The Odd Calm of EU Officials
Imagine the following scenario: Texas votes to secede from the United States, sparking bitter negotiations between Austin and Washington. A neo-Nazi party wins seats in the California legislature. Cook County, home to Chicago, threatens to break away from Illinois to form its own state, while government officials, worried about losing such an economically vibrant region, furiously try to prevent the election from taking place. The federal government, meanwhile, vows to suspend North Carolina’s voting rights in Congress simply because it didn’t approve of its behavior. It considers doing likewise for Arizona.
In such a scenario, one might rightly conclude that something is terribly wrong with the United States.
The thing is, this is pretty much what is happening in Europe. The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union, and the negotiations over its departure are unpleasant, to put it mildly. Alternative for Germany, a party whose members have been compared to neo-Nazis, has won a surprising number of seats in Germany’s parliament. Catalonia, which is home to Barcelona, a large and economically vital city in Spain, held an independence referendum Oct. 1, something the government in Madrid has tried to stop. (Early reports indicate physical altercations between regional and national forces.) And the European Commission has threated to suspend Poland’s voting rights over actions taken by the Polish government, and has previously attacked the Hungarian government.
Putting Europe in Perspective
This is not meant to diminish the problems of the United States, nor is it meant to imply that these problems are perfectly analogous to Europe’s. The EU is a treaty organization; the US is a closely knit federation. Disintegration would hurt a singular country like the US more than it would a collection of singular states. Still, the degree of fragmentation, the mutual anger between member states and the central apparatus, and the separatism in Spain (the most significant of several such movements) seemed extremely serious to me.
I simply want to put Europe in perspective. For all its problems, the United States isn’t about to lose its second-largest economy. It isn’t revoking voting rights from state legislatures. It isn’t grappling with a legitimate secessionist movement. It doesn’t have bona fide neo-Nazis winning seats in its largest and most prosperous state. It may be a tough time to be American, but it is an especially tough time to be European.
But as discovered last week in Europe, this is not how European officials see the situation. They regard the problems as serious but not existential. They believe these problems can be managed… and point to economic growth in several of its member states as evidence of their management.
...European officials don’t answer to constituencies. They are insulated from the pressure applied to a member state’s national representative. Their insulation can calm and clarify matters for them, but it can just as easily detach them from reality. Either way, their tranquility over serious issues—secession and dissolution—seems odd.
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