Also posted at Slugger O’Toole
European flag carpet, Gift from the Republic of Azerbaijan. World Forum for Democracy 2016, Strasbourg, France. © Northern Ireland Foundation
Today, the Netherlands reinstituted border checks with Germany and Belgium. The new policy, which will initially run for six months, aims “to combat migration and human-trafficking”. According to the EU, fourteen of the twenty-nine members of the Schengen passport-free travel area currently have some form of “temporary” border control; of these all but Malta’s relating to a major international conference feel at least semi-permanent, with Russian sabotage efforts and “risk of violent actions against Israeli citizens” cited by some countries along with irregular migration and organised crime.
This hits me particularly hard because of the ten summers in a row between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s I travelled by buses and ferries from Northern Ireland to Germany – in the early years to West Germany – via Belgium and the Netherlands to spend the summer with a German family. I remember the infrastructure on the Dutch-German border being dismantled in the early 1990s; most traffic was waved through before that, although a differently coloured passport could occasionally attract attention from a bored border guard. But on the Antwerp to Eindhoven motorway, even in the 1980s, I can only ever remember a few trucks being parked up in service areas waiting for a customs inspection. Otherwise there was nobody around to check passports and not even a little booth to house them. I had to Google when was the last time private citizens last faced checks on the Dutch-Belgian border; it turns out to be 1947!
Those of us who have believed in the vision of a united Europe and saw it start to blossom in our lifetimes are watching our dream dying. There are plenty of shrilly self-deluding voices screaming that it has been betrayed by populists and jingoists and paid shills for Putin. The harsh reality, however, is that it is dying because it hasn’t survived contact with reality; and more specifically, it hasn’t survived contact with Europe’s reality of the 2020s being very different from what anyone imagined in 1992, let alone 1947.
We could summarise the history of the European Union over the last 35 years in a rock lyric: “You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the Moon.”
As a once divided Europe emerged into the post-Cold War glow of the 1990s, the European Union embarked on three megaprojects, any one of which individually would have been challenging to implement and bed in over the course of a generation. These were the creation of a single currency across countries with vastly different economic bases, the free movement all EU citizens across the entire bloc, and the expansion of the Union to formerly Communist Eastern Europe, much of which was desperately poor and some of which had endured ethnic wars well into the 1990s.
Each was a massive challenge on its own – only free movement has been entirely completed, even by 2024 – and to do all three together in just 30 years or so would have been extraordinary in a continent that was otherwise stable. But the actual 21st Century EU was also embarked on absorbing the biggest wave of immigration from outside Europe since the last days of the Roman Empire, even before a series of crises from the mid-2010s showed it to be incapable of controlling its external borders.
These migrants were coming to a continent that while still rich was rapidly becoming the sick man of the world’s great powers, drowning in the 170,000 pages of European law members had to incorporate into their domestic rulebook, unable to match either American dynamism and invention or the Chinese capacity to produce at low cost and vast scale; without Russia’s vast natural resources; and behind even India and in the number of high value start-up companies it housed, and also behind the post-Brexit UK on its own by this measure.
2024’s Europe is a product of trying to do too much, too soon, while refusing to take the rest of the world seriously. The EU has been stagnant since the 2008 financial crisis; is bullied by China, Russia and soon also Trump’s USA; the far-right is running rampant electorally in more countries than it remains in abeyance; eastern Europe has emptied of its people, especially of its young people; and the EU has midwifed a new élite in its eastern members so wedded to the diktats of managerialist technocracy that Romania has just cancelled an actual presidential election halfway through the process because of TikTok videos.
[I know that because I’m liberal and pro-Ukraine, I’m supposed to think it was OK that Romania cancelled its elections because of TikTok videos, but I’m actually pretty sure it wasn’t OK even in its own terms and will also end up having some grim second and third order consequences a few years down the line.]
Most of all, the EU sought to create a new primary loyalty for over half a billion Europeans with their national and regional identities relegated to second place. Projects like this are possible—peoples from the Han Chinese to the Romans to the Arabs have made them happen historically—but they are the work of lifetimes and demand significant resources thrown at them to encourage compliance, resources on a scale not likely to be forthcoming in a continent where, ultimately, voters were in control.
This collection of political megaprojects also needed clear boundaries; both actual and well-enforced physical control of the EU’s external boundaries and hard limits on the powers that could ultimately be ceded to Brussels. Neither of these were forthcoming; “Ever Closer Union” was enshrined in the EU treaties even as the Union and the political class in most of its members told themselves European values were so universal they could be exported to Afghanistan and readily absorbed by any new arrival from elsewhere.
Little by little, that political superstructure, far too heavy for its cultural foundations, is breaking down at the edges. The danger is that it is allowed to collapse because nobody can bring themselves to admit that it needs to be trimmed back to what both voters and external powers will allow it to be. And if it just collapses, it might also take down the vision that drove its creation, of a flourishing continent at ease with itself in all its diversity, where another Treblinka or Srebrenica or Passchendaele or Dresden was unimaginable; where nobody could imagine it was worth killing and dying for the future of Northern Ireland or the Basque Country or Transylvania.
What comes next if the dream dies? Who knows? Yugoslavia was a wholesome dream, of a new supra-nationalism uniting all South Slavs, superseding the petty chauvinisms of Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim. The USSR’s dream was grander still, of universal brotherhood based on reason, science, and sharing—and who could object to that?
Each survived for more than 70 years, for many of them seeming to represent an inevitable and flourishing future. Yet when they collapsed Armenians and Azeris, Serbs and Croats began butchering one another almost immediately. The wars of Soviet succession still continue, not just in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also in the ethnic cleansing of Karabakh and in the Tajik-Kyrgyz wars you probably never heard about.
So I hope and pray that the dream does not die because the alternative is horrid. But it is dying in the manner that people mostly die, slowly and little by little, a cancelled election here, an exiting member there, and then the tedious business of reimposing border controls where they have been absent since the year when Dutch and Belgians trudged through their war-damaged towns to see Miracle on 34th Street in the cinema.
