The Empire Strikes Back, and Europe is Confused

[Celerity]

Amid a world of resurgent imperial powers, a fragmented Europe grapples with its past and uncertain future.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-empire-strikes-back-and-europe-is-confused



“I’m standing here in pieces, and you’re having delusions of grandeur!” The line, delivered in an acclaimed Hollywood movie from 1980, might well serve as Europe’s most accurate opening gambit in a conversation with Donald Trump’s America. The futuristic setting of “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” could also bring to mind China’s “galaxy empire,” recently depicted by John Keane and Baogang He in their compelling book of the same title. And the Empire’s relentless pursuit of the rebels in that epic film might evoke President Putin’s brutal assault on neighbouring Ukraine. Indeed, the empire—or, perhaps more accurately, the empires—are back, and Europe, seemingly standing in pieces, appears unable to consolidate its strength to confront this new global reality. It did not have to unfold this way, and there may yet be time to reverse Europe’s diminishing fortunes.

A few decades ago, Europe seemed poised to become an empire of sorts itself. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the European Union embarked on a policy of territorial enlargement that bore some resemblance to a benign imperial project. The E.U. expanded its reach not by force of arms, but through financial assistance and the export of its legal framework. States in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans were gradually integrated into the E.U.’s shared space, but under stringent conditions; democracy, the rule of law, and free trade were paramount among them. Their scope for diplomatic negotiation remained largely theoretical, owing partly to the significant wealth disparity between the E.U. and the candidate states, and partly to the absence of any genuinely appealing alternatives.

The widening of the E.U. coincided with the deepening of its integration project. The Union established a single market and currency, shared external (Schengen) borders, and a common foreign and security policy. When the conflicts in the Balkans starkly exposed the E.U.’s military limitations, the Union resolved to create a defence capability of its own. This culminated in the decision at the 1999 Helsinki summit to develop an autonomous capacity to deploy sixty thousand troops within sixty days for operations lasting up to a year. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the E.U. began drafting its own constitution, an effort intended to consolidate and strengthen the European legal, economic, and institutional architecture. Yet the promised military capability never fully materialized, and the proposed European Constitution was subsequently rejected by voters in referendums held in two of the integration project’s founding members, the Netherlands and France.

The failure of the European Constitution in 2005 marked the advent of a new phase in European politics: the sovereigntist era. From that point on, the Eurosceptic right began to achieve significant electoral successes across the continent, campaigning against an allegedly over-powerful European Union that they claimed was undermining democratic states. Brexit, the most striking manifestation of this trend, was framed explicitly as an effort to reclaim sovereignty for Westminster from European bureaucrats in Brussels. While the substantial costs of Brexit prompted continental Eurosceptics to adjust their strategy, the underlying aspiration to restore nation-states as the ultimate arbiters of power did not wane. The objective shifted to weakening Brussels’s influence from within the E.U., primarily by vetoing common initiatives and undermining European institutions. The vision was a Europe composed of proud and sovereign nations, finally laying to rest the spectres of a federal Europe. According to this view, unelected European commissioners and judges should not presume to question the sovereign will of the people, as expressed through national elections that brought sovereigntist parties to power.

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