realclearworld Newsletters: Europe Memo
Events in Europe have come fast and furious in the little more than a week since we published part one of our interview with European Council on Foreign Relations director Mark Leonard. Here is just a short list of happenings in that time that point toward the further disintegration of consensus on the Continent:
EU leaders held their first major summit since British voters opted in a referendum to leave the European Union. The meet in Bratislava was intended to serve as a demonstration of unity, but any such illusion crumbled when Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi trashed the gathering as just a “nice cruise on the Danube.” Recently tabbed as a rising leader on the European landscape, Renzi’s political future is in present peril in Italy.
Mainstream parties in Germany, including Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party, posted abysmal numbers in Berlin elections, while the far-right Alternative for Germany party turned in another strong showing. Germany and France go to national elections in 2017.
Finally, this weekend marked the official failure of the insurgency within Britain’s Labour Party against hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn, as Corbyn drew an even larger share of votes in a leadership contest than he had when he rose to the post in 2015. Amid fears of purges, accusations of entryism and disloyalty, and speculation over a party split, Labour sinks, leaving Britain with no effective opposition party even as the country moves to negotiate a historic change in its relations with Europe.
The second part of our conversation with Leonard offers a glimpse into the reaction of thought leaders across the Continent. Leonard describes an interregnum -- a period where an old order is dying and a new one has not yet taken over:
RCW: You guys [last week] hosted UKIP member of parliament Douglas Cardwell here for a talk. What were the takeaways from what he had to say?
Leonard: One of the interesting things about the EU’s politics is we’re going through a period of major political realignment where the traditional mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right are appealing to less and less people people and are finding their ability to govern and to lead curtailed in different areas. We’ve seen the emergence of insurgent parties running against the political establishment. We have identified 55 of these parties across the member states. Some come from far-right backgrounds, some from far-left backgrounds, some of them are more centrist. Some of them are over 100 years old, some of them sprung up on the internet over the last 12 months.
But they do have a number of different things in common. They’re all broadly Euroskeptic and get a lot of their energy from campaigning against Brussels and talking about taking back control from Brussels and restoring national sovereignty.
Secondly they tend to be quite hostile to immigration, to free trade. They tend to be quite anti-American, particularly against American interventionist policies in the Middle east, and they are often quite sympathetic to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, they’re quite skeptical about NATO. They’re quite anti-free trade. And most importantly, they’re all trying to recast politics away from the classic battles between left and right, and instead to set politics up as a fight between the cosmopolitan, out-of-touch elites who have traditionally run the countries, and the people, mobilized in a new way.
That’s why one of the things that almost all of these parties love talking about is direct democracy and referenda. We found that these parties are calling for 34 different EU-related referenda in 18 members states of the European Union. Some of them are about in-or-out referenda, some of them are about getting out of particular bits of the EU -- the euro, the Schengen area -- some of them are about policies, like TTIP -- it’s kind of mixed.
Douglas Carswell is an interesting part of this mix. He’s the one elected representative of UKIP in the House of Commons. He played an important part in the run-up to Brexit in the Leave campaign. But he’s somebody who has been in different ways involved, writing books about direct democracy. It is interesting if you look at what these parties are doing, it’s a real counter-revolution. They’re running very directly against some of the central tenets of Western foreign policy.
Carswell started out by talking about the 1880s when the common man, as he put it, first got the franchise in the UK, how central foreign policy was in those days. He was arguing that what we’ve seen over the last 130, 140 years, is a professionalization of foreign policy -- that the elites have made foreign policy on their own, unencumbered by a need to explain and engage with the public. He’s saying that that’s very different to what it was in the 1880s, when a lot of the elections had foreign policy at their heart, whether it was discussions about the Ottoman Empire, or the campaigns in Crimea, and so on.
It’s certainly true that foreign policy is being politicized, and a lot of foreign policy issues are central to domestic policy, whether it’s how we deal with Turkey, what we do with the refugee crisis. That makes it much more difficult to make foreign policy in the traditional way.
RCW: How different is the atmosphere in Europe now compared to when you founded ECFR in 2007?
