Coming European Split?
World War II touched every corner of the world. If a country wasn’t destroyed by fighting on its territory, then it probably benefited from wartime industry. If it didn’t play a direct role in industry, then it was probably a colony that was able to use the post-war order to secure independence. From Asia, to Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, the war had lasting effects we’re still dealing with today. Having been through centuries of destructive wars, Europe came up with an experimental idea. These countries who had so often fought would be joined together in a post-nationalist idea. The EU, a supra-governmental organization would bind Europe together and prevent another Somme, another 100 years war, and another Holocaust. This grand experiment looks to be failing, and Europe is staring a massive split square in the face.
Demonstrating this split is a perfect case study in the East-West divide Europe now finds itself in. In March, the EU moved to sanction Poland over policies that the EU deemed “not compatible with fundamental principles of the EU.” The European Council moved to punish Poland but was blocked from doing so by Poland’s allies in the Council — namely Hungary and other Visegrad countries. See, what’s a violation of principles in Paris and Brussels may be perfectly in line with values in Warsaw and Prague. French President Macron warned about the East v. West schism, but this is a direct result of the EU’s policies.
Perhaps forgetting that the EU is made up of multiple countries with different priorities, cultures, histories, and values, policymakers in Brussels brought this on themselves. Central European countries (apparently thought of as “East Europe” in a tongue-in-cheek way of describing them as primitive) have different cultural memories than that of Western Europe. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and other regional powers still remember being on the front line against centuries of Islamic (Ottoman) invasions of Europe. Now they’re being pressured into opening their gates to another form of invasion as they see it. Millions of migrants from war-torn Middle Eastern nations are knocking on their doors the way Turkish invaders did only a few hundred years ago.
Is it any coincidence that this right-wing populist wave sweeping Europe as a whole, but Central/Eastern Europe in particular started when the refugee program intensified? As populist parties swept to power in Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, EU officials fretted over the storm clouds gathering over Europe. What those policy makers failed to consider was that voters in Prague and Budapest were going to vote for politicians who reflected what citizens of Prague and Budapest wanted. What did they care if those politicians, from Babis to Orban, irked officials in Brussels? Why should the Czech Republic open its doors to millions of migrants who have no intention of assimilating all because diplomats a thousand miles away want their ideals of open borders and a post-nationalist Europe to apply to everyone?
Europe, for all its pros and cons, is not the United States. Americans formed an identity here relatively recently, and they all had to buy into being “American.” The time when Americans didn’t buy into this idea of all being Americans? There was a civil war with 600,000 killed. When Thomas Jefferson had finished the Declaration of Independence, Europe had already had a thousand years of nation-forming and collective historical memories to back it up. It took a bloody civil war for Georgians and South Carolinians to accept the fact that a federal government — made up of their own people — had some form of control over them. The EU is an attempt to assert foreign control over two dozen states.
If the UK, one of the strongest countries in the world, and one of the founding members of the EU can leave, is it even a real power? UK citizens rightly rejected the idea of this supra-national government and wanted to reassert local control over their borders and economic policies. That is the reason states exist and exert sovereign control.
President Macron and his kind in France and Germany may demand that nationalism is bad, but that statement will never find traction throughout Europe. Yes, nationalism has been the cause of millennia of wars, but it is the core of identity in many states. EU policy makers would be wise to heed that warning and not continue trying to coerce Eastern Europe into their “one size fits all” transnational method of governance.
