BY
The two main threats to the idea of “Europe” — that fluffy, vague,
frequently invoked concept of a united, open continent committed to liberal
democratic values — come from the right- and left-wing extremes of European
politics. With Greece’s leftist Syriza government currently engaged in a
high-stakes game of chicken with its creditors, the left-wing argument that
Europe has become dominated by a narrow-minded focus on budget austerity at the
expense of human welfare is currently playing out on the front-pages of the
continent’s newspapers.
Syriza is itself not opposed to “Europe” — as silly as that formulation
sounds. It wants to stay within the EU and keep the euro as the country’s
currency. But as Greece heads to the polls on Sunday to vote on a set of
economic reforms, Syriza’s belligerent negotiating tactics and the
intransigence of Greece’s creditors have combined to put the country on a path
to possibly exiting the euro. The euro’s permanence was one of its founding
assumptions, and if Greece leaves the currency area, it would undermine the
foundation upon which that idea of “Europe” is being built.
Meanwhile, a far more pernicious brand of politics, an anti-immigrant,
right-wing nationalism, is spreading across Europe. In Britain, the UK
Independence Party is growing with every election. In France, Marine Le Pen and the National Front
will make their most serious challenge
yet for the French
presidency. In dreamy Scandinavia, the Sweden Democrats, with roots in the
neo-Nazi movement, are that country’s third-largest party, and now the latest victim is Denmark, where that country’s newly
minted center-right government depends on the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party to hold power. Consequently,
the government this week announced that it would slash benefits to
asylum-seekers in the country, which doubled from 2013 to 2014. “The effect
will hopefully be that fewer asylum-seekers come to Denmark,” Integration
Minister Inger Støjberg told reporters.
Denmark will also impose new border controls, all the while strenuously maintaining that the new
controls are within the guidelines of the Schengen agreement — the landmark
measure that removed intra-Europe border controls and facilitated freedom of
movement on the continent.
Like many other European countries, Denmark has been flooded with
refugees in recent years. And like most European countries, it has done a
generally miserable job integrating them. First- and second-generation
immigrants make up 12 percent of the 5.6 million who live in Denmark, and the
rise of the Danish People’s Party can be mostly attributed to the fear that
immigrants are taking over the country. Their Orwellian, awful — and totally
brilliant — slogan: “You know what we stand for.”
A more accurate, if less politically appealing version of that slogan, would be “You know what we are against”: Islam, immigration,
multiculturalism, and a more fully integrated Europe. And therein lies the
terrible irony of recent events in Greece. Syriza represents none of these
ideas, but the crisis it has now become embroiled in also threatens the
European project.
Indeed, the European left has been marked in recent years by a comedy of
errors. There is a great deal of agreement across the center-left and left-wing
factions of European politics that austerity, the Berlin-driven policy of
budget discipline in the face of sluggish economic growth, has not paid
economic dividends and has had terrible consequences for the poor, the
downtrodden, and the working class. French President François Hollande was
elected in 2012 with a
mandate to end austerity but has been unable to deliver on that promise.
Syriza’s election victory was built on the same vision. Like Hollande, Greek
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has found himself unable to deliver.
As a result, Europe finds itself being pulled apart from the left and
the right, as right-wing populists argue for a return of national sovereignty
and the left clamors for the undoing of austerity. In the center is German
Chancellor Angela Merkel, and one can only feel humbled by the enormity of the
political task she has on her hands. She too has intransigent domestic
political forces to contend with, namely, a widespread
unwillingness to offer
further concessions to Greece. At the same time, Merkel is charged with keeping
the European project moving forward — and that too is wrapped up in the
historical fact that the European project is itself a reaction to the wartime
actions of Nazi Germany and an effort to ensure that such devastation never
returns to Europe.
Even as that project has mostly managed to end interstate warfare on the
continent– the exceptions being the current state of affairs in eastern Ukraine
and the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s — the primary cause of misery in the
world, the plight of refugees, is intimately connected with the challenges
facing Europe. There are now 60 million refugees in the world, and many of them are looking to Europe for succor, as
embodied by the thousands of people making the perilous journey across the
Mediterranean. It is these men, women, and children who are the target of
Europe’s right-wing populists.
Could a more creative politician than Merkel somehow reconcile the
competing demands of austerity, left-wing anger, a growing refugee population,
and the right-wing backlash? It’s hard to come up with what Merkel could do
about the last two. But the first two represent the outcome of a policy that
she has championed.
In the topsy-turvy world of European politics in 2015, it will be Greek
voters on Sunday passing judgment on that policy.
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