As the E.U. Weakens

Throughout the 1990s, and even after the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, Western governments pulled towards capital and market values and away from people and social values—towards transnational systems, and away from local traditions. This uncoupling of democracy and capitalism, or at least capitalism as we have known it since 1990, led to a revolt of democracy and values against capital and a governing class that has taken on the aspect of aristocracy: self-perpetuating, self-serving, and contemptuous of the governed when they persist in adhering to the wrong kind of values.

In the United States, early signs of this revolt appeared on the fringes of both major parties, with the Tea Party in 2009 and Occupy Wall Street in 2011. But the cracks showed first in the European Union. In 2005, 55 percent of French voters rejected a proposed constitution for Europe. The alliance of France and Germany is the foundation of the E.U.’s economy and crucial to the political drive towards “convergence” into a single European state. But voters in France preferred not to cede their rights and laws to a supranational entity. Across Europe, resistance to the E.U. has risen sharply since then. The nation-state has become an impassable obstacle on the E.U.’s road to convergence.

The modern nation-state was born in Europe. It was declared dead in Europe, too, in the years after 1945, although reports of its death now seem exaggerated, if not utopian. Still, the nation-state’s reputation remains poor in Europe. To many postwar Europeans, raised on the mood music of the European Union and the memory of two world wars, defense of the nation-state was deemed heretical, a rejection of the dogma of peace and progress. Indeed, too ardent a defense carried undertones of racism, imperial nostalgia, and even sympathy for fascism.

Now, however, the memory of World War II is fading. The E.U.’s political development has been stalled for more than a decade. Europe’s social peace and its welfare systems are threatened by mass immigration, terrorism, and the unending “migrant crisis.” Some voters are turning to the nation-state for the protection that the bureaucrats in Brussels seem unwilling or unable to provide, just as their medieval forebears might have sought the safety of a castle. But others never stopped experiencing nationhood as an inescapable reality. Today, Europeans and Americans too are shedding the ideal of a borderless world, some with regret, others with glee. A working alternative, and the political forms of a democratic future, need to be defined.

* * *

“Whether it’s happened deliberately or not, it’s the results that interest me,” says Gil Delannoi. It is a precociously warm spring afternoon in Paris, and we are sitting beneath a tree in the garden of an old house on the Left Bank. Delannoi, a political scientist at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, or “Sciences Po,” has just published a thoughtful book on the mixed legacies and potential uses of democratic national identity, La nation contre le nationalisme, or The Nation Against Nationalism.

In France, the nation has been historically identified with the state, and the state with the universalism of the French Revolution, as well as the errors of imperialism and Vichy. France’s national institutions are unanimously Europhile; it is as though the nation-state has recognized the inevitability and desirability of its Hegelian absorption into the higher universal form of the European Union. Meanwhile on the lower slopes of history, the traditional political parties have either collapsed into the center or scattered to the fanatic fringes, and the loudest defenders of national particularity are the Le Pen family. As these are fractious times in Europe, La nation contre le nationalisme has attracted intense and often hostile interest.

“Whether we like it or not, national consciousness exists,” Delannoi writes. “It is urgent that, instead of exalting or condemning it, we know and understand it.” In the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the idea of the nation was “denigrated,” and its historical demise seen as “ineluctable, irreversible and sometimes even destined.” Yet while transnational institutions and the American-led order spread across the globe, the European nation-state revived with the reunification of Germany and the restoration of sovereignty to the ex-Soviet states.

“In all nationalisms, you find the idea that political identity corresponds to cultural identity,” Delannoi says. For all the E.U.’s successes, European democracy failed to develop at the supranational level. This produced what the Brexit-minded British call the E.U.’s “democratic deficit.” A fatal lack of accountability severs Europe’s collective political identity from its constituent cultural identities.

“The E.U. and the global commercial institutions may not practice war or violence,” Delannoi concedes. “However, they don’t practice what I believe is the most elementary of democratic characteristics. That isn’t even universal suffrage so much as offering political options and alternatives. If there’s a basic definition of democracy, it’s the possibility of legally protected political change. People should be able to choose between multiple possibilities.”

The European Union and its precursor institutions were founded against nationalism—or rather, Delannoi argues, against a false image of nationalism raised by the two world wars. This has caused what Delannoi calls a case of natiophobie, “nation-phobia.” Europe’s political managers are suspicious of particularism and of democracy in general.

“Technically speaking, the E.U. is a democracy of delegates. To belong to the E.U., you have to satisfy certain democratic criteria. And elected politicians nominate the leaders on the European Commission. So the E.U. seems to defend certain democratic principles. But when I go to any country in the world, the question that I ask, especially if I don’t know the country, isn’t, ‘Do you have an elected president or parliament?’ nor even ‘Is the press entirely free?’ Instead, I have two principal questions. ‘If you’re in opposition, do you risk imprisonment without reason?’ And secondly, ‘Can you peacefully change policy and government?’ ” He laughs. “At least the European Union fulfills the first condition—but not the second!”

“Not that I’m a Euroskeptic,” Delannoi clarifies. “My critique of the E.U. is all about this deficit. In a democracy, there is Politics A and Politics B. If A doesn’t work, you can go for B. The E.U. functions only in a nondemocratic mode. Even if it has human rights and a parliament, it still has only one policy. So if you criticize the policy, you’re not favoring an alternative. You’re against the union’s existence.”

Delannoi, an expert on Isaiah Berlin, sees Europe’s liberal democracy squeezed between two globalizing forces. One is “the world market” into whose open-bordered system the European Union has integrated itself, regardless of its subjects’ political desires. The other is the imperialism of values represented by fundamentalist Islamism. Both have their extremists, their servants, and their useful idiots. Both sense their power of conquest and, like all conquerors, believe their conquests to be irreversible.

