After Europe

Ivan Krastev

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780812294262
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geopolitik

In this provocative book, renowned public intellectual Ivan Krastev reflects on the future of the European Union—and its potential lack of a future. With far-right nationalist parties on the rise across the continent and the United Kingdom planning for Brexit, the European Union is in disarray and plagued by doubts as never before. Krastev includes chapters devoted to Europe's major problems (especially the political destabilization sparked by the more than 1.3 million migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia), the spread of right-wing populism (taking into account the election of Donald Trump in the United States), and the thorny issues facing member states on the eastern flank of the EU (including the threat posed by Vladimir Putin's Russia). He concludes by reflecting on the ominous political, economic, and geopolitical future that would await the continent if the Union itself begins to disintegrate.

Chapter 1

We the Europeans

In his great novel Death with Interruptions (2005), José Saramago imagines a society where people live so long that death is deprived of its existential role.1 At the outset of the new reality, most people are overwhelmed by a sense of euphoria that their lives will be extended. But soon enough, an awkwardness—metaphysical, political, and practical—takes hold. Different institutions question the benefits of a longer life. The Catholic Church worries that “without death there is no resurrection, and without resurrection there is no church.” For insurance companies, life without death means the decimation of insurance policies. The state faces the impossible financial task of paying pensions forever. Families with elderly and infirm relatives understand that only death saves them from an eternity of nursing care. The prime minister warns the monarch, “If we don’t start dying again, we have no future.” Soon enough, a mafia-style cabal emerges to smuggle old and sick people to neighboring countries to die (since death is still an option elsewhere).

Europe’s experience with a world without borders—what we speak of as globalization—resembles Saramago’s imagined flirtation with immortality. It is a tale of a sublime dream turned nightmarish. The immediate post-1989 excitement prompted by the shattering of walls has been replaced by a dizzying anxiety and a demand to build fences. Since the Berlin Wall fell—an event heralded as a world opened up—Europe has put up, or started to erect, 1,200 kilometers of fences expressly designed to keep others out.

If only yesterday most Europeans were hopeful about the impact of globalization on their lives, today they are unsettled by a future globalized world. Recent surveys reveal that a majority of Europeans believe that their children will have a tougher life than their own and are convinced that their countries are heading in a wrong direction.

The tourist and the refugee have become symbols of globalization’s contrasting faces. The tourist is the protagonist of globalization, appreciated and welcomed with open arms. She is the benevolent foreigner. She comes, spends, smiles, admires, and leaves. She makes us feel connected to a larger world without imposing its problems on us.

By contrast, the refugee (who could have been yesterday’s tourist) is the symbol of globalization’s threatening nature. He comes weighed down by the misery and trouble of the wider world. He is among us, but he is not of us. The priority of, for example, the Greek government is to keep refugees far away from tourist destinations. Attracting tourists and rejecting migrants is the short version of Europe’s desired world order.

In the nineteenth century, European high society embraced the quadrille, a dance in which participants continuously changed partners and roles. The quadrille’s intense popularity soon led to its metaphorical usage, with newspaper articles discussing the “stately quadrille”—implying freshly formed political alliances with changing partners and the maintenance of a European balance of power.

In the last decade—since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers catalyzed a global recession—the EU has been dancing with (and around) crises of its own: the eurozone, Brexit, and the revolution (and possible counterrevolution) in Ukraine. But it is my claim that the refugee crisis is the primus inter pares crisis and the dance “partner” that the EU will bring home. The only genuinely pan-European crisis, it puts under question Europe’s political, economic, and social model.

The refugee crisis has fundamentally changed the state of play in Europe. It can’t be explained solely by the influx of refugees or labor migrants. It is, among many other things, also a migration of arguments, emotions, political identities, and votes. The refugee crisis turned out to be Europe’s 9/11.

The Migration Crisis: Or Why Hasn’t History Come to an End?

A little more than a quarter-century ago, in what now seems like the very distant year of 1989—the annus mirabilis that saw Germans rejoicing on the rubble of the Berlin Wall—an intellectual and US State Department official neatly captured the spirit of the time. With the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama argued, all major ideological conflicts had been resolved. The contest was over, and history had produced a winner: Western-style liberal democracy. Taking a page from Hegel, Fukuyama presented the West’s victory in the Cold War as a favorable verdict delivered by history itself. The overthrow of communism was the most marvelous of all revolutions not only because it was liberal and peaceful but also because it was a revolution of the mind. “The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal,” Fukuyama insisted, “insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man’s universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed.”2 The Western model was the only (i)deal in town. In the near term, some countries might not succeed at emulating this exemplary model. Yet they would have no alternative to trying.

