Coming Apart

Here is the news from Brussels. The political expansion of the European Union stopped a decade ago, when voters in France and the Netherlands, two founding EU states, rejected a draft of a European constitution. The euro, once vaunted as an alternative to the U.S. dollar, is weak and will remain so as long as its political future is uncertain. Since the crash of 2008, the European economy has only contracted or stagnated. Half the young people in southern Europe are unemployed. In 2015, the eurozone’s economy grew, it’s projected, by only 1.5 percent; the IMF dares hope for 1.6 percent in 2016.

Across the Continent, popular resentment at large and apparently uncontrolled inflows of migrants is carrying ultranationalist parties, all of them hostile to the Brussels government, from the disreputable fringe to the parliamentary center. As last summer’s immigration crisis becomes this winter’s security crisis, the Schengen system, which guarantees the free movement of people between the EU’s member states, continues to disintegrate. Members are instituting ad hoc border controls, and voters are turning to parties who seek to repatriate powers from Brussels.

In the last fortnight alone, Marine Le Pen and the National Front swept 6 of the 13 regions of mainland France in the first round of regional elections, taking nearly 30 percent of the national vote and more than 40 percent in two regions. Her turnout increased in the second round, but the strategic voting of François Hollande’s left-wing supporters for his rival Nicolas Sarkozy prevented her from repeating her success. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, another ultranationalist of dubious provenance, called for the Schengen rules to be rewritten. In Greece, the socialist Syriza government refused to comply with a Brussels directive that imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank be marked. And in Britain, advisers to David Cameron leaked that if Brussels continues to block the prime minister’s request to re-negotiate the country’s treaties with the EU, he will lead the campaign to vote “No” in the U.K.’s forthcoming referendum on EU membership.

We are witnessing the decline and fall of the European Union as we know it: the beginning of the end for the last of the twentieth century’s grand political experiments. The speed of the decline and the extent of the fall are not certain; Brussels still has plenty of options. But it is clear that the EU, having ceased its geographical and institutional expansion, is entering a period of contraction, and quite possibly disintegration. The lines of fracture are clear, and so are the indicators that the stresses will only intensify. Divisions between the rich north and the poorer south, between the new recruits in Eastern Europe and the “Inner Six” founders in Western Europe, and between the core partners, France and Germany, are all compounded by Brussels’s long-term lack of democratic legitimacy and accountability.

The faltering of the EU is not just a problem for Europeans. Collectively, the European Union is the United States’ biggest trade partner. In 2014, only Canada bought more U.S. exports than the EU, and only China supplied more U.S. imports. Like the United States, the European Union produces about a quarter of the world’s GDP. Together, the United States and the EU control more than half of the world’s economy, as well as three of the five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council. At a moment of global disorder, a pillar of the global economy and the United States’ global strategy is crumbling.

For sixty years, from the Congress of Europe in 1948 to the Great Recession of 2008, the European states slowly worked towards convergence into a single federation. By 2008, the union’s membership had grown from 6 states to 27, 19 of which had exchanged their national currencies for the euro. The union expanded by promising affluence and security. It is no longer capable of guaranteeing either. With the stalling of political convergence in 2005, territorial expansion has ground to a halt. Since 2008, only Croatia has entered the union. Iceland applied in 2009, when it was on its knees economically, but in 2013, having regained its feet, it suspended its application. Economically, Europe is becalmed. Politically, the union is paralyzed. And as there is no European military, Europe’s collective security policy has no substance. If Vladimir Putin sends Russian troops into the Baltic states, who will they turn to: Berlin, Paris, and London—or Washington, D.C.?

Now, the impetus in European politics belongs no long-er to convergence but to a democratic revolt towards divergence. The twinned topical issues, immigration and security, reflect a deeper pair of problems. The first is popular resentment of the “democratic deficit”: the EU’s failure to establish its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. Turnout for European parliament elections is consistently low. The Council of Europe, composed of the national heads of state, selects its president by secret horse-trading. His rival for the EU crown, the president of the European Commission, is also unelected by his subjects. This does not stop him from giving an annual, American-style State of the Union address to the European parliament.

The second problem is anger at the incompetence of the Brussels authorities. Having accumulated sovereign powers by promising affluence and perpetual peace, they have wrought economic stagnation, an immigration crisis, and an often illiberal nationalist backlash.

According to Frontex, the EU’s border security agency, 1.2 million “irregular migrants” entered the Schengen zone this year, a rise of 431 percent on 2014. Over the summer, as the EU’s system for the internal management of immigration collapsed under the weight of numbers, Germany, Austria, and Denmark restored border controls. Next, when the EU ordered member states to accept quotas of migrants, most of whom are Muslim, the Eastern European states revolted. Now, with the EU expecting more than 1.6 million migrants in 2016, member states are improvising their own border controls and setting independent immigration policies. The summer’s temporary measures, the barbed wire and checkpoints that sprang up along the overland route to Austria through the western Balkans, are becoming permanent.

In November, Austria barricaded its border with Slovenia with barbed wire. “A fence is not a bad thing,” Johanna Mikl-Leitner, Austria’s interior minister, told ARD TV. Sweden, a country of 10 million that has been accepting up to 10,000 migrants a week, reinstituted border controls and refused to accept more immigrants. In France, a leaked letter revealed that Hollande’s government intended to start passport checks on all its borders to “maintain order” during the monthlong U.N. conference on climate change. That was before the terrorist attacks of November 13, when Islamists murdered 130 and wounded 368 in Paris. Since then, the Hollande government has demanded and obtained the systematic security screening of all EU passport holders as they enter the union and indefinitely extended its own border controls. Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s interior minister, promises to retain them “for as long as the terror threat requires us to do so.”

