bickerton

Since 2015, there has been a chorus of doomsaying about the European Union. Commentators’ odds on its survival lengthened as the Eurozone crisis foretold the prospect of sovereign-debt defaults, the narrow avoidance of ‘Grexit’ was managed at an enormous cost to Greek citizens, the refugee crisis hit European shores with its full and tragic force and the uk voted to quit. Out of this quartet of crises came a swathe of ‘end of eu’ writing, from historian John Gillingham’s The eu : An Obituary to Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe, lamenting the continent’s cultural collapse. Even the most convinced Europeans had their doubts. Guy Verhofstadt, one of Europe’s most ardent federalists and long-serving leader of the liberal group in the European Parliament, published De ziekte van Europa—‘Europe’s Sickness’—though by the time the English version was published he had opted for the more optimistic Europe’s Last Chance. Amidst all this was much talk about who would follow Britain out of the eu’s door.

Though products of the same historical moment, both Jan Zielonka’s Counter-Revolution and Ivan Krastev’s After Europe run against this tide of commentary. Krastev’s title is a nod to the catastrophist Zeitgeist, but neither author gives much credit to Bannonite fantasies of the collapse of the eu. Instead, both argue that a certain phase of European integration has come to an end—what we might call its liberal-constitutionalist era—rather than the eu as such. In contrast to much of the technocratic literature on this subject, both books are short, well-written and packed with ideas. Contrary to those who imagine ‘Europe’ as something extraneous—‘out there’, in ‘Brussels’—both understand the eu as primarily an expression of the sorts of politics that predominate within the member states themselves. As these national political landscapes begin to buckle beneath the strains of economic and social crisis, what will be the effects on their Union?

It is no coincidence that two Eastern Europeans seek answers to this question. As Krastev points out, the citizens of their countries know what regime disintegration is like, whereas Western Europeans only have it from text books. Krastev was born in Lukovit, in northern Bulgaria, in 1965 and Zielonka, born ten years earlier, was originally from a Silesian town in south-western Poland. Krastev was a final-year philosophy student in Sofia in 1989. Zielonka had left Poland in the early 1980s and campaigned for Solidarity abroad; he was in Holland when the Iron Curtain came down. Krastev now holds a permanent fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His list of visiting positions in think-tanks and universities—from Berlin to New York—is improbably long. Zielonka has been at St Antony’s College, Oxford, for well over a decade, after teaching in Leiden and Florence. Yet though these trajectories inform their outlooks, neither suggests that the changes underway in Europe have any special origin in the East. Zielonka explains that he conceived Counter-Revolution in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the eu and Renzi’s defeat at the hands of Grillo. Even as he wrote, in 2017, establishment politicians—Rutte in the Netherlands, Macron in France, May in Britain—were respectively castigating migrants, bashing traditional parties and embracing Brexit.

Highly readable, Zielonka’s book takes the form of a letter to his old teacher, Ralf Dahrendorf, who in 1989 had drafted an epistolary response to the tumult in the Comecon countries modelled on Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Where Dahrendorf saw a liberal revolution underway, Zielonka now tries to understand the ‘counter-revolution’ that has arisen against it. Refreshingly, his book departs from much of the literature on the ‘populist explosion’, which seeks to unpick the claims of the populists without criticizing the liberal order itself. Instead, he offers a systematic attempt to trace the crisis of liberalism through the failures and weaknesses of the post-1989 decades. In his view, the liberal revolution overreached itself, taking neoliberal and anti-majoritarian forms. No longer ‘a map to guide individuals, governments and societies’, liberalism became ‘a comprehensive ideology of power’, removed from the realm of electoral contestability as another political outlook, alongside conservatism and socialism. Instead, it came to function as a background mode of governance, promoting markets above politics, favouring the regional integration of economies and the construction of transnational modes of rule, and emphasizing an extra-democratic constitutionalism—in particular the delegation of powers to independent non-majoritarian institutions—as a route to resolving societal conflicts (in the rulers’ favour). Though liberal parties continue to participate in elections, liberalism has been embraced by all the mainstream parties, left, right and centre, as the establishment’s ideology of power.

The forces that Zielonka labels ‘counter-revolutionary’ are characterized by their opposition to at least some aspects of this ideology of power. Examples include the critique of independent institutions, such as the Constitutional Courts in Poland—or, of course, the European Central Bank. The ‘counter-revolutionaries’, in Poland and elsewhere, argue that even though liberalism embraces pluralism, its entrenchment as a governing ideology has anti-pluralist consequences. Another manifestation is the resistance to the increasing convergence between parties on the left and the right, their willingness to govern together in cartel-like ‘grand coalitions’—a resistance now emerging within the mainstream parties themselves, for instance the #NoGroKo movement in the German spd. Yet there is no simple way back. ‘European models of democracy, capitalism and integration are not in sync with new complex networks of cities, bankers, terrorists and migrants’, Zielonka writes. The eu as a liberal construct needs to be re-invented, which demands a reinvention of liberalism itself—‘stopping, if not reversing’ neoliberal politics. ‘I strongly believe that the current European predicament could well turn into another wonderful renaissance’, he concludes. But this will require ‘serious reflection on what went wrong’ if Europe is to avoid what Dahrendorf once envisaged, a Vale of Tears.

