The European Union Has Been Shaken by Its Crises — but the Left Needs a Plan to Change It
The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have shaken many of the European Union’s dogmas. Yet the EU has repeatedly defied predictions of imminent collapse — posing the need for a serious left-wing program to reform it.
A program for Europe needs to be about providing social protection and collective power. (Kenzo Tribouillard / AFP via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Harrison Stetler
In the 1990s, the European Union emerged amidst triumphalism over the new age of globalization. Yet in the last decade, events from the sovereign debt crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have forced it to cope with severe instability. Lurching from crisis to crisis over issues as diverse as migration and budget deficits, EU policymaking has often appeared rudderless or merely reactive. Its staunchest critics on the Left decry the antidemocratic nature of European institutions, designed to cushion the common market from popular control and oversight. But despite its many flaws, the bloc has so far managed to defy predictions of its imminent collapse.
Today, the European project is at a turning point. In hindsight, the 2016 Brexit vote appears to have been an exception: rather than seeking a split, the continental far right increasingly looks to the EU as a potential vector for power and conservative policymaking. The austerity debates that dominated the bloc in the last decade have likewise taken a backseat since the start of the pandemic, with Brussels currently reforming the rules regulating member-state debt. Casting a pall over transatlantic relations, the Donald Trump years bolstered calls for European “strategic autonomy” — the idea that the twenty-seven-member-state EU needs to chart a course more independent from Washington. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, has pushed in the opposite direction, leading to what some fear could amount to a reinforced European dependence on the United States.
Chloé Ridel is an essayist and civil servant. She has worked in Brussels for the European Commission and in Paris and Bucharest for the French Ministry of Economy and Finance. Ridel is cofounder and assistant director of the Institut Rousseau, a Paris-based think tank specialized in environmental and social policy. She is the author of the 2022 essay D’une guerre à l’autre, which provides an overview of the role that crises have played in the development of the European project. Ridel sat down with Jacobin’s Harrison Stetler for an extended conversation on the EU and its transformations in an age of turmoil.
What has the invasion of Ukraine, and the political and economic fallout that it has caused, revealed about the European Union?
A political shock, the war has also been a huge slap in the face to the EU and Europeans in general. Unable to prevent the war from breaking out in the first place, we have since been unable to bring the invasion to a halt. We have imposed sanctions, but that is not forcing back Russian tanks. We have been relatively unable to help the Ukrainian resistance. The United States is still in the driver’s seat, sending about $50 billion of support — all humanitarian, economic, and military aid combined. This is roughly double what Europe has been able to send. This war has revealed Europe’s weaknesses.
At the same time, this war has been a moment for Europe to stake out its identity. In the United States, it was as well to a certain degree, although [the war] has mostly served to revive the ghosts of the Cold War and the idea of a global clash between democracy and autocracy. In Europe it is different and is creating something new. Several taboos have been broken. For example, the use of the European budget to finance the exportation of lethal weapons to an active conflict zone, which is forbidden by the EU treaties. Sanctions were taken, the Nord Stream II project was suspended. Out of this shock, Germany is rearming.
Nine months after the beginning of the war, the results are mixed for Europe. NATO is strengthened and even resurrected, with Finland and Sweden moving toward membership. But this is not good for Europe. Locking ourselves into a 100 percent NATO defense solution makes us hostage to what the United States wants to do.
What explains the lingering appeal of US power in Europe? A war that might have bolstered calls for European “strategic autonomy” instead seems to be strengthening Europe’s military dependence on the United States, which is pocketing arms deals on the continent.
That’s true — these contracts lock in partnerships for at least ten or fifteen years. But what is most important here is the question of the nuclear umbrella. The United States remains the nuclear umbrella for the Central and Eastern European states, and Germany in particular. The United States has shown that it is more credible than France [the only nuclear power in the EU].
It is all a question of credibility. If we want to make the case for European strategic autonomy, all our partners must be convinced that the French will be their partner no matter what it takes. When you look at the political debate in France you cannot be so sure.
