O patrão da Geopolitical Futures faz o
balanço das recentes eleições “europeias” e descodifica os seus resultados. Um
requiem pelas ilusões de um “projecto” geopolítico que não tem nem nunca teve
qualquer realidade geopolítica própria.
Europe Redefined
The
European Parliament elections are a benchmark for a continent in flux.
By George Friedman | GPF | May 30, 2019
The biggest takeaway from the European Parliament
elections, which were held last weekend, is that the political center continued
its decadelong retreat. This election is a milestone in that regard, though it
is difficult to articulate why, considering the European Union has no clear
constitution that defines its institutions and its powers. Instead it is
governed by treaties among nations. Treaties among nations are necessarily
compromises, and compromises necessarily make for ambiguity. Some institutions
are controlled by constituent governments, of course, through which democracy
is mediated by domestic elections. But the European Parliament is the only
institution in which the votes of EU citizens create the membership. The
multiplicity of authoritative bodies and their overlapping powers only adds to
the ambiguity.
From the beginning of the European project, few
European governments were prepared to cede power to pan-European institutions.
The European Union is not a multinational state. Yet the European Parliament
reflects the idea of Europe as a single political entity. The rest of the
European Union reflects the fact that it is the nation-states that have joined
together in a treaty organization, the elected governments of those
nation-states retain ultimate authority, collectively over the EU, and
ultimately over themselves.
Before the Maastricht Treaty went into effect in 1992,
there were several disagreements between European nations over policy issues,
with many going their own way. These faded for a while but never completely
disappeared. Nations occasionally chose to disregard European rules and go
their own way, but they were bound together by their original ideology, which
dictated simply that after two world wars of staggering horror, Europe sought
an exit from its past. The creation of economic unions (one of the stipulations
of the Marshall Plan) was designed to eliminate what was thought to be the
fundamental cause of these wars: nationalism. The thought was that binding
nation-states together economically would reduce the chance of war. It worked
insofar as there were no wars, though that had as much to do with the general
weakness and dilapidation of Europe as it did with the fear of battle.
Nationalism may have been the original motive for the
EU’s creation, but after 1992 the bloc adopted another principle: technocracy,
which arose from the ashes of the Soviet Union. The Cold War had been an
ideological battle. Europe’s leaders envisioned something that moved beyond
ideology. They wanted a government of experts, a government that made decisions
without the burdens of outdated systems of belief about what government should
do. Beneath the nation-states, and beneath the democratic parliaments, emerged
a cadre of what might be called technocrats, a disinterested class committed to
efficiency and governance. The EU managed the enormously complex system through
regulations, and the regulations were formally approved by political masters
but were generated and controlled by the civil service.
All this worked to some extent until 2008, when the
competence of the technocrats was brought into question, and when national
leaders became more responsive to the problems in their own countries for fear
that they would lose their jobs. The idea that the technocracy of Europe was
not ideological was an illusion. Technocracy is itself an ideology, deciding
what is better and worse based on the consensus of the moment, rather than on
explicit principles.
The consensus between 1992 and 2008 was the belief
that economic growth, seen as the inhibitor of war, was all-important. The
distribution of wealth, or the damage done to some through the impositions of
efficiencies leading to growth, was simply a price to pay. Somewhere along the
way, a tacit consensus emerged between center-left and center-right parties of
a Europe with common values. In their shared vision, Europe’s laws aligned not
with the wishes of their voters but with the principles of the parties and the
technocrats who shared them.
The measure of a technocracy, though, is its
competence. It appeared to many that Brussels was incompetent, and that their
pious repetition of the centrist belief in European values was merely a cover
for the interests of the European elite.
This came to a head with the Muslim migration issues,
and it did so in three ways. First, it raised the issue of whether the EU
principles could compel nations to accept migrants based on European principles
from which some states and many people dissented. Second, there was the
awareness that when migrants came, they would not live in the elite, affluent
neighborhoods of the member states – in other words, the places that advocated
the loudest for open doors. Third, it raised fundamental questions about the
limits of EU power and the rights to self-determination of member states.
Over the past 10 or so years, the EU’s center held in
the face of the British referendum to leave the EU, the Greek crisis, the
election of governments in Poland and Hungary that pursued the wishes of their
electorates rather than the EU, and of Italy, which resisted the EU’s attempt
to impose a solution to its financial crisis.
Naturally, the center responded by demonizing all of
these centrifugal forces. Also natural was the spread of these movements
labeled as populist. What they were was
a return to what Europe had always been and truthfully never left, for all the
efforts of the EU. Nationalism was re-emerging, drawing the lower classes into
the system, insisting on controlling who may reside there, and treating Europe
as a treaty rather than a nation. The EU was created to suppress such forces,
and the EU was losing control of the situation. As happens to those who believe
that they have the right to govern, they could not accept the idea that the
right to govern was slipping away.
Hence the importance of these EU elections. The
centrist parties weakened a little. The nationalist parties strengthened a
little. And, depending on where you draw the line between left and right,
left-of-center parties fared pretty well. But what is important is the fact
that the elections showed that the center parties are losing control over the
political system, however slowly. (Losing, but not yet having lost.) The
decisions on this will not be made in the European Parliament but in the
national parliaments, which are directly representative of their citizens. I
suspect that one more economic crisis or attempt by the EU to impose behaviors
that many oppose, such as migration into Europe, can break the increasingly
fragile structure. Since the technocrats can’t imagine losing authority, this
will be led by an unwillingness to adjust to changing realities, the weakness
of all treaties.
Capa do L'Express em vésperas das últimas "europeias"...
Ian Kearns (que em Junho passado abandonou o Labour para aderir aos Liberal Democrats) is the co-Founder of the European Leadership Network, a pan-European think tank with its headquarters in London, and author of “Collapse - Europe after the European Union”.
