Has President Juncker grasped the full meaning of the constructive criticism addressed to him in the previous Beacons on 14 October (see EUROPE 11645)? Here is what it boils down to: this is no longer the time for prevarication or for half measures. To be content with that would be to condemn the project of European construction to certain, inevitable death. Because every day lost is tantamount to persuading a few more European citizens that teamwork is not worth a button, that only taking shelter inside supposedly protective national borders can give hope of better days to come. Is this misguided? Yes but people sometimes, when suffering and embittered, can give in to the most toxic illusions and the most unwholesome imaginings.
In its way, Brexit – sealed by some 52% of British citizens – is as heartbreaking as illuminating a demonstration of this. Jean Pisani-Ferry, an economist well-known in the European quarter of Brussels before becoming Commissioner General of France Stratégie in Paris, notes that the UK referendum of 23 June revealed deep divisions in the country: “In the north-east of England, over 70% of the electorate voted ‘Leave’. In some parts of London and in Edinburgh, similar proportions voted the opposite way” with, in addition, “differences between small and large towns, old and young, unqualified and qualified, low paid and well paid”. Many lessons can be drawn but one is obvious: even though UK leaders have recently been speaking like populists, we have to acknowledge that Theresa May’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, was correct when he observed that Brexit was a cry of protest by those who have been left behind in the Britain from the time of Tony Blair to that of David Cameron. Is this a problem that is unique to the United Kingdom? For a European leader, merely asking this question should give the answer.
However, do some of them sometimes ponder that question? Have they realised that, as Professor Lawrence Summers argued in the Financial Times (9/10/2016): “there is increasing reason to doubt that the industrial world is capable of simultaneously enjoying reasonable interest rates that support savers, financial stability and the current financial system and adequate growth at the same time”? If they have, then what have they done to prevent the major crisis which could not but result from this explosive cocktail? Nothing – or at least, nothing that they feel it right to reveal to calm growing public fears. More than a mistake, this is a political blunder, if one believes Summers, a former United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton: “It can hardly come as a great surprise that, when economic growth falls short year after year and when its beneficiaries are a small subset of the population, electorates turn surly. They lose confidence in traditional policy approaches and their advocates”. What a perfect illustration that the disenchantment, if not the economic and social despair, spreading through societies is manna from heaven for silver-tongued populists.
How can one fail to see societies being torn apart between the well-off privileged few and a middle class snuggle blanket slowly fraying more and more before swelling the ranks of the working poor for whom instability can be both work-related and psychological? Some will counter that, in the world, Europe is still a haven of prosperity. The United States, too. For both, however, does the nub of the problem lie in how that prosperity is shared? Is this not what financial capitalism, with all its excesses and hardships, has led us to: societal erosion? That is what Donald Trump and, now, UK Prime Minister Theresa May have realised. The leader writer of the Belgian daily Le Soir has provided a perfect summation of the situation: “Trump’s masterstroke is to have espoused the deep public resentment of a section of the American population. The ‘ordinary people’ who have lost out economically and who are fed up of hearing the same talk from the same establishment figures, increasingly from the same ‘dynasty’. The people are fed up with the rhetoric that globalisation is the panacea”. This reasoning applies equally well to European countries. What are the uplifting words from reasonable leaders to drown out the foolish, dangerous harangues of those who seek to exploit the distress of today’s choir of slaves? There is only silence, we are still waiting!
The silence of the “realists” is the death blow for the European project. This is because, as Jean Pisani-Ferry argues, the Union “has striven tirelessly for the opening of borders for people, goods and capital but, lacking fiscal and social competences, has barely made any contribution to dealing with the consequences”. And the resultant popular resentment has been all the stronger, all the more profound as the Union “has long appeared complicit in the fiscal competition and the reducing of states’ power to act” that are the products of the four great freedoms of movement. When no boundaries are set, no limits put in place for the common good, all freedoms lead to the law of the jungle. National leaders have made sure that there is no “sheriff” to keep order, preferring to wear their shiny star of sovereignty. They, to a greater or lesser extent, are the ones responsible for the rise of the populists and nationalists who are now causing them such difficulties. They may be reassured, however: there is no longer any pie in the sky talk of a United States of Europe only, fearfully, of disunited states of Europe.
Michel Theys