Providing a nuclear guarantee would be risky on France’s part, to say the least. Ukraine joining the European Union may be fifteen or twenty years away, even further if ever in the case of NATO. The talk recently is about Ukraine’s participation in the new “European Political Community,” a loose intergovernmental forum of EU and non-EU states promoted by Emmanuel Macron. But could France ever actually provide a nuclear guarantee for Ukraine?
Yes, France, together with the United Kingdom. But if we want a European defense that is autonomous from the United States, that’s what we need. We must not have European countries that trust the United States more than they trust us. Emmanuel Macron’s project of a European Political Community was badly launched and has been poorly framed, becoming a PR stunt with little concrete impact.
But now is the time to invent a new security architecture for Europe that offers protection to all countries that are currently without protection: Moldova, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, and Georgia. And this in an enlarged European framework that is not that of the European Union, but could include the United Kingdom, which is an important nuclear power — and does not only concern security or defense but also energy policy.
The increased dependence on the United States is not just a defense issue. European officials are increasingly concerned about the global effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes many subsidies that could encourage a shift of European industrial activity to the United States.
[In response], the United States is essentially telling us to do the same thing! In the long term, the United States would be shooting itself in the foot by deindustrializing Europe, which would only strengthen the far right. They are defending their own industries and Europe has to do the same thing. We’ve been hearing talk about the need for a green industrial policy for thirty years. The World Trade Organization is essentially dead yet we are still clinging to it, notably because of Germany.
You talk about the current moment as a kind of geopolitical awakening in Europe, but what’s to say that we won’t eventually return, in Western Europe, to the status quo ante that has been about détente and rapprochement with Russia? If we take the case of France, the political class has always been more or less united around the idea that it is necessary to maintain good relations with Russia — a stance that has played a role in souring relations with Eastern members of the EU.
We know very well that if Russia does not transform itself, Europe will never be safe. We must be concerned with bringing Russia back to Europe: to say that Russia was European and that it can become so again.
There are two things to keep in mind. Obviously, we want to make peace with Russia. But we can no longer be naive about Vladimir Putin’s regime, which has been authoritarian for twenty years and has only been hardening since his return to power in 2012. His goal, and the goal of those around him, is to cause the European Union to implode. That’s why he has financed political forces on our continent, especially on the far right. Through his propaganda, Putin has supported those who argue that Europe is a decadent civilization, eaten away by multiculturalism. We have never threatened the territorial integrity of Russia. The only thing that Putin is obsessed with is that Europe shouldn’t have a pull over countries that he considers to be part of a Russian sphere of influence.
The Left must have no tolerance for this. Much of the French elite look through what Anna Colin Lebedev calls the “Russian filter.” That is to say that they see everything through the prism of the Russian narrative.
The reality is that our security depends on the Russian people. We can do whatever we want, but we will not be safe if the Russian people themselves do not manage to decide and delimit their borders and say, “Here are the borders of Russia.” We need to be able to come to terms with them on this without giving in on our security demands.
Let’s get back to the politics of the European Union and its response to the recent spate of global crises: the pandemic and the energy crisis. How are they affecting European institutions and policymaking?
These two crises — the energy crisis and the pandemic — have shown that Europe is not incapable of changing or reforming itself. This contradicts a certain discourse that has been popular on the Left in recent years. I think that we need to completely change our attitude. We have proof that Europe is capable of taking a turn. That it is possible, on the basis of a simple political decision in the European Council, to obtain a suspension of the rules in the EU treaties: even the most taboo ones, like those regulating member-state budgets and economic aid. It is possible to make changes at the European level as long as we know how to do politics. We have to stop this scorched-earth policy that seems content to say, “We don’t care anyway, ciao,” throwing out any chance of European solidarity or the possibility of creating common policies with our neighbors. This seems to me to be a dead end.
But I think we need to distinguish how the war and the pandemic have changed Europe. Certainly, the pandemic has enabled advances on issues such as public debt. But the pandemic was a planet-wide experience. The war in Ukraine is a European moment. There is a new awareness of the need for Europe, which differs from the climate of the last decade when the right-wing identity front has said that being European is about being white and Christian. Ukrainians do not want to join us because we are white or Christian, but because of a certain way of life and institutions such as the rule of law and social redistribution. We need to realize that these are worth defending and that only we can defend them.
