History of the Present (fortnight ending 16 December 2023)
War or peace? Dictatorship or democracy? Europe's future is on the line
I have been in more than twenty European countries this year and I have seen two Europes. Across large parts of the continent, you're still in a Europe where high-speed trains waft you across frontiers you hardly notice, as you travel seamlessly between highly integrated liberal democracies resolved to solve all their remaining conflicts by peaceful means. But take an old slow train just a few hours to the east and you are spending time in bomb shelters and talking to badly wounded soldiers with tales from the trenches reminiscent of World War I. I keep the Ukrainian Air Alert! app active on my phone, so its warnings of air raids on Ukrainian cities remind me every day of that other Europe.
There's a related duality in our politics. Many European countries still have governments on the spectrum between centre-left and centre-right, often with complicated coalitions, yet all committed one way or another to making both liberal democracy and the European Union work. In Poland, we can celebrate the return of such a government under Donald Tusk, kicking out a populist nationalist party that had dangerously threatened the country's democracy. On the other hand, populist nationalist parties of the hard right have scored notable successes, from the emergence of Giorgia Meloni as Italian prime minister late last year, through worrying regional election gains for Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the recent election victory of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán is more aggressive than ever as he works against both the interests and the values of the EU, while exploiting all the advantages of membership in it. (Brexiters at least had the honesty to leave the club they loathe.)
Which of these two Europes prevails will significantly influence the larger question of whether we are moving towards a Europe of war or of peace, of dictatorship or democracy, of disintegration or integration. Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 ended the post-Wall period – the one that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 – and we are now in the formative years of a new period whose name and character we don't yet know. In politics, as in relationships, beginnings matter. The first few years after 1945 set the basic parameters for a European order that lasted decades thereafter, as did the years immediately after 1989.
Intellectually, European leaders know this. It's the commonplace of a thousand politicians' speeches and think tank webinars. Russia's war against Ukraine has significantly changed attitudes to security in countries such as Germany and Denmark, not to mention Finland and Sweden, catapulted from long-standing neutrality to NATO membership. But emotionally, and in the wider society, it's much less clear. Earlier this year, a student at Göttingen University asked me if I thought there would be a new European generation of '22ers' – their commitment to build a better Europe shaped by the impact of the largest war in Europe since 1945. I've been asking that question all over the continent ever since, but the feedback is not encouraging. Even in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, people shake their heads and say 'not really'. In places farther west, such as Italy, Spain, Portugal or Ireland, the negative is even more decided.
Partly this is because of the very robustness of the European order built since 1945, and both widened and deepened since 1989. People living in countries that belong to NATO and the EU still don't really believe that war can come to their front doors. With a heap of problems at home, from inflation to struggling welfare states, they are understandably reluctant to face up to the daunting challenges all around us, from war in the east to migratory pressures in the south, from a melting ice cap in the north to the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency in the west. And their politicians hesitate to give it them straight, for fear of not being re-elected.
Torn between those two Europes, the EU is supposed to address many of these issues in the next few months. At the European Council in Brussels last week, the result was indecisive. Negotiations were opened for Ukraine eventually to join the EU, but Orbán blocked a vital package of financial support for Ukraine. European leaders will reconvene in January to remove that block. They also discussed the Israel-Hamas war – on which the EU has been divided and ineffective, although the conflict directly threatens inter-communal relations in our own societies – as well as the security and defence policy which becomes urgent as we face the prospect of a President Trump 2.0 pulling the rug from under us.
Next week, EU finance ministers are supposed to agree a Franco-German compromise deal on new fiscal rules so complicated and ambiguous that, even with a cold damp towel wrapped around your head, it's hard to make sense of them. Yet Europe's future economic growth, and the jobs that offer life chances to young Europeans, will depend on their effect.
The Spanish presidency of the EU also aspires (hope against hope!) to get agreement on a new EU package on migration policy. The issue of migration is roiling the politics of most European countries. Italy has made a deal with Albania to process asylum-seekers there. Germany's coalition government is introducing a tough new set of migration policies. In France, Emmanuel Macron's government just suffered a crushing defeat on its new immigration bill, because the right did not consider it tough enough. (In this respect, Britain is an entirely typical European country, except that it doesn't know it and wants to do it all by itself.)
