Just over a century ago, an assassination in the Balkans ended up entangling much of Europe in a great war. When, 80 years later, another war broke out in the Balkans, peace continued to reign in Europe. No one was surprised. Indeed, the criticism was directed at Europe for failing to bring the wars in the former Yugoslavia to an early end.
No one was surprised because by then everyone was accustomed to dividing Europe’s 20th century into two halves. The first half was about the competition between nation-states. The second half was about the magic of cooperation: the pooling of economic resources like coal and steel, participating in a single market, and combining that with social solidarity.
The result was, to coin a phrase, prosperity with a purpose. That purpose began with a capital P (no, not Panama): Peace. By the end of the century it was associated with a process called Europeanisation, where structural funds enabled countries to join the Union and converge on living standards and quality of life, while creating the largest single market in the world.
But that’s not the lesson I want to draw as we reflect on Malta’s 15 years of EU membership. I’m more interested in how Europe’s prosperity with a purpose could be blindsided by events.
The big dreams that existed with the launch of the euro and the 2004 enlargement are now no more. Europe used to parade itself as the avant-garde political answer to handle the disruptions of globalisation (hah!).
We would lead the world in entering into special partnerships with non-European areas. Turkey’s membership is now a remote prospect. The deadline for the Mediterranean Free Trade Area came and went and is forgotten. And when was the last time you heard about the Union for the Mediterranean make real news?
Internally, some of the principal member states are experiencing turmoil. France has had two one-term presidents and might have a third in three years, if a credible challenger can be found. Spain has had several elections in a short period, with leading parties struggling to create a governing coalition and, at the election of last weekend, seeing the centre-right party in existential crisis. In the UK, both parties of government have lost the faith of many of their supporters – in a context where the element of profound division is EU membership itself.
We live in complex times but in an age dominated by those political simplifiers, known as populists
And although Germany is stable, with a long-serving chancellor, electoral results keep showing serious potential trouble for both main parties, who have sometimes found it difficult to put together a government coalition.
What is more, Europeanisation is now being unpicked by some member states, notably Hungary and Poland, but Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia, for example, are concerns as well (not to mention Malta and Italy).
It’s easy to forget how quickly it all has happened. Up until shortly before the economic crisis, it was still possible for Nicolas Sarkozy, running for the French presidency in 2007, to propose the Mediterranean Union (as it was called then) as part of his ‘vision thing’.
I remember attending a dinner where Silvio Berlusconi, then Prime Minister, was the keynote speaker, just as the financial crisis was breaking out in the US. Someone I had spoken to the day before worked for J.P. Morgan, and he didn’t know if he’d have a bank to return to after the weekend. But Berlusconi spoke confidently about how the crisis couldn’t possibly affect Europe. Yes, I know it’s Berlusconi and that he helped run Italy into the ground; but if there were any strong feelings to the contrary among his fellow leaders, even he would have had grounds for pause. Berlusconi may have been more bullish than others, but he wasn’t being eccentric.
The economic crisis didn’t just put pressure on the EU. It didn’t just raise questions about the construction of the eurozone. It didn’t just prevent the Union from intervening with proportionate economic force in North Africa when the Arab Spring broke out. In other words, it didn’t just show that Europe was, to cite the cliché, an economic giant but a political dwarf.
It showed that Europe had no narrative once the logic of prosperity through enlargement was called into question. The loss of narrative was combined by other crises that prosperity had kept off the radar.
One is a crisis of solidarity – the crunch on welfare states and, with it, growing resentment for having to pay for the welfare of people, of migrant background, that many taxpayers were suspicious of.
Another is a crisis of representation – that fact that growing inequality has led to a gap between the educational and social background of parliamentarians and the people they’re supposed to represent. The political class is resented as an elite that’s out of touch with voters.
And the result is that there’s a crisis of communication, itself driven in part by new technologies that call for sound bites, and short visual clips, and memes, which resist more detailed explanation. We live in complex times but in an age dominated by those political simplifiers, known as populists.
So here is the lesson for us. Prosperity cannot be its own justification. Nor can redistribution of some of the profits. You can bank the money but not the narrative that makes sense of it all, as Europe is finding out.
Prosperity with a purpose is a mission for only one half of the economic cycle, the upside. It can last a long time. The upside can be prolonged. But at some point the downturn will come. It can come suddenly and destructively.
And just as a society needs to have enough economic capital to pull us out of the downturn, it needs social and cultural capital – the means to persuade people it’s worth sticking together and keeping faith in a system going through leaner times. But right now, as communities are disrupted and the cultural and natural heritage is defaced, we’re running down our social and cultural capital as though there’s no tomorrow.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece