What Doesn’t Kill EU Makes EU Stronger
The Myth of the European Union’s Imminent Death
In “The Return of Europe’s Nation-States” (September/October 2016, Foreign Affairs), Jakub Grygiel argues that post-European Union nation-states “would do a better job of checking Russia, managing the migrant crisis, and combating terrorism on their own than they have done under the auspices of the EU.” His unspoken goal of putting a positive spin on an admittedly tumultuous period in the EU’s life is noble, and I’ll be the first to say that the EU is a very difficult and complex institution to fully understand. But giddily writing off the Union as already dead (“As the union dissolves…”) served to relegate the piece to the very pile of Eurosceptic and right-wing rhetoric that he talks about so much in his essay. Rest assured, the European Union will survive its current “crisis;” any claims to the otherwise are either unfounded or severely confused.
To be fair, being a Eurocrat these days is not easy, and the continent does face many serious problems. But is this actually the “worst,” most threatening, most existential, “political crisis since World War II”? Grygiel has seized recentism — the phenomenon of putting an excessive amount of importance behind recent events — as a tool to support his argument. For example, terrorism is often cited, by Grygiel and others, as a sudden and new danger to European citizens’ security. But instances of terror on the continent are hardly new, and are actually considerably lower now than they were in the 1970s-1990s when Basque separatist group ETA and the Troubles in Ireland continuously made headlines for terror. Spain, Ireland, and the United Kingdom were EU members during this, and the Union survived that.
Grygiel spends much of his essay on security, and laments the EU’s inability to adequately address this. In this respect, he has conflated the European Union with NATO, its alter-ego sibling organization comprised of mostly the same members. It is obvious that he respects the latter more than the former, as his concluding wish is that the EU’s death breathes fresh life into NATO. But his criticism in the EU’s defense policies fall flat because of the structural design of the Union. This is to say that the EU’s lack of a hard security component like NATO was an intentional decision — not a mistake. European Union member states realized that any efforts to establish a non-American version of NATO would fail because NATO simply wasn’t going anywhere. What’s the point of dedicating national resources to maintaining two international bureaucracies that essentially do the same thing? So the European Union’s members have more-or-less decided that anything related to defense is the prerogative of NATO and not the EU, at least for now.
Meanwhile Grygiel claims, “The European states that border Russia have found little reassurance in the union, which explains why they have sought the help of NATO and U.S. forces.” He is probably referring to Poland’s 2014 invocation of NATO’s Article 4 and repeated anxious cries from the Baltic states. These cries fall to the ears of NATO not because other European countries don’t care within the EU sphere, but because the venue for caring about defense specifically already eagerly exists at NATO. If he were to give credit where it is due, Grygiel should be proud that the EU has tried to integrate NATOesque policies where it can — for example, the 2009 Lisbon Treaty included a collective defense clause (Art. 42.7) that acts identically to NATO’s famous Article 5.
In his talking on security, Grygiel dedicates several paragraphs to the Euromaidan crisis in Ukraine which he perceives as a major failure for the EU. This analysis of the event is quite a bit different than most versions. Though the annexation of Crimea can be seen as a failure of international sanctions and ineffective negotiations, this is by no means the EU’s fault exclusively. In fact, the European Union is often seen as the big winner of Euromaidan, for PR reasons if nothing else. Euromaidan gave the European project an unexpected stage for European ideals and European nationalism to play out. Flags of the European Union abounded and were flown with as much pride as Ukrainian flags. The important part of this — and the part that Grygiel never mentions — is that Ukraine is not a member of the EU nor NATO. NATO’s defense clauses were never triggered, and NATO did not act against Russia during Euromaidan. So why is Grygiel mad that the EU didn’t? Ukrainians used the EU as a symbol of a happier and more successful future for the nation, more “Western” and more progressive than its still-memorable Soviet history. Ukrainian revolutionaries vocally aspired to the governmental transparency and free movement of persons and ideas that the EU prides itself in. The complex nature of Russian irredentism and its half-successes in that respect aside, Euromaidan gave the EU and its members a reason to be proud of themselves and their union.
Since defense, fiscal, and border security were policies that the EU member states did not want to give up sovereignty on, how could we say that the EU has been a failure in those areas? It failed only because its member states designed it in an ineffective way. This is like being angry with your egg poacher for not scrambling eggs too. The areas where the Union has failed have often resulted in legislative change that amends the policies and improves the responsiveness of the Union. The migration crisis prompted the October 6, 2016 evolution of ineffective Frontex into the European Border and Coast Guard. The revamped agency of double the staff and triple the budget has centralized command of border patrol from the member state level to the European level, and is being hailed as “game changer” for EU border security. Likewise, the Sovereign Debt Crisis prompted several proposals for long term policy changes including the establishment of a European Fiscal Union. Much like the Titanic’s sinking served as a catalyst for maritime safety policy creation, each of the EU’s crises have given the Union much more help than pain, as they have exposed integration policy areas needing to be fixed.
Grygiel is writing in the wake of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the EU, which he calls “a stunning blow to the bloc.” While I’m not sure he is qualified to be the voice of opinion for the EU’s 510 million citizens, he is not wrong to say it was a shock and surprise. He says the vote — which was much more nationally polarized than the UK-wide 52–48 score he reports, was a rebuke of a failing EU. But, he says, “The support for Brexit in the United Kingdom […] was less an expression of hostility toward other European countries than it was an assertion of the United Kingdom’s right to self-govern.” He says this was patriotism, not nationalism. I disagree. The four nations of the United Kingdom voted markedly differently than each other, with Scotland and Northern Ireland voting staunchly pro-EU, and England and Wales voting staunchly anti-EU. Hate crimes against Eastern Europeans have risen dramatically since the vote, and a stew of xenophobia and pure English superiority has emerged in the chaos that has followed. Will the EU survive Brexit? Absolutely. I happen to think the UK’s future is less clear.
Grygiel’s criticisms of the European Union are valid, to be sure. There is without a doubt a massive democratic deficit that needs to be addressed. Building a European nation is far easier said than done, and a surge of xenophobic sentiments will need to be squashed before more integration can be undertaken in earnest. The Lisbon Treaty was a major improvement on the EU before that, and I should expect that the these will be among the major areas to improve with the next treaty.
I agree with Grygiel that nations are becoming more relevant within the EU — for instance, during a trip to Barcelona last year, I observed that the noticeable absence of Spanish flags was more than filled by Catalan separatist flags flying next EU flags. But do small nations honestly hope that the EU collapses around them? Certainly not; just ask Scotland. The EU isn’t going anywhere. By working toward improving the EU rather than fantasizing about its death, Europe will be able to meet its most pressing challenges the way it has since World War II — through unity in diversity.