Underlying all these issues, big enough in themselves, is an even bigger one: can a democratic, law-based political community of 27 very different countries, without a single hegemon, actually hang together and deliver? The question of reforming the EU so it can't be subverted by rogue actors like Orbán is generally posed in the context of a possible enlargement to create a Union of more than 35 member states, but it's there already in this month's decision-making. As European party politics fragment, this means wrestling not just with 27 different national interests but with the added complexities of multiple coalition governments. And let's be clear: this kind and scale of non-hegemonic union by consent has never been done before in European history and has no counterpart anywhere else in today's world.
Which of the two Europes will prevail? It's the question I've been asked everywhere this year, since obviously historians must know the future. But the answer lies not in in any inevitable historical process but in ourselves. It's up to us.
A pre-summit version of this commentary first appeared in the Guardian, 13 December 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/13/war-peace-dictatorship-democracy-europe-european-council-liberalism-populism
In Slovakia
The last stop of my multi-country year was Slovakia, also for the 15th edition of Homelands published in 2023. Depressingly, even as Poland moves decisively away from illiberal democracy under Donald Tusk’s new government, Slovakia is threatened by a return to it under that of Robert Fico. Fico is ‘pragmatic’, so despite his campaign rhetoric has continued to allow Western arms supplies to go through Slovakia to Ukraine. And despite his political friendship with Viktor Orbán, the Slovak prime minister did not join him in blocking the funding for Ukraine at the European Council last week.
But that will not stop him pursuing Orbánism at home. In Fico’s case, that starts by making sure he himself doesn't go to prison. On my first day in Slovakia, I had lunch near the parliament with opposition leader Michal Šimečka. He had to dash back for a vote on a government move to abolish the special prosecutor’s office, which was going after those who abused public office – including… guess who.
Fico will doubtless impose new bosses on state television and radio, but my friends were remarkably calm about this. The most watched channels are private. What they were not relaxed about is the outsize role of Facebook in feeding the narrative and conspiracy theories of the populist right. It is no exaggeration to say that Facebook’s algorithms are one of the serious threats to democracy in Slovakia – and one that Slovak democrats can do precious little about.
The biggest threat, however, would probably be a change to the electoral law. At the moment, Slovakia has a very unusual electoral system: a constitutionally embedded proportional system in which the whole country is one electoral district. There are serious arguments for amending it. But if the change is done by Fico, there would be a huge danger of gerrymandering and other fixes to slant it to the advantage to the ruling party, as has been done in Hungary.
Please watch this space.
Feedback please, for 2024
A friend recently remarked to me that he couldn't remember a moment in his lifetime when things in the world looked so bad. And he has lived a long time. I tried to push back, saying that for nanny millions of people in China, the Soviet Union or rural India, life had surely been worse in the 1950s or 1960s. But, with the signal exception of the Polish election result, there’s no doubt this has been a bad year.
By this time next year, matters could be even worse – from the consequences of the continuing horror of the Israel-Hamas war to the prospect of a second presidency of Donald Trump, from a possible sharp shift to the populist right in the European elections to the overwhelming fact that we are not doing enough to keep global warming under 1.5° above preindustrial levels.
I will continue to chronicle European developments in this History of the Present substack, which is also a way of making notes for a future book, to be written when the character of the next period has become clearer. I'm delighted to have you among the now more than 5000 subscribers to this newsletter – and usually more than 6000 readers of an individual post. (Do subscribe, if you haven't already.)
I would appreciate any feedback you might have in the comment thread below, or by email. What would you like more of? What would you like less of?
Meanwhile, I'm switching off entirely until the New Year. One of our sons arrives tonight from China, another from Canada on Tuesday. Revolutions may happen; more wars break out; stock markets collapse; four horsemen of the apocalypse be seen riding across the evening sky. I shall ignore them all until Tuesday 1 January 2024. Family and Christmas first.
May the festive season bring you relief, joy and love. As Robert Browning says at the end of his poem Love Among the Ruins, with such perfect simplicity: ‘Love is best’.
Your articles are an antidote to the media who try to pull you in one way or another. Please keep up the good work.
In the short term support for Ukraine is vital if we are not to repeat the late 1930’s again. For Hitler read Putin. In the longer term all countries must reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. Both big challenges indeed ......
Is it not possible that the EU won't be either of these things you discuss but remain conflicted, moving in different directions, then back again, as we see now? I guess I am simply wary of assuming anything will ever be black and white. That said, thank you for these newsletters and your long perspective on events and their context.