Europe is in a crisis of a kind it has not seen since its modest beginning as the Coal and Steel Community, transformed into the European Economic Community, and now the European Union (EU). The credo was an ever closer union — a concept rejected by Britain — and not all members joined the common euro currency when it was launched.
The crisis Europe faces, which blew in the faces of member states by the millions of Syrian and other refugees who flooded Europe, has deeper causes. The first is the changed attitudes and worldview of the former East European countries, initially the most enthusiastic members. Second, the euro experiment, good in concept, has not worked out as hoped for, with Greece a case study. Third, the refugee flow opened the divergent and contradictory views of members. Lastly, under Angela Merkel’s decade-long chancellorship of Germany, Berlin has come to pretty much run the organisation.
The British referendum on June 23, on whether to stay in the EU, is only the last blow to a grouping that was conceived with high hopes and saw an unprecedented boom for members even as the younger generation revelled in the boon of visa-free travel among most members. In any event, Britain has been an awkward member, never quite losing its nostalgia for its empire and military prowess, first becoming a tail of the United States and then having to defer to its World War II enemy, Germany, in the EU.
But the refugee crisis has opened up the very different perspective of East Europeans. Poland is a prime example in prospering, thanks to the considerable assistance it has received from the EU. With a change of government, it is now the most arbitrary member of the EU, consigning liberal values to the waste paper basket. Hungary has been a maverick state under Viktor Orban who cocks a snook at Brussels on how he runs the country. These countries, some of them grouped under the Visegrad label (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), have also raised the question of masses of Muslim refugees vitiating an essentially Christian setting. The EU leadership does not have the appetite to take them on.
Before the refugee influx, Greece’s financial predicament as a member of the euro group had come into sharp focus, with Ms Merkel finally yielding the stick. Athens had little choice but to swallow the bitter pill of austerity if it wanted to remain in the euro arrangement. But the austerity medicine given it was highly unpopular and led to a domestic political upheaval. Indeed, the German austerity cure has become deeply unpopular in most member countries.
Thanks to the refugee crisis, Ms Merkel is also facing problems at home. The world praised her for welcoming refugees, with more than a million of them settled there last year. But the early welcome wore off as there seemed to be an endless number flooding southern Europe to get to Germany. Domestically, it swelled the ranks of such right-wing parties as Alternative for Germany, as the recent state elections showed. Besides, the German open door policy angered other EU members, many of them starting to erect barriers to ward off a seemingly unending stream. Thus, these member states were striking at the heart of the signal EU achievement of open borders known as Schengen.
The outcome of these series of crises was the curious agreement between the EU and Turkey, the starting point for Europe of most refugees. The major elements of this agreement, which superseded a previous tentative one, was that Ankara would receive a subvention of six billion euros, would take back all other than Syrian refugees from Europe and Europe would take refugees from Turkish camps of a similar number. It was in the end an exercise in realpolitik and Germany and others held their noses to approve it.
These developments throw up portentous questions on the future of Europe. Whatever the British decision turns out to be, the EU has lost its elan.
For long the French-German engine was pulling the organisation, Paris on the political front, given Berlin’s need to live down its Nazi past. But Germany has largely got over its past, Ms Merkel herself having been a citizen of Communist East Germany. Indeed, France has been uncharacteristically passive in relation to the refugee crisis.
Is the European Union then to shrivel to a grouping of northern European continental powers? We are, of course, living in very different times, compared to the glory days of the beginning of the EU. The world has changed. The Soviet Union has disappeared and some countries in Eastern Europe have replaced their Communist systems with Right-wing orthodox Christian regimes tending to turn to the Right. The credo of liberal democracy on which the EU was founded is an engendered animal today.
The world’s hope will be that despite these new disruptive events, the sum total of advantages of being together will tip the scales in favour of remaining together. Ironically, a change in the foolish policies followed by the EU on Ukraine at the urging of Washington might offer a solution. The Soviet Union is gone and the days of Boris Yeltsin, who sang in unison with the American orchestra, are history.
The West might rail at Russia’s President Vladimir Putin but he is protecting his country’s interests. Washington is still treating Moscow as a defeated Cold War power. An elementary look at the land mass and population of Ukraine and its symbiotic relationship with Russia in culture, religion and family relationships will tell the EU that Moscow would resist the EU (and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) heaving away the country from its natural mooring to an anti-Russian orientation.
Given the Western noise level, President Putin thought it wise to take back Crimea, the home of the Russian Black Sea fleet that Nikita Khrushchev gave away to Ukraine in the days of the Soviet Union. And Moscow encouraged and supported a rebellion of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
