The compromise hammered out by the European Council just as dawn was breaking last Friday has left a bitter taste in European mouths (see EUROPE 12051, 12052).
All European mouths.
It is felt by those who, like the German Foreign Minister and President of the Bavarian CSU party, Horst Seehofer, consider that migrants hiding behind the word ‘refugee’ will be able to continue to entrench themselves in countries that have no vocation to be their promised land, or at least their temporary refuge.
In the opposite corner, it is considered scandalous by those who feel that intergovernmental Europe has once again, and once too often, given into the temptation to see asylum seekers – and migrants in general, even legal ones – as an attack on their very identity.
Not since the 1920s and the 1930s have European society and the national societies of Europe, the European people, in brief, been so divided. The blind austerity imposed on the most vulnerable citizens of the EU seemed to create resentment only on the periphery of Europe. In reality, policies promoting social and regional inequality and leading to a loss of status for the middle classes fed fears and frustrations, even in the most prosperous countries. Even in Germany, Angela Merkel has now found this out the hard way: the fear of the outsider, of the other, serves the electoral interests of extremists and, even worse, contaminates the traditional political parties.
“To stop domestic politicians in their race to the bottom, the citizens are putting their faith in those who claim to be selling dreams, but are actually peddling hate”, writes the French economist and Federalist Bernard Barthalay, (blog.mediapart.fr, 29 June; our translation). He is right, this is the case absolutely everywhere in Europe; even in France, where the victory of Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen cannot hide the obvious fact that there is a dangerous radicalisation of ideas.
“All the ingredients for a swing to the far right, nationalism and racism are now in place. This time, it is the so-called illegal refugees, or the Roma in Italy, who are the scapegoats. Or Mexican nationals in the USA. Over and over again, we hear talk of assembly centres, as if it were normal or an everyday thing (…). Wherever you go, there are people who want to build walls and fences” (our translation).
This comment was posted on Facebook by a perfectly balanced Christian Democrat who long served as spokesperson for a Belgian Prime Minister who ended his career as President of the European People’s Party. What would Wilfried Martens say now if he could see how Angela Merkel has been taken hostage by the Christian Democrat Horst Seehofer, or some of the things Viktor Orbán gets up to?
Granted, he spent a long time overlooking Silvio Berlusconi’s more outrageous behaviour and entered into some regrettable agreements with the British Conservatives to tighten the EPP’s stranglehold over the European Parliament; but how much longer could he go on in the guise of a modern-day Pontius Pilate at the service of Realpolitik?
No, it’s time for all democratic consciences to wake up to the fact that unfettered globalisation and the European Realpolitik of recent decades now pose a serious threat to democracies. This is the case in Europe and in the United States – to say nothing of countries such as Russia or Turkey, where autocratic regimes wear democracy like a fig leaf.
It’s also time for the democrats of Europe to take to heart the fact that it is the intergovernmental Europe made flesh by an omnipotent, yet impotent, European Council that is taking us back to the darkest hours of the history of the continent.
Our colleague Shada Islam, who works for Friends of Europe, is bang on the money when she says that “European leaders – the ones who still believe in EU values and EU solidarity – have to stop being on the defensive on migration and must resist the pressure to embrace toxic populist rhetoric” (Carnegieeurope.eu, 28 June). Even more so, when she adds: “instead, they must contest the false assertions that immigration leads to increased unemployment, crime and terrorism. By not doing so, they are amplifying the populist narrative”.
During the night from Thursday to Friday of last week, the members of the European Council bowed to pressure; Orbán, Salvini and Seehofer induced them to amplify the populist narrative. The conclusions they adopted confirmed that an up-and-coming new generation of fascists have got their foot in the door in Europe.
It is now for the European democrats, from the whole of Europe, to put up some kind of resistance to these excesses that are jeopardising not just the European Union, but, ultimately, long-term peace on our continent as well. They need to remember that, as Henri Lastenouse wrote, “the European project responds both historically and ontologically to the experience of the fascist regimes in Europe in the 20th century” (Témoignage Chrétien, 28 June; our translation). They need to put up some peaceful resistance, remembering those who took up arms in the Resistance of the 1940s, hoping to build a European federation at the service of its citizens on the smouldering ruins left behind by the Second World War.
Which is not what the European Council has ever had in mind.
Michel Theys