Recent events have forced us to consider once more the passions of religion and how politically to constrain them. We have not, Delannoi believes, accepted history’s suggestion that the contemporary passion for “openness” may also require limits. “What does this passion signify?” he asks. What is “the hidden object of institutionalized multiculturalism? Is it hiding a desire for empire? And why is it hiding it?”

The answer, he implies, is an unstated complicity between Europe’s national publics and their unaccountable supranational rulers in Brussels. Both wanted the profits and pleasures of a borderless world without the economic and social costs. After nearly three decades of mass immigration and a decade of economic stagnation, the national electorates now find those costs have grown too high to pay.

“The public resists two different aspects of globalization,” Delannoi says. “Firstly, there’s the deindustrialization of wealthy states, a new phenomenon. The problem that demands our attention is that it’s going to be difficult to go all the way, to the absolute extinction of industry in the richest countries. Maybe the other, emerging industrial states can become rich too. But if it’s completely to the detriment of the older rich states, it’s evident that the population will say, ‘Stop!’ at some point. And that’s what’s beginning to happen.”

The second stumbling block is “cultural membership,” without which a nation cannot have common values. And that means confronting immigration, Islam, and terrorism. “We have to be very precise here,” Delannoi warns. He is a classical liberal, a species rarer in France than among the Anglo-Saxons, and does not wish to give intellectual ammunition to the National Front. He manages to discuss the French state’s crisis of relations with French Muslims without mentioning Islam.

“We used to have a great divergence between nations in Europe, but we also had a number of circumstances favoring multiethnic integration around common political principles. We’re going to have problems, because that model no longer works. These populations want to live in Britain or France but no longer want to say ‘We’re British’ and ‘We’re French.’ ”

In truth, Europeans were never enthusiastic about integrating their immigrants. The British left them to their own devices, often in their own slums, in the name of multiculturalism. The French installed them in purpose-built slums, then lectured them on the virtues of French republicanism, which, though theoretically universal, are in reality highly particular. The Germans created a mostly Turkish underclass, denying citizenship even to the grandchildren of Turkish guestworkers until the European Union, performing one of its better deeds, made that sort of discrimination illegal.

The European Union has complicated integration, Delannoi thinks, and has “wavered between two strategies.” In order to build a “post-national” state, the E.U. sought to weaken its nation-states. But while it has drawn executive powers upwards to Brussels, it has also sought to lessen nationalist resistance by encouraging “sub-national” and regional identities. The result is that the Scots feel more Scottish than British, and the Catalans more Catalan than Spanish. And that leads to local revolts against the established nation-states.

“The policy can be justified economically, as in the case of Alsace and other regions that straddle national borders,” Delannoi allows. “But it was a bad policy. It consisted in simultaneously encouraging national identity while also expecting it to disappear.” The logical consequence was the Catalan referendum on secession from Spain—and the imprisonment and extradition of the Catalan premier from Germany on an E.U. arrest warrant: a perfect example of what Delannoi calls the E.U.’s “negation of politics.”

The E.U.’s double policy towards nationalism has also complicated the integration of immigrants. “It’s much harder to integrate someone who comes from another continent—maybe it’s different if you come from another European country—if you’re also saying, ‘We’re asking you to make an effort to integrate into something that our elites say should disappear.’ ”

* * *

While Americans argue over whether culture is upstream from politics, Delannoi locates Europe’s crisis of legitimacy in the weakening of the nation-state, which is where culture and politics meet. In the boom years after 1990, liberal nation-states experimented with abandoning their “almost perennial political mission,” the democratic expression of their peoples’ culture and values. In the lean years since, the authoritarian democracies of Russia and Turkey have encroached on Europe like their empires of old.

“The issue today isn’t whether we can keep things as they were. That’s not possible,” Delannoi concludes. “It’s if we’re going to have a more globalized world, who is in control of it? If it’s going to be controlled by international companies and institutions, can we trust them and their sense of responsibility? If it’s not controlled at all, that’ll be very difficult. Some of my colleagues want to suppress the state. I tell them, ‘Go live for a year in a country which is considered to have no state, and then come and see me.’ ”

The Hobbesian reality, Delannoi insists, is that we need the state for security if not for the luxury of democratic expression. “Just to collect taxes and to ensure a minimum of police and social protection. You can’t organize those things on a global scale. Therefore, the system cannot be post-national. It can only be international. It can only work internationally with relatively strong nations.”

The current crisis of democratic legitimacy in the West has developed because the pursuit of free markets has uncoupled democratic polities from their value systems. Pluralities, and sometimes majorities, of voters have revolted because they feel that democratic capitalism has betrayed its own spirit and then failed to deliver the material goods. The vocabulary of denigration—populist, nativist, extremist, ultranationalist—suggests that populism is a protest from the fringe. In fact, populism is a distorted centrism, a consensus run amok. It arises from the level of values and emotions but is displaced to the margins by the weaknesses of the institutions that are at the center of political life.

Anyone who thinks that we have passed peak populism is probably deluding himself. The stakes are high, for we have enough problems already. A socialist revival would very probably turn the current crisis into a disaster. Yet if we do not repair popular democracy, we may well get populist collectivism. This takes familiar economic form in unworkable promises of redistribution from socialists like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and familiar cultural form in Europe’s “new nationalism,” with its explicit impulses toward authoritarianism and bigotry.

Better the old nation-state, the liberal nation-state, which was created in order to protect freedom of conscience and local traditions of liberty, but also to contain the excess energies of nationalism. If the state is to regulate nationalism, it must regain the trust of the nation. For though the political seas are heavy, the nation-state remains, as Gil Delannoi says, “the closest democratic horizon.”