Trump’s Europe
Populists Mean More American Power
By Ari Paul
Dissertations could be written about the American right’s fraught relationship to Europe, but here’s the short version: It’s always a narrative laden with resentment.
Still dealing with the past
The United States reluctantly had to rescue a cowardly France from the Nazi occupation. The US, still a developing power, had to assist the wheezing British dinosaur flailing in response to German might.
After World War II, America again came to the rescue — through the Marshall Plan and military power, protecting the West from the rival Soviet Union, which eventually crumbled, a testament to American fortitude and capitalism’s superiority to the communist experiment.
The European Union we know today, the economic centrality of a unified Germany and social democratic institutions are not a contrast to the American way of life but rather a gift from Washington. America likes neither, really, especially the welfare state bit, but it was a necessary evil to get Europe going again, so we wouldn’t have to invest more, later.
Republican congressmen and Bush Administration officials — especially during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq — spoke of Europe as being weak, arrogant, even effeminate. This all due to the unacknowledged feeling that Europe owes something to the United States, and that Western Europe would not exist without a powerful patron on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
With US President Donald Trump now in the second half of his first term and Europe on the verge of a historic EU election, the American right may start to feel it’s getting that debt paid, and ominous solidarity is growing.
Far-right populist governments in Hungary and Poland and the nationalist forces that pushed the Brexit vote are testament to the fact that the rise of Donald Trump does not exist in a vacuum. They are the extension of larger trends throughout western society, once thought to be a beacon of enlightenment and democracy, now digging up the ghosts of its racist and fascist past.
The term “anti-globalism” is a contradiction of the political ideology’s true nature. Think of the famous bond between Brexit-mastermind and MEP Nigel Farage and Trump, often grinning together in what they symbolised as a collective victory for the transnational right.
Even the Greek fascist party Golden Dawn maintained an American affiliate, tapping into Greek-American communities in New York City and their nostalgia for the Greece of the generals, and the Nazi occupation.
As European far-right leaders have a veneer of crafting policies tailored to their respective home countries, the truth is that populist movements work together for a unified counter-policy to decades of social democracy, free movement and multiculturalism.
A changing attitude towards Europe
This has changed the American right’s attitude towards Europe. Once derided for its perceived softness and decadence, the EU’s lurch rightwards, since the 2007–8 economic crisis and the 2015 refugee crisis, is a model of what to do in order to combat social liberalism and to maintain a homogenous cultural identity. Donald Trump may say nasty things about the EU. But the fact is, he sort of likes it. And he might like it even more if he gets a European Parliament with more Lega Nord and Alternative für Deutschland MEPs in it.
Just look at the warmth coming from the Visegrád Group. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn has grown close to Trump, calling him an “open man” after the 2016 US elections. He’s not “ideologically hidebound”, Hungary’s populist-in-chief said. Poland’s autocratic Premier, Jarosław Kaczyński, counts himself as an equal intimate. Witness the warm welcome he extended to the US leader during his visit to Warsaw last July. It was as though Trump had just relieved the Polish capital from siege. Not by the Russians or the Wermacht, but the EU.
While inaccurate, America’s alt-right and white nationalist press return the love in kind when it can, promoting, for example, the French Yellow Vest movement as a nationalist response to Macron’s “globalism” and excessive taxation. It may be unfair and ideologically less consistent than imagined. But their laissez-faire nativism fits nicely into right-wing American arguments in favour of greater deregulation and a smaller state.
The link to would be far-right movements in France is far from without precedent. National Rally chief Marine Le Pen, whom the American magazine Vanity Fair dubbed “The Donald Trump of France”, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr right after the 2016 US elections that “Trump made the impossible possible” and that his triumph over Clinton was “an additional stone in the building of a new world”.
So far, Europe’s major economic powers remain in the hands of its mainstream parties, and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s attempt to create a continent-wide right-wing movement has had setbacks — the German AfD, for example, has not joined his alliance.
But any gain for right-wing populists in the next European parliamentary elections creates a world model where Trump’s America — surreal as it is with a president who refuses to condemn white nationalists and shuts down the federal government to blackmail congress for a border wall — isn’t totally against the global norm, either.
A growth in right-wing power in Europe shifts the Overton window in political debate to a point where Trump’s fierce anti-immigrant agenda is more easily envisioned.
Worse, a European rightward shift would help blunt the ascendance of social democratic forces in the United States like the Democratic Socialists of America. Demands for universal medical coverage or higher wages in the US will be taken less seriously when its advocates can no longer use liberal European states as positive examples.
If anything, the national populist currents in Europe and the United States are symbiotic: a victory for one feeds the momentum of the other.
In reference to this article, Noam Chomsky told The Battleground on Sunday :
“The right in any country tends to gain from the rise of similar forces elsewhere. It’s not ‘legitimacy’, any more than the rise of fascism in other countries gave legitimacy to Hitler. And there certainly are significant efforts to develop solidarity among these forces.”
Ari Paul is a journalist based in New York. Paul’s work has appeared in dozens of outlets including The Guardian, The Nation, In These Times and Jacobin. Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