Leonard: I wrote a book in 2005 called “Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century,” and I argued in that book that the EU stood for something new and important in the world about how power could be organized. I had this notion of transformative power, I argued that the European way of doing things would gradually spread around the world, through the enlargement of the European Union -- at that time the EU had just I think enlarged from 15 to 25 member states. Secondly through the osmotic power of European neighbor policy. There was a whole series of countries that had gone through big domestic changes because they wanted to get closer to the EU. From the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, there was a sense that other countries were transforming themselves. Thirdly, through the creation of global institutions that embodied a post-Westphalian European way of working: At that time people were really excited about the World Trade Organization, the ICC, the Kyoto Protocols, and other things that were very different from the Bretton Woods institutions.
And then finally, at that time you could see other regions coming together in clubs a bit like the European Union. You had Mercosur in South America; the African Union had just been launched with the explicit goal of becoming like the European Union. People were talking about an East Asian union. Basically every region of the world had its thing -- the Arab League as well. The idea at that time of ECFR, and my kind of thinking, it was very much [in line with] a universalist project where we saw the EU transforming the world around it.
Now there’s much more focus on the transformative power of Europe’s neighbors, and how they are changing the EU itself. People are less interested in, less aware of the European Union exporting its values and institutions, and more of the EU importing chaos, importing refugees. There’s a much more defensive mindset. People are much more focused on European exceptionalism, rather than the universal aspirations and the reach of European norms. Instead of coming together and going toward ever-closer union, the EU is disintegrating. It is a much more challenging environment.
For ECFR, we need to firstly be aware of the new world we are in. I think of where we are now as an interregnum. The last few decades have been defined by an American security order, and a European-inspired legal order. Both of those are fraying. The question is, during this really dangerous period where the old orders are fraying, how does the EU survive?
For ECFR, we think about four sets of questions. The first is how you stop people being so focused on their navels, their internal questions, that they can’t grapple with these big foreign policy challenges which are going to reshape our societies. Whether it’s dealing with Turkey or with Russia, or the refugee question. How do we get people to focus on that in a sustained way so that we can actually get strategies and not just tactical responses?
Secondly, in this new political environment, how can you go about rebuilding a consensus at a national level that Europe is the first line of defense against a lot of these things? That means getting embedded in national politics in the different member states, and working out how to engage with these new political forces, and to think about how you get a national consensus for European action. How do you knit together European action from the bottom up by seeing how the EU can actually defend the national interest in different places, and what kind of constituencies can you work with?
Thirdly, there’s a specific challenge for the EU 27 about what they want to do together, how they organize themselves after the British vote. There are conceptual things that they need to work through as well as practical things. And the fourth basket of issues is the British debate, and how that gets resolved. I personally think that a lot of the stuff that is going to be in the headlines will be about whether Britain gets access to the single market, how it deals with free movement, and that’s really important. But just as important from a long-term British national-interest perspective and an EU perspective is going to be how Britain engages with the rest of its continent on foreign policy issues. And those are second-order issues from a political perspective, but there are massive stakes. So I want to help lead a debate within the UK about how Britain can play a constructive part in the European security order -- and in the other capitals, to see if there are ways they could develop new arrangements for dealing with the UK.
Because I do think that the core thesis of my book back in 2005 might look slightly absurd in a moment where people are wondering whether the EU is going to survive the 21st century, let alone run it and define the rules. But at the same time, if the EU is not going to be picked apart by other great powers and be a pure spectator in the world, it’s going to need to come together behind a foreign policy, and I think it will be easier to do that if it can engage with the UK and with other foreign powers.
RCW: After the Brexit vote, are you more optimistic than pessimistic, or the reverse, on the future of Britain in Europe but not in the EU?
Leonard: Well, much as the Brexiteers might want to, Britain can’t leave Europe. British culture is European culture, the royal family are Europeans, many British ideas developed through people moving back and forth across the channel. There’s an intellectual ferment that’s very European. British culture is European, British food has been much improved as a result of recent engagements with the rest of the EU.
From a security perspective and an influence in the world perspective, Britain has almost indistinguishable interests in a lot of areas as some of these countries and will be much stronger if it finds a way of working with others. So I’m sure that there will be arrangements found to do all of those things. But it’s going to be much more needlessly complicated outside of the European Union, and I think Britain will be less influential and will be less successful than it would have been in the EU. And a huge amount of time is going to be wasted in the next decade, implementing the bureaucratic mess which the Brexit creates.