Krastev’s After Europe begins with an earlier dissolution of the continent’s ruling order, as portrayed in Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March. He reminds us that for Eastern Europe, the historical experience of ethnic diversity was bound up with political instability and violence: ‘More so than elsewhere, Central and Eastern Europeans are aware of the advantages, but also the darker sides, of multiculturalism.’ In this region, states and nations emerged late in the nineteenth century, and did so almost simultaneously, born of the disintegration of the continental empires—Austrian, Ottoman, Russian—and the processes of ethnic cleansing that followed. ‘The nineteenth-century ethnic mosaic of Western Europe was generally harmonious, like a Caspar David Friedrich landscape, whereas that of Eastern Europe was more like an expressionist canvas by Oscar Kokoschka.’

Like Zielonka, Krastev does not deny the historical significance of the Eurozone crisis or the ‘democratic deficit’. But his main argument centres on migration: the refugee crisis of 2015 was, he claims, ‘Europe’s 9/11’. What it produced was not a ‘lack of solidarity’, as we often hear, but a ‘clash of solidarities’, in which ‘national, ethnic and religious solidarities chafe against our obligations as human beings.’ The clash pitted the (larger and richer) Western states against the ‘Višegrad Four’, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, who opposed the mandatory relocation quotas for refugees drawn up by the European Commission. Why should we understand this as the major crisis for the eu? ‘History matters in Central and Eastern Europe’, Krastev argues, where citizens tend to be endowed with a ‘déjà vu mind-set’. After the devastations of the first half of the twentieth century, the route to national stabilization passed through ethnic homogenization; any embrace of diversity wakens fears about the return of the past.

Moreover, the disappointments of actually existing eu membership make it difficult for these citizens to meet the demands made of them by Western European liberals. ‘We owe nothing to these people’, was a widespread response. Above all, however, Krastev stresses the sense of vulnerability created in countries affected by dramatic outward migration. Since 1989, 2.5 million people have left Poland and 3.5 million have left Romania. His native Bulgaria has lost 10 per cent of its population, which is projected to shrink another 27 per cent by 2050. ‘Nations and states have an unfortunate habit of disappearing’ in this part of the world, Krastev points out. In a hundred years, will there be anyone left to read Bulgarian poetry? Yet while seeking to understand the hostility to incomers this vulnerability creates, he also sees its tragedy, evoking Bulgarian villages emptied by emigration, where not a single child has been born for decades, yet where the elderly inhabitants still mobilized against ‘the refugees’.

Krastev claims that migration is the new ‘exit-driven’ revolution, enacted not by mass movements but by individuals and families. ‘For today’s damnés de la terre, change means changing your country by leaving it, rather than changing your government by staying put.’ In his view it is liberalism’s failure to address the upshots of migration, rather than the economic crisis or rising social inequality, that explains voters’ turn against it: ‘The inability and unwillingness of liberal elites to discuss migration and contend with its consequences, and insistence that existing policies are always positive-sum (ie, win-win), are what makes liberalism for so many synonymous with hypocrisy.’ The political outcome is that ‘democracy as a regime-type that favours the emancipation of minorities (gay parades, women’s marches, affirmative-action policies)’ is supplanted by political regimes that ‘empower the prejudices of threatened majorities’.

If Bourdieu has been described (by Jon Elster, in a review of La Distinction) as the ‘master of the illuminating fait divers’, we might say that Krastev is the master of the illuminating aphorism. On virtually every page of After Europe there is an original turn of phrase that flirts with paradox. The migration question raises liberalism’s central contradiction, Krastev writes: how can our universal rights be reconciled with the fact that we exercise them as citizens of unequally free and prosperous societies? He delights in Brecht’s famous dictum: ‘For this world we live in, none of us is bad enough.’ In giving us a view from the ‘other side’ of the free-movement debate—that is, from a country of net emigration—Krastev makes an important contribution to the debate. Europe’s own political elites are not shy of hypocrisy: any critical discussion of free movement within the eu is tarred with the brush of far right bigotry whilst their approach to the migration crisis has been to keep out as many non-white refugees as possible.

In attributing the turn against liberal constitutionalism to fears of ethnic heterogeneity, Krastev racializes Europe’s political crisis. He seems to believe that, as the institutional trappings of liberal constitutionalism are peeled away, what lies beneath are political majorities anxious about a collapse of the moral order and motivated by authoritarian tendencies. In rapid succession, to make his point about a ‘revolt against tolerance’, he dragoons Huntington’s Who Are We?, Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality, Karen Stenner, Jonathan Haidt and—for good measure—Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. And yet, we find for instance that Poland issued more residence permits to non-eu migrants than any other member state in 2018—more than 600,000. Most of these went to ethnically similar Ukrainians and Belarusians, but increasing numbers also went to Indians, Nepalese and others. Krastev tends to assume, as do many of those he criticizes, that any sustained criticism of liberal constitutionalism is motivated by a latent form of racism.