To understand the current crisis of the EU, we must recognize that the European project today is intellectually rooted in the idea of “the end of history.” The European Union is a highly risky wager that humankind will progress and develop in the direction of a more democratic and tolerant society. In an ideological context driven by such liberal nostrums of human improvement, the refugee crisis forces a questioning of everything from top to bottom. What is radical about the migration crisis is not that it asks us to give different answers to those questions pondered in 1989 but that it changes the questions altogether. We are on a substantially changed intellectual footing than a quarter century ago.

In Fukuyama’s conceptual framework, the central questions humanity would need to confront were clear-cut: How can the West transform the rest of the world, and how can the rest of the world best imitate the West? What specific institutions and policies need to be transferred and copied? What books should be translated and reprinted? How can the old institutions be expanded, and what kind of new institutions should be created?

The dawn of the Internet as a mass phenomenon influenced the West’s eagerness to endorse Fukuyama’s vision of the future. The end of communism and the birth of the Internet seemed to go together, in that the end of history called for a kind of imitation in the sphere of politics and institutions at the same time that it invited innovation in the field of technology and social life. The very word revolution migrated from the world of politics to the world of technology. Nineteen-eighty-nine heralded a world where global competition would increase—but among firms and individuals rather than ideologies and states. Fukuyama imagined a global marketplace where ideas, capital, and goods would flow freely while people stayed home democratizing their societies. The very word migration with its attendant images of masses of people crossing national borders, was wholly absent from Fukuyama’s story. For him, it was the unfettered travel of ideas that really mattered. In his vision, global ideas would be free to cross borders; as a result, a liberal conception would win over hearts and minds.

It is this vision of the world that is in free fall. Only by contesting its major assumptions can we adequately address the risks of the unraveling of the European project. The questions at the heart of the European Union’s existential crisis, and posed by the downward spiraling of the liberal order, are not about what the West did wrong in its efforts to transform the world. The questions are how the last three decades have transformed the West itself and how its ambition to export its values and institutions has resulted in a profound identity crisis in Western societies. That so many Europeans unconditionally accept the flow of immigrants as a sign of democracy’s failure is symptomatic of the problems du jour. Only a radical rethinking of the unintended consequences of the end of the Cold War can help explain why angry populists are sweeping elections throughout the Western world and why liberal notions of tolerance, cheaply reduced to a caricatured notion of “political correctness,” have come to be seen as the enemy of the people.

Rather than ideas, Fukuyama’s engine of progress shaping the future, it is the millions of people legally or illegally arriving in the European Union today who will shape twenty-first-century European history. Migrants, in other words, are history’s actors who will define the fate of European liberalism. But the centrality of the migration crisis in European politics compels us not only to reimagine the future but also to reinterpret the past.

At the same time that Francis Fukuyama, amid the enthusiastic applause of Western political elites, professed history’s end, another US political scientist, University of California Berkeley’s Kenneth Jowitt, was suggesting a very different interpretation of the Cold War’s finale. For Jowitt, the Cold War’s end was hardly a time of triumph and, instead, signaled the onset of crisis and trauma, the seeding of what he called “the new world disorder.”3 A respected Cold Warrior who had spent his career studying how peripheral communist regimes like Ceausescu’s Romania mutate the Soviet model, Jowitt challenged Fukuyama’s thesis that Leninism’s end was “some sort of historical surgical strike leaving the rest of the world largely unaffected.” In Jowitt’s view, the end of communism “should be likened to a catastrophic volcanic eruption, one that initially and immediately affects only the surrounding political ‘biota’ (i.e., other Leninist regimes), but whose effects most likely would have a global impact on the boundaries and identities that for half a century have politically, economically, and militarily defined and ordered the world.”4

For Fukuyama, the post–Cold War world was still bound by a formal order, where borders between states would endure but no longer provide the power and incentive to provoke war and conflict. He envisioned the spreading of a postmodern idea of the state, one in which values trump interests, a suprastate unsurprisingly embodied in the structure of the European Union. Jowitt, by contrast, had a far bleaker view: He envisioned redrawn borders, reshaped identities, proliferating conflicts, and paralyzing uncertainty. He saw the postcommunist period not as an age of imitation with a handful of dramatic events still left but as a painful and dangerous time rife with dystopian, mutated, and unpredictable regimes. In Fukuyama’s imagination, Europe was the model for the coming global liberal order. For Jowitt, on the other hand, the old continent was the epicenter of the new world disorder.

Jowitt did agree with Fukuyama that no universal ideology would appear to challenge liberal democracy, but he was anxious about the notion of postideological politics. While Fukuyama did not see his task as answering “the challenges to liberalism promoted by every crackpot messiah around the world” or the strange illiberal thoughts that “occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso,”5 Jowitt disagreed. The Berkeley professor foresaw the return of submerged ethnic, religious, and tribal identities. For him, the end of history would augur an age of resentment. The absence of a powerful universalist ideology to confront liberalism meant not the end of revolutions, per se, but rather a trigger for revolts against the very idea of universality and against the Westernized cosmopolitan elites who defended the idea.

