The European Union has seen better days.
In the early-2000’s, the EU seemed destined to become a truly global force, capable of filling the void left behind by the Soviet Union, without the brutal string of concentration camps, permanent economic turmoil, perpetual threat of thermonuclear annihilation, and chronic shortages of food and other basic amenities that had characterised the continent’s former hegemon.
In 2002, the Eurozone came into being. In 2004, the Union expanded into Eastern Europe and the Balkans, encompassing another ten states. Across the English Channel, two of British politics’ most famous Europhiles; Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, had cast a long, Euro-friendly shadow over Whitehall for over half a decade.
In short, life was good.
Today however, the EU is faced with a number of problems which in combination, present an existential threat to the project’s survival. Brexit, of course, is the most prescient of these issues, but I refuse to allow this piece to transform into yet another beast of conjecture, postulating about the potential maybes of a deal or no-deal, hard or soft, red or blue Brexit.
From both within and without, challenges to the stability of EU continue to emerge and adapt. Many of these challenges are significantly more interesting, and arguably more severe than Brexit.
Nonetheless, this past week Brussels was given the opportunity to select the new members of its executive branch, the Commission.
This opportunity afforded the Union’s champions the chance to appoint a handful of competent, unifying figures capable of guiding the continent through the rough waters it is already starting to encounter.
Surprisingly, this opportunity was squandered.
Several of the existing figures on the Commission have become household names within European and British politics. Largely due to their largely unyielding stances on Brexit.
This new collection of Eurocrats may, arguably, be more recognisable on the continent than their predecessors, although not for right reasons. Ursula von der Leyen, Christine Lagarde, Charles Michel, and Josep Borrell all enter their new positions with significant baggage. Baggage that may undermine the Commission’s authority at the parliamentary and national level, at a time when the Union must adopt a cohesive, unified approach in order to overcome the variety of headaches it is certain to face in the immediate future. Although I personally believe incoming President of the European Parliament, the Italian socialist David-Maria Sassoli, acts as a competent counter-balance: mainly due to his inconsequential political history.
Competent and inconsequential are not terms that could be used to describe the woman likely to become the European Union Commission’s new President, Ursula von der Leyen. The former head of the German Defence Ministry was once regarded as a rising star within German and European politics, and a potential successor to Angela Merkel premiership at the top of the CDU, but her time overseeing the Bundeswehr has been an unmitigated disaster.
Rupert Scholz, a man who can speak with authority on the subject of failure in a ministerial role in Germany, has described the current state of the German armed forces as ‘catastrophic’. In 2014, Bundeswehr personnel participated in a NATO exercise, throughout which they were forced to substitute mounted machine guns for broomsticks. According to a parliamentary assessment carried out by Hans-Peter Bartels, there are crippling shortages of manpower and materiel across every branch of the German forces.
When these less than glowing appraisals are combined with opinion polls that indicate over 50% of the German public believe von der Leyen to be a ‘bad choice’ for Europe’s top job, and a looming investigation into alleged corruption within her department, it would appear fair to suggest that the Commission has shot itself in the foot regarding its most important appointment. Both the Green Alliance and the Socialist and Democrat blocs within the European Parliament have suggested they would vote against von der Leyen’s candidacy, citing the minister’s lack of concrete policy proposals and the shady process that preceded her emergence as a choice for the role to begin with as disqualifying aspects of her candidacy.
Given the fragile status of Mrs. von der Leyen’s (as yet unconfirmed) position at the top of Europe’s famous bureaucracy, it would seem that the Commission would have to look elsewhere for sources of confidence and legitimacy: It is amusing at least to me, to note that when examining the remainder of the Commission’s new members, one finds at the head of the European Central Bank, a former French Finance Minister and Managing Director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, who of course bears the scars of negligence and misappropriation of public funds so typical of those who touched the sky of the world of international banking pre-2008. Charles Michel, a failed Benelux technocrat, ousted from his position as Belgian Prime Minister only a year ago after losing the confidence of his parliament, as Donald Tusk’s heir as President of the European Council, and finally, in the role of the EU’s new foreign policy czar, the Spanish diplomat Josep Borrell, who just two months ago stormed off the set of a televised interview when pressed on the subject of his government’s appalling treatment of separatist Catalan politicians and activists.
Controversy and political ineptitude were not, I am certain, the themes the Commission was pursuing when piecing together its new members, yet (barring the innocuous Sassoli,) every single one of its new appointments are in some way associated with these features. Features that will only be amplified during the coming storm the Union is sure to encounter.
On the economic front, Christine Lagarde is about to inherit a situation that most closely resembles the final scene of the Italian Job. Her bus, the Eurozone, is dangling precariously over a cliff, whilst her gang, the ECB, shift around gingerly in a futile attempt to recover a European economy that seems, at best, to be facing a recession in the near future.
Europe’s largest economy, Germany, is already starting to exhibit some of the symptoms of this economic slowdown. Between May 2018–19, German manufacturing output dropped 8.6%, and in February, the government amended its projections for GDP growth by the end of the year from 1.8% to 1%. Deutsche Bank, before announcing major restructuring plans that included cutting 18,000 jobs by 2022, predicted a German recession that would almost certainly wreak havoc within a lagging Eurozone that has barely managed to pull itself out of the grave prepared for it by the 2009 debt crisis.
