“I don’t know where democracy will end,” said the Habsburg statesman Klemens von Metternich, “but it can’t end in a quiet old age.” Metternich was an architect of a postwar European order—the Concert of Europe, assembled after the defeat of Napoleon. In his old age, he witnessed its disintegration after the democratic revolutions of 1848. In the 1850s, Turkey, once the strategic anchor of the southern front, became a liability, aggressive and unreliable. Russia sent troops into the borderlands of Central Europe. There was even war in the Crimea.
In the breakdown of modern Europe’s postwar order, the democracies get louder even as the voters get older. The two phenomena are related. For decades, Europe’s leaders told their voters to trust the euro and mass immigration. The euro would create an economy of scale, like that of the U.S. dollar. Mass immigration would soften the effect of demographic decline on the tax base that funded hospitals, social housing, schools, and welfare systems. Now, voters in Europe’s cities discover that their hospitals and social housing are crowded with immigrants. Their schools are the stage of cultural conflict between the relaxed morals of postwar Europe and the rather more stringent demands of Islamism. And welfare budgets have to be cut because the eurozone remains a sluggish giant.
Now, as in 1848, that Spring of Nations when the harvest was poor, successive waves of nationalism challenge Europe’s leaders. The politicians, as concerned with staying upright as with setting a course, ride the waves. In London, Theresa May’s government squeezes between Scylla and Charybdis, avoiding shipwreck on the rocks of law and legislative process.
In late January, Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that May’s government must give MPs a vote in Parliament on the act that would formally begin Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, invoking Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union. The government, whether from cunning that Metternich might have envied or mere aimlessness, drafted a bill of two clauses and 137 words. The Remainers, whose hopes of reversing the Brexit referendum in court had also been dashed with the January decision, hoped that the House of Lords would force May towards a “soft Brexit,” whereby Britain stays in the EU’s single market, by inserting amendments into the bill.
But their lordships are not what they were in Metternich’s day. Even the splendidly named Lord Pannick, who had represented the Remainers at the Supreme Court, advised his fellow peers to accept the will of the people’s elected representatives in the Commons, who had already passed the bill. The peers did pass two amendments, but the Commons voted them down, and the Lords finally assented to the original bill. On Thursday, the queen’s signature, in a flash of constitutional magic of which Metternich would have approved, turned the bill into an Act of Parliament. May is on course to honor her promise to notify Brussels by the end of March.
On the day before the queen signed the Article 50 bill, the voters of Holland made their marks on their ballot papers. The Dutch are usually the kind of electorate that Metternich might have tolerated—moderate, consensual, and averse to change. Not these days. Only in the week preceding the election did Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Freedom and Democracy party deflect Geert Wilders’s anti-immigrant and anti-EU Party for Freedom in the polls—and only then because Rutte’s statements were almost as hostile to Turkey as Wilders’s. A row erupted just days before the vote when Turkey announced it was sending its foreign minister to speak at a rally in Rotterdam in support of a referendum on constitutional changes that would expand the power of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Rutte declared Turkey wouldn’t be allowed to chase the votes of Holland’s Turkish citizens—possibly escalating tensions in the process—on Dutch soil.
Rutte’s party won, with a fifth of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. The office of Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the EU commission, was quick to congratulate Rutte on his “clear victory.” Yet the clarity of the victory is debatable. Rutte did not do as well as he did in the 2012 election, and Wilders did better. And now, Rutte, as in 2010 and 2012, must form a coalition. He has promised not to admit Wilders into it, or to repeat the arrangement of 2010-12, when Wilders supported Rutte from outside a minority government. Without Wilders, Rutte will have to form a four-party coalition, Holland’s first since the 1970s. The negotiations to assemble this coalition will be complex, and may fail. In the meantime, the direction of Dutch democracy is unclear. So are Holland’s economic policies and its role in the EU.
At present, the parliamentary influence of Europe’s populists is limited by two factors. Firstly, although the number of voters willing to prioritize nativist policies is large and growing, it is generally not large enough to produce absolute majorities, especially in parliamentary systems designed to create multi-party consensus. Secondly, the mainstream parties work to exclude the insurgents. This is what happened in Sweden after the Sweden Democrats took 13 percent of the seats in the Riksdag, and it is what Mark Rutte will try to engineer now in Holland.
This does not deprive the populists of indirect parliamentary influence. The populists have gained votes because nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment are becoming mainstream views. In a February poll by the London think tank Chatham House, an average of 55 percent of citizens in 10 EU states wanted a halt to immigration from mainly Muslim countries. The populists, their profiles amplified by the mob parliament of digital media, are setting the domestic political agendas.
The mainstream parties, if they are to ride the currents of disaffection into power, are tacking towards the populists. In France, François Fillon’s advocacy of national identity and Catholic social values overlaps with the policies of Marine Le Pen. In Germany, Angela Merkel, facing the Alternative for Germany in this year’s elections, considers whether to ban the burka. In Holland, Rutte pulled ahead of Wilders by banning Turkey’s foreign minister from the country. In Britain, Conservative Europhiles voted for the Article 50 bill.
“The most fundamental problem of politics,” Henry Kissinger wrote of Metternich in A World Restored (1957), “is not the control of wickedness, but the limitation of righteousness.” For years, the EU leadership in Brussels insisted that there could be no deviation from “convergence” into a single European state. Like Metternich when he said that “democracy is a falsehood,” those EU leaders antagonized the nationalism they sought to suppress.
In early March, however, the first sign emerged that the EU’s leaders are beginning to understand that democracy and nationalism threaten not just the speed of convergence, but also the future of the union and the euro. On March 1, Juncker gave the European parliament a white paper examining five “pathways” to the union’s future.
“The future of Europe must not be held hostage by electoral cycles, party politics, or short-term successes utilized for domestic political purposes,” said the would-be Metternich of Brussels. “Brexit, as regrettable and painful as it may be, must not be allowed to stop the European Union on its march to the future. We will go on. We must go on.”
Juncker’s position after the Brexit vote resembles that of Metternich in 1830, after France’s July Revolution. “My whole life’s work is destroyed,” Metternich said, then strove to mitigate the damage. The Concert of Europe was able to crank out the old tunes for another two decades.
Two of Juncker’s five paths would save his life’s work, by looping around democracy and ending in full and final convergence. The other three, though, amount to its destruction: an EU that reverts to being a single market, a “two-speed” Europe with a converging core and a nationalist periphery, and an EU that acts “quicker and more decisively” where possible—which is to say, more slowly and less intrusively.
The direction of European democracy remains as unclear as it was for Metternich, but the EU’s path is approaching a fork in the road. The future of the EU is no longer in the hands of Juncker and the Brussels elite. It will be shaped by democracy and nationalism—how the mainstream parties adapt to the challenge of the populists, and whether Brussels responds to resistance from the national parliaments in the rigid style of Metternich.
Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is a frequent contributor.
