About a third of all voters at this May’s Euro elections gave their support to parties demanding an end to the European Union as we know it today. They all have in common a sense of unease at the Brussels bureaucracy and its ever-extending political powers, at a nebulous and hard-to-understand political union with its overlapping, contradictory and rival spheres of influence. Europe’s political contours resemble those of a familiar state not as much as the structure of the medieval Holy Roman Empire, with emperor and pope, electors and robber barons, free cities, prince-bishoprics, urban patricians and foreign powers all vying for power. Determining who has authority over what is reminiscent of physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: We can never know both the position and momentum of an electron in its path around the nucleus. Similarly, it seems that even with a keen sense for institutional and personal rivalries, we still can never be sure about who’s the boss, which sword is swiftest, or who’s spoiling for a fight against whom. And that, of course, spawns uncertainty and rejection.
The new Europe is a patchwork quilt economically, too. The strengths of the respective protest parties feed off of national problems. Britain’s UKIP has been openly anti-immigrant ever since the growing influx of Eastern European jobseekers collided with a scarcity of housing and the lack of job positions caused by a recession. All will be better once Britain leaves the EU, both politically and economically, pledges UKIP chief Nigel Farage.
Strength of protest
Meanwhile the “Alternative for Germany” or AfD is trawling among those who distrust the euro and harbor resentment over the series of international bailouts of Eurozone states to which there were allegedly no alternatives. The Germans are probably the least worrying of the new populists. Speeches by AfD-chairman Bernd Lucke resemble well-turned and soporific university lectures more than calls for rebellion. The revolt, it seems, will take place in the auditorium, complete with a list of speakers and debate over the rules of procedure.
Greek euroskeptics rail vociferously against the austerity measures they believe were dictated in Berlin, while regarding financial aid packages totaling hundreds of billions as the inalienable Hellenic right to support by the heirs of its pan-European culture.
Rejection of regulations
With all the differences, however, there is also one big parallel. It’s the rejection of big, all-encompassing regulations, a criticism of globalization that hits home at this level. Marine Le Pen argues that at France’s biggest construction site, the gas port at Dunkirk, only four out of ten workers are French and that Romanians there work for 30 percent less money, because the social levies are calculated according to the workers’ countries of origin, she says. Fear is also growing in Germany that people could claim social welfare benefits there who had never lived in the country and never paid into its social welfare system. In the UK people fear that too many migrants are plundering the free National Health Service. It’s the new, borderless Europe with freedom of movement for workers. On the one hand that’s an achievement, but on the other it’s an attack on social welfare systems that were built up on the basis of national circumstances and that function only in a national context. It’s the attraction that the entitlements of the prosperous in Western Europe have on the more disadvantaged people of the EU’s east. The pattern repeats itself in the debates on the euro and budgets. Ever since the single currency eliminated the possibility of making adjustments through exchange rates, the real reduction of excessively high wages in Greece, Portugal and Spain has been taking place through real wages and non-wage costs. It is therefore felt immediately. It is the pain caused when differences are exposed, when a common currency makes prices, wages and social welfare entitlements comparable with just the click of a mouse, and, in the next step, leads to harmonization and adjustment of price systems.
And because that’s not enough, the planned transatlantic free trade agreement TTIP could soon become reality as well. In Germany it infuriates both the right and the left. The one faction believes it will betray the achievements of Germany’s social welfare state to the interests of US corporations, while the other camp fears that the economic niches for small business owners, local entrepreneurs and midsized companies will be bulldozed. In the past the European Union could argue credibly that the common market would supply prosperity to all. But in the wake of the euro crisis that pledge is no longer heard. Its place has been taken by fears that more concessions to big multinationals will choke off the small shop on the street corner.
Who’s afraid of TTIP?
That also raises the attractiveness of something the French call national socialism with a blitheness that sends shivers up German people’s spines. French jobs for French people, protection from unfair competition on the labor market, financing, when needed, through the Banque de France, i.e. one’s own currency instead of through the European Central Bank, which they say is not coincidentally based in Frankfurt and therefore a mere operative for Germany’s Bundesbank. They would also shield key industries such as steelworks through economic patriotism carried out by a strong state that serves the common good. Those are the demands of the Front National, and they are completely at odds with the idea of a big European or even bigger transatlantic market.
Blurred categories
Yet they can be found in this or that couleur in pretty much every European left- or right-wing party. In Germany it’s found, implicitly, in the latent belief in the parental state, which completely negates free markets. The public outcry against neoliberalism has not only torn the financial markets off their pedestal, but has washed away the waterworks too. It’s now a Europe-wide consensus that municipal waterworks, most of which proved to be economic failures in the past, are of existential importance to European citizens and that water should never, ever be supplied by a private sector company.
Are small solutions and grassroots movements preferable to the big ones? Is a protectionist system and the shielding of regional characteristics better than the pizza-flat world of neoliberalism, whether in the guise of the EU or TTIP? Is competition anything more than the overused dictum of a borderless capitalism facing down the seemingly protective hand of a paternalistic social welfare state, which must now itself seek shelter from the self-exploitation of migrant workers? The classical categories of politics are becoming blurred. In 1966 the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl wrote about “light and reft” being confused easily. And now they’re here, language in Europe is confused at all levels, as different colors and parties fight both for and against one other. Jandl warned all those who believed the two can always be “diffelentiated.” He concluded that would be a “ralge ellol.” ■
Roland Tichy is a JVG columnist. He is one of Germany’s most renowned economic editors