To the south, the perpetually crisis-gripped Italy has entered what some economists have described as a ‘perma-recession’: Its economy continues to shrink quarter-by-quarter, and its government is shackled by the aporia at the heart of ECB strategy, that being the massive restrictions Frankfurt places on the ability of Eurozone governments to stimulate their own economies through public spending. Austerity, opposed from abroad, the EU’s ugliest flaw.
Italy’s economy, as one of the ‘big 3’ underpinning the Eurozone, is absolutely vital to maintaining the stability of the single currency. The EU simply can not afford for a Greek-style collapse to occur within the Italian economy, yet as the nation’s debt load surpasses €2 trillion, the likelihood of such an disaster inches ever closer. Is Christine Lagarde, the financier who catapulted to political stardom at the International Monetary Fund, famous for its ultra-restrictive, borderline masochistic structural adjustment programmes, really the person to guide the Union through the economic turmoil it looks sure to encounter in Italy? Economic turmoil that may, according to the economist at Capital Economics, Jack Allen, pose an existential threat to Euro’s very existence. I for one, would argue that she isn’t. The EU needed a reformer at the ECB, one who would attempt to approach the impending crisis free from the shackles of the neoliberal consensus that created it in the first place. In Lagarde, the Commission has appointed a standard-bearer of the economic status-quo.
Internally, the EU faces a challenge to its core values, including a commitment to the democratic process and the championing of human rights. In Hungary, the burgeoning dictatorship of Viktor Orbán is quickly transforming the member of the 2004 club into a fully-fledged one-party state: placing suffocating restrictions on the freedom of the press and the electoral system within the nation, whilst simultaneously using his international platform to present Hungary as the shield of Christendom in its war with Islamic migration, a role it performs valiantly and piously: by starving refugees in holding camps along its southern border. What the EU has then, is the emergence of an authoritarian theocracy within its own boundaries
Similar trends can be observed in Poland, where the typically named Law and Justice Party have attempted to roll back the tide of liberalism that swept the nation after its emancipation from the Soviet bloc in 1989. Just this year, the government tightened its already rigid abortion laws beyond a point that would make even Kay Ivey blush.
This tide of reactionary populism continues to sweep through the members of the 2004 club and threatens to create a genuine rift within the Union: between the liberal west, and the authoritarian east. An unpleasant arrangement that many of us are familiar with already.
The EU has so far done nothing to even incentivise these rogue regimes to reverse back down the illiberal paths they find themselves following. Even during the Commission’s last cycle, when it was dominated by men who could be considered (by continental standards,) strong personalities, in Tusk and Juncker, the situation in Eastern Europe only worsened. Hungary receives financial assistance from the European budget that amounts to almost 3% of the nation’s total GDP: over €4 billion of EU taxpayer’s money is funnelled directly into the hands of an autocrat every year. Money that contributes to the construction of a theocratic one-party state that treats the concepts of human rights and European law with contempt.
How then are the new faces of the executive, von der Leyen and Charles Michel, going to impose upon Mr. Orbán and his would-be imitators in Poland the rules by which (apparently) all EU member states must abide? Von der Leyen lacks legitimacy in her own country amidst the previously touched upon scandals of incompetence and allegations of corruption, whilst Mr. Michel saw his political career in his native Belgium torpedoed by a populist-right group reminiscent of those of Orbán’s Fidesz, and Poland’s Law and Justice parties. Once again, it seems as though the Commission has not taken into consideration the delicacies of the political situation it seeks to govern. Is this short-sightedness, or a fundamental flaw in the nature of multi-national governance? A question for another day perhaps.
As someone who is truly invested in the continued survival, let alone the success of the European Union, its appointments to the Commission greatly disappoint me. In this rather short assessment, I myself (by no means an expert,) have only touched upon a few of the more pressing issues the Union is currently, or will soon be sure to encounter, and I have declined to mention the giant red, white and blue elephant just north of room.
The EU for the first time faces a series of challenges that threaten to undermine the values that underpin its structure. It can no longer operate as a technocracy, quietly erecting park benches and making sure the goods that flow through its common market won’t spontaneously combust in the middle of the night. It has to take a more active role in encouraging its members to reinvest their energy into the European project. In order to achieve this, it needs legitimate and decisive direction from the top, not the anaemic stewardship of a gang of politicians who have been ran out of their own countries due to mismanagement and incompetence.
The five new members of the European Commission are set to inherit an EU that will be radically different to any of its previous iterations. It feels as if the Union is being nudged, by outside forces, towards the edge of a deep hole it has dug itself, at the heart of its very structure. This does not sound like a task that should be taken on by a failed German department manager, and a man who could not retain the confidence of his own parliament.
Of course, the solution is the democratisation of the means by which the European Union’s executive body is selected, the EU’s obsession with bureaucracy and lack of trust in the ordinary citizens it governs the lives of is bizarre. There seems to me to be no reason why the general population of Europe should not be entrusted with the ability to elect its own leaders on the supranational level, when whole purpose of the European project to begin with was to preserve the right of Europeans to be in charge of their own political destinies on the national level.
For now, though, the EU has lumbered itself with a Commission that is reflective of an era it has long since left, an era where everybody bought in, and the trajectory of the European project was clear, it does not inspire confidence, and suggests that the institutions and structures of the once-emerging superpower have started to ossify.
Dynamism, and yes, popular legitimacy, appear to me to be the twin factors that can reverse this trend and loosen the gears of the Union before they break. However, it seems as though the EU has chosen to ride into the future with the Four Horsemen of the technocratic apocalypse, and an Italian.
Twitter - @SamuelBF3
