E.U. or Eew?

A panoply of cross-currents are ripping through the European continent. While European Union countries do not nearly reflect the polarization of haves and have-nots that defines the reconfigured United States, it is abundantly clear that any notion of a “recovery” from the Great Recession is hardly spread uniformly across the EU or even within the vast middle classes of the continent. The U.K. seems to have the greatest level of economic/class polarization – but still nothing compared to the U.S. – while general economic stability seems elusive throughout Europe, even within the fabled German manufacturing juggernaut.

The giant European social safety nets – from healthcare to minimum welfare support – have cushioned some of the economic woes, but those same programs have also made Europe less competitive in the global markets. Outside of the top earners on the continent, an increasing number of Europeans are seething at the costs and restrictions of the European Union, the interference of the Brussels-headquartered EU on the internal functioning of individual countries, the open borders allowing “foreigners” to travel and work freely within the EU and a uniform currency that impacts the more economically stable northern nations with the “irresponsible” behavior of southern member countries. And even within the southern nations that need E.U. financial support, resistance and reaction to imposed austerity requirements by the EU Central Bank and the EU Commission itself have provoked powerful negative reactions.

As in most sustained economically impaired times, a right wing rises, circles the wagons and usually rails against some minority group as “job stealing, social benefit robbing,” a mindset that we have seen before. Look at our own Tea Party which shares parallel views on immigration. As pre-World War II Germany faced a collapsed economy saddled with paying “war reparations” to the victorious allies after World War I, Adolph Hitler seized power and blamed local Jews for his country’s economic woes. In contemporary Europe, the primary manifestation is a rising tide focuses against immigrants and even second and third generations of children of immigrants. It’s about white, white, white… and normally protestant or Catholic faiths.

Across the continent, the right wing is gathering supporters, rising from inconsequential representation in local parliaments to a whopping 24% average after the last set of recent elections. They want the “big government” E.U. to butt out of local issues and are generally in favor of either complete withdrawal or at least a reduced role of the E.U. in local politics. They want to seal off their traditional borders to the immigrant job-stealers from less affluent E.U. nations. There is also a tug to return to the individual currencies, eliminating the Euro and the central economic directives that go with having a uniform currency.

The biggest shock from the just-completed E.U. parliamentary elections has to be the rise of Euro-skeptics in France. “Emboldened by the victory in European elections of her fiercely anti-European Union party, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front, took her crusade on [May 28^th] into the lair of the ‘monster of Brussels’ — the headquarters of the 28-nation union — to forge a far-right alliance spanning the continent.

“Ms. Le Pen, whose party trounced France’s established political forces in European Parliament elections that ended on [May 25^th], said at a news conference that she had a mission to form a bloc of like-minded groups in the Brussels legislature that would ‘prevent any progress’ toward European unity and would restore the power of individual nation states.

“For now, however, she is falling short, betraying the fractious nature of Europe’s right-wing groups, which find even each other too toxic, even if they share a desire to push Brussels bureaucrats into a corner and farther from politics on the national stage.

“‘The model of a totalitarian, technocratic Europe is now out of date,’ Ms. Le Pen said Wednesday, speaking in the European Parliament alongside the leaders of populist, anti-Brussels groups from Austria, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands.” New York Times, May 28^th. What more? A little totalitarian hypocrisy? “…Le Pen, leader of France's far-right National Front, said she admired Vladimir Putin as much as German Chancellor Angela Merkel because the Russian president did not allow other countries to impose decisions on him… Le Pen's anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic party scored its first nationwide poll victory in European elections [on May 25^th] and has since said it is close to forming a political group in the European Parliament.” Reuters, June 1^st.

 While the majority of those elected do not favor disbanding or contracting the European Union, there are some unmistakable trends that cannot be ignored. The E.U. was formed for any number of once-deemed essential reasons: aggregating European economic power to compete against what was then a seemingly unstoppable American-dominated world financial powerhouse, making sure that another European-generated world war would never happen again (did anyone talk to Russia?) and to facilitate cross-border movement in the tightly-packed European continent.

And then the Great Recession hit. History repeated itself. The blame game began. Anti-immigrant and opposition to Big BAD Brussels generated the predictable right wing response that in turn generated angry adherents looking for simple answers in an overly-complicated world. The big picture decline of Western economic power and the concomitant growth of Asia power, the shifting of economic values and spheres of influence and the yet-uncalculated impact of climate change will continue to wreak havoc with traditional powerhouses. Angry stateless enemies from the Muslim world seem to have exacerbated this clash of civilizations, redefining global conflict and adding gasoline (oil?) to an already volatile and fiery mix. We need to know that the aggregation of these changes will impact the United States and each of its residents with increasing force in the years to come.

I’m Peter Dekom, and managing the impact of change requires understanding the elements of change and their impact on each other.