He fails to address the possibility that what is driving this revolt against the eu establishment is simply a concern with those aspects of democratic life that liberal constitutionalism consigns to the sidelines: the power of popular majorities to reshape their societies and their political systems. As Zielonka describes at length in Counter-Revolution, the empowerment of non-majoritarian institutions—central banks, fiscal councils—has had the effect of locking in certain kinds of policies, whilst making others almost impossible. Would quantitative easing have been so universally deployed as a policy instrument had monetary institutions been subject to greater popular control?

Instead of atavistic sentiments chipping away at the liberal edifice, it is the expansion of that edifice—the steady accretion of authority to transnational policymaking regimes—that leaves little room for political parties to shape an appeal to voters. If the deep-seated macro-economic problems facing a country are removed from national political debate, it is easier for a right-wing party to politicize migration and refugees instead. In Italy, Salvini has made hostility to migrants a core part of the Lega’s political offer, more central than its traditional commitment to regionalism and the secession of the rich northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto from the ‘subsidy-guzzling’ mezzogiorno. He was helped in this by Italy’s exceptional exposure, along with Greece, to asylum seekers—but also by the foreclosure of sustained debate on economic questions for any Eurozone country. Krastev suggests that European political elites have tried to bolster their legitimacy through a shift to plebiscites. But he fears that, given the many ‘Nos’ these produce, this tactic may prove ruinous: while governments or parliaments have the power to call referendums, ‘it is the people who get to decide what question they will answer’. Far from being a flaw, this is perhaps the best defence of any contemporary use of referendums: their capacity to disrupt and challenge a political establishment which calls one in the hope of manufacturing consent for its preferred policies. Thus French and Dutch voters roundly rejected the Constitutional Treaty in 2005, while a majority of Hungarians responded to Orban’s referendum on the 2016 mandatory resettlement scheme by either staying home or invalidating their ballot papers.

Zielonka and Krastev agree that, if liberalism’s critics are gaining ground, they have yet to develop an alternative agenda. Neither author sees a new political cleavage emerging of the sort that once shaped the modern European party system, pitting an urban bourgeoisie against the landed gentry, or a centralizing state against local powerholders. ‘Unlike the Catholic Church or the Communists of old’, Krastev writes, ‘the new populism lacks any catechetical or pedagogical ambitions.’ Their goal appears to be ‘empowering the people without any common project’. Zielonka’s counter-revolutionaries show little insurrectionary zeal. Nevertheless, the two authors diverge on what is to be done. For Krastev, the history of political disintegration in Central Europe offers lessons in the art of survival: flexibility, improvisation, compromise and conciliation; instead of demonizing its enemies, the eu establishment should consider adopting some of their policies, even their attitudes, starting with strengthening its external borders and revising its commitment to free trade. Zielonka has little time for this sort of incremental change, in the name of ‘living to fight another day’. He argues that liberals should boldly embrace the decoupling of territory, authority and rights that globalization has placed at the heart of contemporary political conflicts. Power should be concentrated not in nation-states but in cities, regions and transnational organizations. Democratic experimentation should be the order of the day, exploring the opportunities offered by digital connectivity.

So far, the rulers of the eu have cleaved more closely to Krastev’s line. Merkel’s ‘resolution’ of the refugee crisis, which appears shakier by the day, was a firm nod to the nationalist camp, applying the ‘no more arrivals’ principle and pulling up the drawbridge on Fortress Europe. Under the terms of the deal struck by Merkel and Erdogan, Turkey would serve as a holding pen for refugees trying to reach Europe, in exchange for money, progress in Turkish eu accession negotiations and visa liberalization for Turks. The eu also upped the budget of its external-border force, Frontex. The new Commission President Ursula von der Leyen signalled silent approbation when the Mitsotakis government’s security forces fired on refugees trying to cross the land border into Greece from Turkey in early March 2020. Any re-founding of the eu project of the sort that Zielonka would like to see is stymied by the need for member-state ratification: a vote on a new treaty is likely—in an era of widespread hostility to the political class—to become a vote on the incumbent government.

Europe has ‘survived’, as Krastev and Zielonka thought it would. But it has done so by remaining very much the same, at least for now. As the 2019 Europarliament elections made clear, the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ have no real desire to leave the eu. We see this most visibly in Poland: the government battles with the Commission over its judicial reforms whilst actively seeking to defend its interests in the negotiations over the 2021–27 budgetary framework. Nevertheless, changes are afoot within member states. From the Gilets Jaunes to the Sardines, the huge feminist mobilizations in Spain, Italy and Poland, the mass strikes in Germany and France, popular action far exceeds attempts to limit it to an atavistic right. Instead, what is shaping the post-liberal agenda is the attempt at expanding electoral and popular sources of legitimacy, at the expense of a constitutional pillar strengthened by institutional changes since the end of the Cold War. Rather than fear this development, we should embrace it and seek to give it a more concrete meaning. And in doing so, amend Krastev’s title: not After Europe, but New Europe.