The European project is today in a more fragile state than it has been for many years. Battered by successive crises, it is also trying to cope with a sea change in European public opinion. In country after country, the attractions of a simplistic nationalism the continent thought it had left behind are growing and the habit of blaming any bad news on Brussels is becoming more entrenched, while the relations between European partners are increasingly quarrelsome. Elections keep punching home this dismal message, most recently in Poland with the victory of the Law and Justice party in October, and in the French elections earlier this month, when the Front National, although its attempt to take control of some of the country’s regions failed, demonstrated its increased political weight. Law and Justice’s decision to remove the European flag from behind the rostrum from which its prime minister conducts her weekly press conference can be seen as symbolic of this shift. There are counter currents – Law and Justice is now slipping badly in the polls, for example – but the overall direction is clear.
After Ukraine, Greece, the refugee influx and the terrorist attacks in Paris, Europe cannot afford another crisis. Yet one threatens, in the shape of David Cameron’s risky bid for concessions on British demands for changes in its relationship with the European Union. That bid both increases European fragility, because a British departure from the union could lead to a more general unravelling, and gives the British prime minister leverage he did not have in the past. Britain’s needs have moved along the spectrum from being a nuisance toward being an existential threat to the European Union. Unimportant in themselves, because they are largely imaginary and symbolic, they now have to be dealt with more seriously because of the larger implications for Europe as a whole.
To be fair to Mr Cameron, he is not alone in needing symbolic coin to help him prevail politically at home. Chancellor Angela Merkel is engaged in a not entirely dissimilar operation in her attempt, now largely stymied, to get Europe to share the burden of looking after Syrian and other refugees in some systematic way. She knows that whatever system might be agreed would be unlikely to be effective, but she needs something to show her voters that other Europeans are ready to relieve some of the strain on Germany. Most other Europeans, reflecting on the fact that Mrs Merkel helped stimulate a large increase in the flow of refugees into Europe without even a brief consultation with her partners, are unsympathetic, but recognise her difficulty.
Those European leaders who support the union, still by far the majority, are faced with a conundrum which has been part of the European project since its early days. Ordinary people tend to blame the problems with which European countries would have to cope whether there was a union or not on their transnational institutions. The changes in the global economy, which have undermined employment in Europe, would have happened with or without the EU. The status of Ukraine could well have been contested with or without an EU. And a Syrian civil war would have happened regardless of Europe’s political arrangements. What is less unfair is the perception that the union is failing to deal competently with these challenges. The disarray evident in the European ranks in the last two or three years, the failure to agree, the readiness to postpone and the angling for national advantage has led many citizens to conclude that the EU is not very good at protecting and looking after them, or is even compounding the difficulties of their lives.
Mr Cameron was given an opportunity to present his case to other European leaders in Brussels on Thursday evening, speaking for 45 minutes at the summit dinner and then fielding questions. He spoke well, and the atmosphere was warmer than it has been. Even though they think he has brought it on himself, his peers grasp that he needs some symbolic baggage to take home with him. But everything he wants is difficult. “Ever closer union,” for example, has been effectively off the agenda in the European Union for years. Mr Cameron’s government knows that, yet it still wants those words struck out as far as Britain is concerned. It is a clear example of how dangerous the game of symbols has become. For want of concessions that are not real, what is real – an imperfect union that is nevertheless better than none at all, or one still weaker – could be thrown away.
