The Winter of European Discontent

It is well known that the post-war architects of European integration used crises to build more comprehensive institutions. In contrast, for gradual, piecemeal reforms to be successful, the challenges facing Europe must be relatively small. That certainly does not describe the current situation in which Europe finds itself.

The European Union is facing a series of interconnected crises that are questioning the very meaning of its existence. Europeans are struggling with an industrial crisis – a consequence of globalization and extremely rapid technological change – then with fiscal crises, as well as a climate crisis that is already wreaking havoc and increasing the costs that countries have to bear.

Moreover, demographic trends – an aging population and a shrinking workforce – portend even greater costs in the future. Democracy is under attack from anti-establishment parties and the collapse of centrist politics. Added to all this is the security challenge that is perceived differently across the continent: while northern and eastern Europe see Russia as an existential threat, others are much more relaxed on the issue.

Recall how the Cold War spurred continental integration, when the original members of the European Economic Community united in the face of the Soviet Union. This fostered institutional cohesion, but it also led European elites to rely on external threats as an incentive to continually strengthen the community they were creating. So, quite predictably, they sounded the alarm after every shock—from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Donald Trump’s first election victory, to Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s reelection.

There have always been certain responses to these crises, but they have not been sufficient. Today, all Europeans – and Ukrainians above all – are faced with a new world order that could be shaped by a summit between Putin, Trump and Xi Jinping. Imagine three elderly, sick men reenacting the Yalta Conference of February 1945, when a seriously ill Franklin D. Roosevelt and a weakened Winston Churchill succumbed to Stalin’s coaxing and agreed to the division of the post-war world. Such a moment would go down in history as a shameful episode, and avoiding its repetition should be one of Europe’s top priorities.

We have come to this point because some of the most significant steps towards European integration since the Cold War were never fully implemented. The creators of the European Monetary Union knew that a single currency also meant the need for a common fiscal capacity. Perhaps they believed that a future crisis would create the political will to complete the job – just as the Covid-19 crisis led to the launch of the “NextGenerationEU” program. That 800 billion euro ($890 billion) recovery program did include a common borrowing instrument, but it did not specify from which revenues the debt would be repaid. It was just a small step towards fiscal integration, and nothing more.

Another fundamental problem is the relationship between France and Germany. Historically, post-war Europe has always been based on their reconciliation, with an economically increasingly powerful Germany relying on the security provided by France – a nuclear power that retained much greater independence from the United States than the United Kingdom ever had. However, France and Germany are returning to their old patterns of behavior.

The current protest movement in France has already sparked unrest in other countries, repeating the pattern of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871. In those periods, France was the driving force behind a revolutionary process across Europe that, as a rule, ended not in democracy but in authoritarianism. Similarly, Germany seems to be repeating the collapse of its first true experience with democracy—the Weimar Republic—in which an incoherent alliance of disaffected Nazis and Communists destroyed the more liberal and moderate parties of the political center.

Then, as now, it was the young who were drawn to extreme options. Germany’s two main parties – the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats – are seeing their support base rapidly shrinking to parties that promise to reorient the country away from Europe and toward Russia.

The old post-war pattern of gradual adaptation has lost its hold. German industry could have improved existing products by introducing increasingly efficient internal combustion engines and increasingly sophisticated automated machine tools. However, it missed the opportunity to radically reshape industrial processes, as is most clearly seen in the case of electric vehicles.

France, for its part, has long projected global power through interventions in Africa. But here too, the story was similar to Germany’s: France increasingly relied on private mercenary groups, and when faced with serious security challenges, it proved to be powerless to respond. Faced with growing demands to withdraw, it withdrew from seven African countries between 2022 and 2025.

This development, too, has disturbing historical echoes. In the 1930s, large sections of the French political spectrum dismissed the threat of Nazi Germany with the slogan: “Why die for Danzig?” Today, the same logic can be heard in the question: “Die for Kiev?”

It’s a recipe for humiliation. In moments of defeat, Europeans often resort to dreams. After being humiliated at Waterloo and exiled to St. Helena, Napoleon spoke of rebuilding Europe based on “the same principles, the same system, everywhere” – with a single European legal code and a common currency.

But some dreams are more realistic than others. Are the prospects bleak enough to warrant serious joint European action? The latest European mantra is that China and the US may be growing faster economically, but that, as predatory superpowers, they are also more vulnerable to resistance from others. That may be true. But it is also clear that piecemeal reforms are not enough for Europe to decisively confront the challenges that lie ahead.

*Harold James is a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University

Source: https://en.vijesti.me/column/834005/winter-of-European-discontent