Jowitt predicted that in a world flush with connectivity but marked by economic, political, and cultural disparities, we should be ready for explosions of anger and the emergence of “movements of rage” that would spring from the ashes of weakened nation-states. The post–Cold War order was a kind of singles bar, Jowitt suggested: “It’s a bunch of people who don’t know each other, who, in the lingo, hook up, go home, have sex, don’t see each other again, can’t remember each other’s names, go back to the bar and meet somebody else. So it’s a world that’s made up of disconnections.”6 A world, in other words, that is rich in experience but fails to establish stable identities and loyalties.

Unsurprisingly, one possible reaction to the uncertainty brought on by globalization is the return of barricades as the desired borders for people and states. In Jowitt’s suggestive metaphor, “a barricade is a Roman Catholic marriage. You get married, you can’t get divorced.”7 It is exactly the transition from the disconnected world of the 1990s to the barricaded world emerging today that changes the performative role of democratic regimes. Democracy as a regime-type that favors the emancipation of minorities (gay parades, women’s marches, affirmative action policies) is supplanted by a political regime that empowers the prejudices of majorities. And it is the political shock caused by the flow of refugees and migrants that is the driving force of the transformation. A study by London’s Demos think tank, long prior to Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential victory, showed that opposition to liberal migration policies is the defining characteristic of those supporters of right-wing populist parties8. It was liberalism’s failure to address the migration problem, rather than the economic crisis or rising social inequality, that explains the public’s turn against it. The inability and unwillingness of liberal elites to discuss migration and contend with its consequences, and the insistence that existing policies are always positive sum (i.e., win-win), are what make liberalism for so many synonymous with hypocrisy. This revolt against the hypocrisy of liberal elites is fundamentally reshaping Europe’s political landscape.

In the way that the free flow of ideas helped bury communism (and, with it, the Cold War), the flow of people crossing the borders of the EU and the United States has buried the post–Cold War order. The refugee crisis exposed the futility of the post–Cold War paradigm and especially the incapacity of Cold War institutions and rules to deal with the problems of the contemporary world. The 1951 Refugee Convention is among the most spectacular examples of this failure.

The Convention on Refugees is a multilateral UN treaty that defines who a refugee is and adumbrates the rights of individuals who are granted asylum and the responsibility of nations that grant it. Article 1 of the convention, as amended by the 1967 protocol, defines a refugee as follows: “A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”9

It is clear that the UN convention was framed with Europe in mind, and especially with World War II’s refugees and those fleeing the communist East in the early years of the Cold War. The convention was never designed for huge masses of people outside of the West coming to the West. After all, in 1951, the world was still composed mostly of European empires.

In this context, the current migration crisis in Europe and the failure of the Convention on Refugees to effectively contend with it serve as a turning point in reimagining the present world. What until yesterday was conceptualized as a post–Cold War world now looks increasingly like the second coming of decolonization. But if the first round of decolonization involved colonizers returning home, the second, present-day decolonization phase coincides with the “colonized” migrating to the colonial capital. A half-century ago, the colonized asserted the European promise of self-government as the basis for their liberation; now they claim the protection of human rights in order to defend their right to be welcomed in Europe.

In legal and practical terms, it makes abundant sense to articulate a clear distinction between the refugees and migrants. After all, they are not necessarily the same thing. Migrants are leaving their countries in hope of a better life, whereas refugees are fleeing their countries in the hope of saving their lives. But for the purposes of capturing the radical nature of the challenge that the mass movement of people presents to the perceptions of Europeans—the key focus of my analysis—I will use the terms “migrants,” “migration crisis,” and “refugee crisis” interchangeably.

Despite the vast difference in political contexts, the current moment has similarities with the popular passions of the 1960s. Anxious majorities fear that foreigners are taking over their countries and threatening their way of life and are convinced that the current crisis is enabled by some conspiracy between cosmopolitan-minded elites and tribal-minded immigrants. These threatened majorities represent not the aspirations of the repressed but the frustrations of the empowered. It is not a populism of “the people” held in thrall by the romantic imagination of nationalists, as was the case a century and more ago, but a populism fueled by the demographic projections about the shrinking role of Europe in the world and the expected mass movements of people to Europe. It is a kind of populism for which history and precedent have poorly prepared us.

In many respects, people who vote today for the Far Right in Europe share the sentiments of French pied noirs who were forced to leave Algeria at the time of the War of Independence. Both are radicalized and share a sense of betrayal.

Michel Houellebecq’s controversi...