But there is no evidence that the war has weakened the far-right front in Europe: in just the past three months, the far right has scored major electoral victories in Italy and Sweden. One of the important arguments of your book is that the far right has embraced European unity. Can you explain?
The European conversion of the far right is one of the major events of the 2010s. Since the neo-Nazi and neofascist movements of the postwar period, the far right has had an idea of Europe. Even before then, Mussolini and Hitler had an idea of Europe.
But for seventy years, [the far right] remained on the sidelines of the European project. Now, they are striving to directly participate in it. Across the continent, they have changed from a program of leaving the European Union to a program aimed at instrumentalizing it from within. They are leading an extremely powerful and coherent ideological offensive. With Viktor Orbán, who is an impressive theoretician and who has inspired all the right-wingers of the continent, they have built a new idea of Europe built on the claim to protect “white and Christian European civilization” against all supposed threats, like Muslim immigration or LGBT and gender theory. Their project for Europe would be to transform the European Union into an authority for guaranteeing the cultural state of the continent, with the European Union spearheading zero-immigration policies.
The European far right is capable of cooperating among itself. For a long time, it was thought to be too nationalist. But we must understand that the far right’s passion for identity is no longer focused solely on the nation but on what it calls “civilization.” It is the emphasis on “European civilization” that has enabled this shift.
The European conversion of the far right has been accompanied by a geographical tilt of the continent. Between 2008 to 2020, to put it crudely, the political debates surrounding the EU and most notably austerity seemed to pitch the continent between Northern and Southern factions. Today, however, we see the European center of gravity tilting toward the East.
The first twenty years of the twentieth century already saw an overlapping of East-West and North-South divides. It seems to me that everything has now exploded. The forces of the identitarian right are just as strong in the West as in the East. Even if in Eastern Europe there is a more marked background of cultural conservatism: these are societies that are very different from the point of view of demography, such as the age of the population and proportion of the immigrants in the general population. Between the North and the South, there are still very strong cleavages regarding economic issues, but they have been somewhat sidelined with the suspension of the debt rules.
There is a power vacuum in Europe. Eastern Europe, and in particular Poland, is becoming very important. The Franco-German tandem is losing its centrality. It has been decentralized for several years now by the “Hanseatic League” [of Northern European countries] and the Visegrád Group [bringing together states in the former Soviet sphere in Eastern Europe]. It is no longer enough that France and Germany agree on something for it to become policy. As we saw with the pandemic recovery plan, they reached an agreement and then it took months and months for it to move forward.
The far right’s embrace of Europe is a warning for the Left to not abandon the European battlefield. Calls for a “Lexit” — exit to the Left — have grown less audible in recent years, giving way to proposals to disobey the EU treaties. But there still seem to be few figures of continent-wide stature making the case for a left-wing idea of the European project.
There is a war of ideas to define Europe and it is only just beginning. For the time being, however, the Left is a largely absent. The far right is one step ahead of us. They have thought up a very coherent project with an existential objective, an institutional doctrine, and a program. The Left has to do the same. As far as an existential objective and an institutional framework, I think we need to be talking about the defense of a model of civilization around political liberties, welfare, and ecology. A program for Europe needs to be about providing social protection and collective power.
You don’t seem hesitant to call for a “powerful” Europe. The geopolitical arguments for European “strategic autonomy” are understandable, but the continent is hardly a stranger to the past and present of imperialism. Do we need one more imperial center?
European power ought to be built in opposition to imperialism. When I say “power,” I don’t mean that Europe should add chaos to an already chaotic global situation. It has to be powerful in order to be a mediating power. I think that the weakness of Europe is one of the factors aggravating global disorder. We absolutely must not let this new Cold War between the United States and China take hold. I have concluded that today’s globalization is not at all bipolar, with China on one side and the United States on the other. It is multipolar, with several powers each asserting their own models.
This doesn’t necessarily need to lead to confrontation. It can be the road to dialogue. Unipolarity, or the domination of one or two powers, creates confrontation. Multipolarity can allow for dialogue much more easily. Within this multipolar globalization, Europe must be able to make its voice heard — not to crush others, but to advance global cooperation. But to do this, we need the real assets of power, especially industrial and military strength.