Anticipatory Misperception in Europe

“They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” 

old communist joke

The European Union lost a big chunk of viability on Brexit, although the UK seems now to understand the enormity of their mistake. It will take decades to undo the damage of that miscalculation. See also my recent After They Talked the Talk… Came the Walk the Walk with a Big Limp blog. But those sorts of miscalculations, misguided expectations, the “persistence of memory” (not Dali but for CIS nations that cannot seem to shake their autocratic past) and fear of the unfamiliar “other,” are creating incompatible wannabe expectations in countries anxious to join the EU, even as those in the EU want more heft. The unraveling is occurring even before the “raveling,” or as the May 16th Economist calls it, the “phoney enlargement”:

“On paper up to nine countries are making progress towards membership. Both in the capitals of the countries looking to join and in Brussels, officials say preparations are being made, reforms enacted, boxes ticked. But whether the mooted expansion will happen is still doubtful. A flush of enthusiasm in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given way to the realisation that the journey from 27 to 36 will be long and uncertain. A target of 2030 used to be seen as aspirational. It now looks delusional.

“Events in recent days show why. A slew of countries that have applied to join the EU have demonstrated why they are not yet members. In Georgia a repressive ‘foreign agent’ law that mimics the manner Russia once cracked down on civil society was approved by parliament on May 14th despite vast protests. Georgians overwhelmingly want a European future but are governed by an oligarchic caste that favours rapprochement with the Kremlin, not Brussels. A few days earlier a new nationalist president took office in North Macedonia, one of six western Balkan aspirants to EU membership. Instead of reciting the usual platitudes in her inaugural speech, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova referred to her country merely as ‘Macedonia’, thus knowingly blowing up a deal with Greece, which worries its neighbour’s use of the name will one day degenerate into territorial claims on its region of that name. This pact had been a prerequisite for it to become a candidate for EU accession. And on May 8th Serbia announced a ‘shared future’ with China as it greeted Xi Jinping with great pomp in Belgrade. It will soon enact a free-trade agreement with China that is completely incompatible with EU membership.

“Before 2022… the EU feigned interest in letting in new members, they purported to make the reforms needed to gain access. Both sides knew it was going nowhere; Croatia had been the last country to join the club, in 2013. War on the continent jolted the EU out of this enlargement fatigue. Not only did Ukraine and Moldova apply to become members, but dormant requests in the Balkans took on a new appeal (Turkey is technically a candidate for accession, but not in practice). The geopolitical imperative of snuffing out Russian influence meant the EU was willing—for a time—to look past the unpreparedness of the countries that had asked to join. Progress was made: Ukraine, Moldova and Bosnia-Herzegovina were cleared to start formal accession talks.”

Indeed, the trend in recent years to admire the central-controlling and economic miracle China and lambast Trump-loving America as an unraveling economy seems to be on a time delay. China’s economy unraveled with exploding unemployment, collapsing real estate development and bank failures… when the failed “central-controlling” directives were outright wrong, and there were no alternative powerful enough to step in. As for the United States’ self-imposed unraveling, as the European model will attest, the survival of a democracy market economic model is not the problem; it’s a political desire for autocracy that may be America’s undoing.

While nations able to choose should avoid China “we always know what’s best” top-down autocratic message for economic direction, they are equally advised to cull American launched populism as their model for much of anything. That said, the EU’s long application timeline does not account well for changes during that tedious process. Change is disruptive, but inflexibility in original intentions in light of subsequent reality often creates too many people pursuing impossible and unachievable goals. As The Economist states, it ain’t happenin’ as planned:

“The challenge now is to keep the old fatigue at bay. The EU has been mindful that the reforms needed to join the club—more corruption-busting, better courts, reformed economies and so on—are painful for politicians. The rewards are far in the future, for their successors to enjoy. Now the EU wants the benefits to come alongside the pain. Many perks of joining the club, such as being part of its single market, could be offered before formal membership. A €6bn ($6.5bn) pot of loans and grants will soon be doled out to Balkan countries that can show they are making those painful reforms. The idea was that a new dynamic would overtake the cynical one of yesteryear.

“So far it has not worked, says Milena Mihajlovic of the European Policy Centre (CEP), a think-tank in Belgrade. ‘The belief enlargement will happen in the short term is not there,’ she says. Far from reforming their way to membership, countries in the Balkans have made at least half a step back for every step forward. A region ‘rich in history’ (diplomat-speak for they all hate each other) has found it hard to bury old enmities. Relations between Serbia and Kosovo, which split from Serbia in 2008, remain execrable. Albania has locked up the ethnic-Greek mayor of a small town, annoying its neighbour. Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine all have chunks of their territory controlled by Russia. Throughout the region, politics remain as messy as ever. Serbia has two ministers who are under American sanctions for their ties to Russia.” And maybe it ain’t happenin’ much as all. The imposition of uniform European rules may accelerate a beneficial economic union, but it sure makes adherence to local pride and nationalism well neigh impossible. While that might be a good thing for democracy, it also makes xenophobia a hard ride.

I’m Peter Dekom, and you have to ask yourself why individual rights and freedom are so damned hard to sell these days.