. Now he says: “I’m not on the left. I’m a democrat.”
Disillusioned with the broken promises and clientelism of mainstream parties, the cardinal virtues for Fo have become “civic commitment” and “honesty”. At his summer home on the Adriatic coast, surrounded by his own paintings and photographs of his late wife, Franca Rame, he has been hosting political discussion groups on where the Five Star Movement goes next.
“I had a very lively meeting here yesterday,” he says. “Fifty or so people came here, young men and women from Rimini, Ravenna, Cesena, and we talked about where we should go with this movement in which so much has happened so quickly”.
“The Five Star Movement is the only means of climbing out of the pit,” says Fo, “the only way of leaving behind the hypocrisy and the swindling in politics. In the eurozone crisis we know that there was speculation and that the banks were saved by the governments of various states. In Italy we’ve now had three governments without elections, and this was not a clean process. We were told that everyone had to make sacrifices to save our nation and then we see that it’s the usual mugs who pay up: workers, small businessmen, students and pensioners and so on.”
Fo backs the Five Star Movement’s call for a referendum on the euro. “I don’t know how I would vote in it. I would reflect for a while,” he says. “But let’s see what the referendum result would actually be, if it’s positive or negative. Let’s have some democracy here rather than have everything done behind closed doors.”
As cultural grandees such as Fo bemoan the current state of “the project” along with thousands of younger activists an urgent defence may be required.
There are signs that one may be coming.
Who will stand up for ‘Europe’?
Herman Van Rompuy, a man whose very name seems to provoke mirth in anglocentric circles, is known for composing the occasional haiku. But the Belgian president of the European Council – the intergovernmental apex of the EU – generally has the reputation of being the driest of dry sticks. To coincide with the coming elections, however, he has published a passionate defence of Europe and all, or most, of its works.
In Europe in the storm: Lessons and Challenges, Van Rompuy writes: “Even the eurosceptic voters don’t want to return to the past. Who wants to go back to the old times, to the customs frontiers that existed before 1954? How many people really want to return to national currencies, after the crisis of the euro? Very few!
“People know very well that not only is there an added value, but also that Europe can never disappear again from their way of life. People have criticised, here and there, abuses linked to the free movement of people. But in the context of the whole acquis [accumulated legislation], that’s ridiculous! The cost of no Europe would be enormous!”
Complacency or common sense? There is no doubt that “Europe”, overwhelmingly, has been a force for good in the world, from the securing of the postwar peace, to the promotion of human rights, to the simple freedoms that allow a European to drive a car from Milan to Brussels without stopping at a single checkpoint.
Outside its borders, as the rush of post-communist states to join the EU demonstrated, Europe is usually seen as an attractive model of democratic decency. In an interview with the Belgian paper Le Soir, Van Rompuy noted: “In Africa … Europe is perceived as the homeland of democracy. The colonial Europe has been forgotten. There is a new Europe which is the biggest donor of development aid and which intervenes militarily only to help. What was our self-interest in intervening in the Central African Republic? None. We mustn’t lose sight of this.”
But even Van Rompuy would admit that recent post-crash history, to put it mildly, has soured the mood. In Brussels, as economic growth slowly returns, there is hope that spirits may lighten. One senior EU official, now retired but an influence in the commission’s glory days under Jacques Delors, says: “I can see it now. The commission will be saying, ‘O ye of little faith. It was unpopular, but austerity has worked. We’re on the right track.’”
Perhaps. But the damage of the last few years has been colossal, as testified to by those extraordinary youth unemployment rates in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. And the challenge of preserving European living standards as the continent’s population ages, and the world’s centre of economic gravity shifts east, is immense.
Ever the optimist, Verhofstadt is already preparing for the fightback after this month’s elections. “This month,” he says, “you will see a kind of victory for the Eurosceptics. But that will hopefully lead to the emergence of a pro-European electorate and eventually to the new leap forward that we need.”
Welcome to the dialectics of hope, EU-style. But as Europeans, or some of them, go to the polls this month, it will be a long time before anyone in Brussels can echo with confidence the famous injunction of Jean Monnet: “Continue, continue, there is no future for the people of Europe other than in union.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
The post What can save the European Union? appeared first on Go Zambia Jobs.