Do Brexit, unbridled immigration, Russian aggression, and mounting nationalist sentiment augur the imminent end of the European project?
In this well-researched and tightly reported study, James Kirchick presages calamity for the continent if such trends aren’t reversed. “We are on the cusp,” he cautions, “of witnessing the end of Europe as we have known it for the past seven decades: a place of peace, stability, prosperity, cooperation, democracy, and social harmony.” To arrest this descent—no mean feat—Kirchick calls for a restoration of Europe’s “muscular liberal center.”
Proceeding geographically from east to west, Kirchick begins his journey in Russia, where long-held grievances, economic frustrations, and revanchist ambitions stoked by Vladimir Putin have largely reversed the political and social freedoms inaugurated by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. One common scapegoat is NATO, whom Putinists and American realists alike finger as a proximate cause of the new Russian military adventurism. But pace academics like John Mearsheimer and pop-foreign-policy types like Thomas L. Friedman, Kirchick posits that “the enlargement of NATO into Central and Eastern Europe has been one of the few unmitigated success stories of American foreign policy as it consolidated democracy and security on a continent once scarred by total war.”
Few nowadays recall that Gorbachev once waxed poetic about the Soviets’ joining the “common European home” and that Yeltsin sought Russian entry into “greater Europe.” Yet Vladimir Putin, presiding over a “criminal regime,” in Kirchick’s memorable phrasing, “whose idea of peaceful coexistence includes coercion and invasion of its neighbors,” has forsworn Europe, or at least any version of the continent’s democratic values recognizable to the West. Instead, in his quest to restore his country’s glorious past, Russia’s strongman has deployed martial might, cyberweapons, and disinformation techniques to destabilize former Soviet republics militarily and politically and, more broadly, to “sow confusion and defeatism in the West by poking holes in its narratives while ridiculing and upending the very notion of objective truth.”
Things are hardly better among the old Warsaw Pact countries, where memories of 1989 and the liberal transformation it promised have faded fast.
From Hungary’s reactionary Fidesz party and its charismatic, irredentist prime minister Viktor Orbán, to Poland’s upstart Law & Justice faction, to the populist leaders of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Central European nationalism and hostility to liberal Western values are ascendant, with many former Soviet satellites now relapsing into a Russian embrace. Even Germany—lately given to outrage at American spying, reluctance to participate in certain NATO exercises, and energy deals with Gazprom—has found it difficult to resist Russia’s gravitational pull, as its traditional (though never fully rooted) Westbindung gradually yields to a nostalgic revival of Ostpolitik. Kirchick attributes this trend to Germans’ “utopian yearning for neutrality,” a dangerous and unrealistic ambition in today’s turbulent foreign policy world.
Liberal European values also find themselves under attack by the ever-growing menace of Islamism, which takes many forms. Postmodern multiculturalism has hollowed out these values, just as a newly assertive political Islam fills the void from Scandinavia to Sicily. Meanwhile, seemingly uncontrolled Muslim immigration has inflamed nativism throughout Europe, thus empowering extremists and fraying bonds between allies. As Kirchick correctly observes:
Europe’s surge in Islamic fervor, nationalist backlash, and illiberal reaction, coincides (not surprisingly) with a spike in anti-Semitism. Ever the canary in the coal mine, Europe’s Jewish population has endured intensifying physical and social threats that have inspired many Jews—most prominently in France—to migrate to friendlier climes, thereby further impoverishing the culture of the societies they flee. “Assailants first struck at symbols of free speech and then at Jews,” Kirchick notes, describing attacks like the Charlie Hebdo-Hypercacher massacres two years ago, “a bloodily and unambiguous signal that the fates of European liberty and Jewry are inextricable.”
Meanwhile, across the English Channel, British integration with Europe finds itself increasingly imperiled not only from the right, by Nigel Farage and his stunningly successful Brexit campaign, but also from the left, by Jeremy Corbyn’s radically remade Labour party—which Kirchick labels “a personality cult” and “the most influential anti-Semitic institution in the Western world,” following a scandal of viciously anti-Israel screeds by many notable party members. (For the record, Kirchick isn’t exactly enamored of the EU itself: He considers it, with apologies to Winston Churchill, “the worst system of governing Europe”—apart from all the others.)
Yet not content merely to be the Eeyore of European decline, Kirchick remains hopeful that the continent can cohere around core principles, even if such unity requires sharply curtailed levels of immigration and a more “cohesive and robust” approach to Russia and foreign policy in general.
He also insists, contrary to some in the Trump administration, as well as its critics, that “the values and interests uniting Americans and Europeans are far more numerous, and of greater import, than anything which divides us.” Let us hope he’s correct. ¨
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer living in Israel.