EU law allows member states to suspend their Schengen obligations for six months in cases of “emergency.” On December 1, the European Council, admitting “serious deficiencies” in its management of the EU’s external borders, recommended raising the limit for internal border controls from six months to two years. Henceforth, Schengen is honored in the breach: Two years is an eternity in politics. With thousands of EU citizens training or having trained as jihadists in Syria, the EU has recognized the immigration and security “emergency” as a permanent state of affairs. The union’s founding principle, the free movement of its citizens, is no longer compatible with the security needs of its member states.

The security crisis demonstrates to Europeans the extent to which their national governments have alienated their powers to Brussels—and how poorly the EU has exercised them. But terrorism is the law and order aspect of a larger problem in European society. The arrival in Europe of large numbers of mostly Muslim immigrants has overloaded schools, social housing, and hospitals, threatened social cohesion in many cities, and forced cultural identity to the forefront of national politics. Hence the popular turn towards parties of ethnic grievance. Not all of them have undemocratic and illiberal roots, but all of them promise to restore national sovereignty and cultural cohesion. All of them vow to repatriate powers from Brussels, especially on immigration and border controls, and many talk of throwing off the EU’s yoke entirely.

In France, the National Front’s share in regional elections has risen from 11 to 28 percent in five years. Given the complexity of Europe’s problems, the ineptitude of its leaders, and the long-accumulated fund of resentment on which the nationalists draw, there is every reason to expect that Marine Le Pen will better this month’s performance in 2017’s presidential elections.

What will happen next? The European Union will not collapse in the old European way, violent revolution. We are unlikely to see a mob of angry Belgians throwing bricks through the glass walls of the Europa building, the unfinished future home of the European government in Brussels. In a sense, that’s a tribute to the union’s positive achievements. Instead, voters will, like the Greeks, elect insurgent parties committed to renegotiating their national treaty obligations; or the established parties, harried by public opinion, will renegotiate the treaties in order to retain power. This latter pattern is emerging in both Britain and France.

In the first round of the French regional elections, the governing Socialists, who are committed to the EU, came in third with 23 percent. The anti-EU National Front took nearly 28 percent of the vote, and Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right party, the heir to de Gaulle’s ambivalence about the EU, were second, with 27 percent. Since losing the presidency in 2012, Sarkozy has positioned himself as the responsible opposition. In 2014, he called for the EU to lose half its powers. In September, he called for the suspension of Schengen and the processing of potential immigrants outside the EU’s borders.

Across the Channel, David Cameron has arrayed himself similarly. In 2013, Cameron called for “fundamental, far-reaching change” in the union’s structure. Earlier this year, he successfully campaigned for reelection on promises to “end our commitment to ever-closer union” and hold an “in-out” referendum on Britain’s EU membership by 2017. Cameron may want Britain to remain in the EU for economic reasons, but he must also position himself ahead of public opinion. A November poll found 52 percent favor a “Brexit.”

Whether led by new parties or old, the net effect will be the same: divergence from a united Europe and the weakening of Brussels. The coming Europe will be a hybrid. The German-led core states will remain tightly federated within a Schengen-style system. But a large group of states will seek a looser relationship: a customs union, with or without a common currency. These states will seek to retain or recover authority over immigration policy, border control, and foreign policy—and may also pursue protectionist policies. If they are not able to accomplish this within a relaxed EU framework, rising anti-EU public sentiment could force their withdrawal from the union. And if one state leaves, there may be a rush to the exit.

Can the EU save itself? Probably not, but it can do a lot to soften its fall, and even recover its footing. The idea of a “two-speed” Europe, where the founders proceed with unification and the latecomers catch up when they are ready, has always been anathema to Brussels, but it may represent the EU’s best hope of retaining members. The immigration and security crisis may force it in that direction, anyway. In late November, Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem proposed radical surgery: shrinking the 26-nation Schengen zone into a “mini-Schengen” in the EU’s heartland. Only five states—Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—would remain a passport-free zone.

These states are four of the “Inner Six” founders of the European Economic Community. They were also the first signatories to the Schengen Agreement. Significantly, the Dutch proposal excludes Italy, the fifth founder of the EEC, and France, the sixth founder and Germany’s historic partner in the construction of the EU. And an EU without France and Italy would be no EU at all.

The economic weakness of the eurozone and the euro’s uncertain future are a drag on the U.S. economy. The prospect of member states leaving the union or the euro will favor neither the European economy nor the long-term health of its currency. But will the United States be better off strategically if it deals with the major European states on a one-on-one basis, rather than negotiating with the democratically impaired authorities in Brussels, who have often proposed the EU as a counter to American influence, rather than a complement?

As with the Dutch proposal for a “mini-Schengen,” we may be seeing the emergent contours of this future. In recent weeks, the French, British, and Germans have joined the United States in bombing ISIS in Syria after votes in their national parliaments. Meanwhile, the EU has issued only protests to the various parties. So long as there is no EU army—and the prospect of its formation gets less and less likely—Euro-American alliances will continue to be organ-ized at the national level and through NATO.

Back in 2005, the CIA warned that the EU, with its aging population, slow growth, and “unsustainable” welfare systems, was heading for “splintering” or even “disintegration” by 2020. Convergence towards a single Europe changed the map of the postwar world, and so will divergence in the coming years. The United States needs to prepare for Europe’s new reality. Even the CIA gets it right now and then.

Dominic Green, the author of Three Empires on the Nile, teaches politics at Boston College.