Around 15 years ago, when European discussions about an EU Constitution were at their zenith, the University law student society invited an Oxford scholar, Larry Siedentop, to address them. In 2000, he had published a book called Democracy in Europe to wide acclaim.

Wherever the book was discussed, practically all the attention, naturally enough, was focused on Siedentop’s arguments about the desirability of a constitution. As I remember, it was the same in Malta, even during the highly interesting, roaming conversation at the dinner in Siedentop’s honour, which was hosted by the late Judge Gino and Tricia Camilleri.

But in the book Siedentop also has a prophecy about right-wing populism and people fleeing into Europe on the run from radical Islamic fundamentalism. In these post-Brexit days, Siedentop’s analysis helps us see what the real tests of European leadership are, and why our leaders are still flunking.

Prophecies are not predictions. Prophets do not see the future. They rather turn an X-ray eye on the present. When people warned about the design flaws of the Eurozone, they were not predicting the post-2008 crisis. They were simply saying that, if a crisis on that scale did occur, the existing economic structures would not absorb the stresses.

Likewise, Siedentop did not foresee Europe’s current crisis, with its multiple stresses of high unemployment, wars on its eastern and southern borders, and unprecedented levels of immigration. A historian of political thought, he was more interested in the long-term features of Europe.

But consider what he was able to argue a decade before the serious electoral encroachment of right-wing populism across Europe:

“Yet those [populist] identities and loyalties could return with a vengeance if a world economic crisis intrudes or, even, if serious economic dislocation results from a single currency – say, a spiralling of unemployment in some countries, with consequent demands for protectionism and job-creating interventions in the market. For such demands will sit uneasily with the system presided over by a deflationary European Central Bank…” (p. 220).

And a dozen years and more before the Arab Spring and the Syrian crisis, he wrote this about radical Islamic fundamentalism in states neighbouring Europe:

“For the foreign relations of a unified Europe could easily become a hostage to this radical religious movement. It could be crucial to Europe not only because of the proximity of these states, several of which are oil-rich, but also because a fundamentalist revolution in these states could result in tens of millions of Westernised Arabs seeking to enter Europe as refugees” (p. 207).

Until the purely economistic model of citizenship is rejected, we have little hope of reversing the rise of right-wing populism

Once more, these lines are not predictions. They are an exposure of structural European weaknesses. They don’t look so astounding now but, remember, they were written years before euro notes and coins began to circulate, while everyone was hailing the coming 2004 enlargement as (wait for it) the beginning of the European world leadership of the 21st century. (Yes, they actually said that, including some now lecturing the rest of us about what led to Brexit.)

In my view, Siedentop gets some things about Islamic identities wrong. But that’s beside the point because, here, it’s not his insights into Islam that are relevant but his insights into Europe. His prophecy is not based on guesswork. It’s based on Europe’s political relations.

First, what people nowadays call the European project – as though we’ve got the only one there could be – is a misnomer. For all the talk about European citizenship, Siedentop shows that what European leaders eventually chose to push did not arise out of any single one of Europe’s diverse civic cultures, almost all of them with pre-modern roots.

It did not even arise out of classical European liberalism (with which Siedentop has a great affinity).

Instead, in the 1980s European leaders opted for a neo-liberal economic model of citizenship. Essentially, despite the rhetoric, they treated us all basically as consumers – probably because they hoped that changing our loyalties and solidarity would be as easy as changing consumer behaviour through the right incentives.

Whether or not that’s why it happened, can anyone think of a single occasion when the two-term President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, justified Europe in terms other than a better world for consumers?

Siedentop makes the simple point that that’s not enough to bind people together – to give them the solidarity to be prepared to endure sacrifices for each other.

Second, Siedentop shows that it’s a mistake to conflate European nationalisms with right-wing populisms. It’s no coincidence that the latter are often regional movements. They precede modern nationalism. The latter historically was often at odds with them, seeking to establish rights for individuals (citizenship rights) that emancipated them from the chauvinism of regional communitarianism, with its roots in feudal inequality.

Siedentop’s point is that the erosion of civic culture by a purely economistic idea of citizenship paves the way for the ‘return with a vengeance’ of older identities and loyalties. But the latter aren’t the only kind of nationalism or solidarity there can be.

When you think of it, it’s very peculiar to argue that the only choice before us is either an economistic idea of citizenship or a chauvinist nationalism. That’s basically to say that the only forms of compelling association available to Europeans are right-wing: neo-liberal or neo-fascist. Somehow, that doesn’t ring true.

Siedentop shows a different way to conceive of the European project, although one that will take much longer to develop a pan-continental solidarity than European elites have so far allowed for.

More importantly, thanks to him we can better understand how and why European leaders are still failing to rise to the challenges before us.

Until the purely economistic model of citizenship is rejected, we have little hope of reversing the rise of right-wing populism. Because the only way to do that is to rescue national solidarity from the racists, and show that nationalism and internationalism are not incompatible.

The prospects of that happening are dim. Even as I write, it appears that, in the UK, a new post-UKIP political party is being planned (in conjunction with a former major UKIP donor) aiming to displace the Labour Party in England.

In France, the mainstream presidential rivals are repeating David Cameron’s mistake of putting their leadership chances ahead of European shared interests. They want to pressurise British negotiations, ostensibly in the name of European stability, but actually to address the challenge from the National Front at home.

In the other major EU members, Hungary and Poland are already led by right-wing governments. Spain has had a second indecisive election in less than a year. Italy’s government might be out by the autumn.

The only semi-secure, respectable leader, Angela Merkel, faces a difficult election next year and cannot afford, even if she were that way inclined, to backtrack from economic policies that might make sense in Germany (where they are bolstered by additional policies that generate political trust and social solidarity) but not in Europe generally.

So it might all fail. But let’s not deceive ourselves that it is inevitable. We are in time if we can summon the nerve and the imagination: the nerve to call out European weakness by its proper name, the political imagination to overcome it.

ranierfsadni@europe.com