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Andrzej Krauze's
illustration on Europe's complacent political elite
‘The unifying
dynamic appears to be the interaction of financial insecurity and the
cultural detachment of governing elites from the governed.’
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As
Le Pen rises Europe’s liberal dream is disappearing in front of our
eyes
The
nationalism sweeping from France to Poland makes it harder to argue
the case for Britain in the European Union
Rafael Behr
@rafaelbehr
Wednesday 9 December
2015 06.30 GMT
When Jean-Marie Le
Pen made it into the second round of the 2002 French presidential
election, part of the horror many voters felt was in seeing, in stark
light, a face of the nation that had previously been in shadow. “It
means people we know voted for the Front National,” a shaken friend
and supporter of the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, told me at
the time. Even understanding the reasons – economic protest, apathy
in the mainstream – did not diminish the impact, nor the anger.
Tout comprendre, ce n’était pas tout pardonner.
The near certainty
that Le Pen’s daughter will be a presidential contender for 2017 is
shocking in a different way, landing with the banal thud of grim
inevitability. Marine Le Pen saunters through French politics
emanating the sharp smell of professionally laundered fascism. She
has distanced herself and her party from the brutish style of her
father, jettisoning explicit racism, colonising the political space
where his extreme position shades into mainstream respectability.
After a triumphant showing in the first round of regional elections
last weekend, the Front National claims to be France’s main
opposition party.
But France is not an
exception. A long malaise in continental liberal democracy is
beginning to feel more like decline. Illiberal democracy is already
thriving in the east of the continent. It is the explicit creed of
the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who has tried to
proscribe press criticism of the government in the name of protecting
“public morality”, and who treats non-Christian religions and
non-governmental organisations as fifth columnists contaminating the
vigour of a national project. That record was established even before
the eruption of an EU migration crisis, in which Orbán sees himself
holding the line against an infiltrating “army” of Muslims.
In October, the
ultra-conservative Law and Justice party swept aside a centrist
government in Poland, raising fears among the country’s liberals of
a lurch towards Orbán-style Christian nationalism. Phlegmatic
commentators counsel against panic, explaining the result as a
backlash against an exhausted incumbent class by poorer Poles, mostly
in small towns and villages, to whom the bounty of post-Communist
market transition has not cascaded down. The reassuring theory is
that moderates can regroup and renew their pitch, at which point the
pendulum will swing back.
But pendulum
politics is looking off kilter across Europe. Even in Scandinavia,
the amicable to and fro between conservative and social democratic
modes of liberalism has been disrupted by rightwing populists. The
Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi factions in its roots, has
topped opinion polls in that country. In Denmark the anti-immigration
People’s party is part of the ruling coalition.
No two countries
have exactly analogous politics, but common threads run across
Europe. The unifying dynamic appears to be the interaction of
financial insecurity and the cultural detachment of governing elites
from the governed. From Paris to Warsaw, politicians of the
technocratic centre are perceived as a caste apart, professionally
complacent, insulated by hoarded privilege from the anxiety provoked
in electorates by economic turbulence and abrupt demographic change.
On to that canvas is then projected the spectre of terrorism,
smuggled into the body politic by refugees from predominantly Muslim
countries.
What makes this
resurgent nationalism so hard to defuse is the panache with which it
sports the robes of popular democracy – as indeed nationalism has
always done. Le Pen is careful not to present herself as a scourge of
foreigners but as a defender of Republican secularism. The
Scandinavian hard right configures its refusal to welcome refugees as
a pragmatic defence of traditional Nordic values of tolerance and
reciprocity – implying that the social contract is undermined by
migrant communities whose failure to integrate is somehow wilful, a
function of religious self-segregation. Once the idea takes hold that
Islam contains innate tendencies to insularity and illiberalism, it
is easy to argue that mass migration is a threat to “European”
values, and that a porous border is incompatible with pluralist
democracy. Recognition that continental Europe achieved relative
religious homogeneity by the systematic extermination of its largest
non-Christian minority in the 20th century is usually omitted from
that argument.
Britain, while
hardly a model of interfaith community cohesion, has stayed
relatively immune to the rise of explicitly xenophobic populism.
Mercifully, Ukip is an amateurish also-ran compared with more dynamic
equivalent movements elsewhere. We like to think this protection is
the enduring legacy of Churchillian anti-fascism, although it is also
an accident of electoral architecture and geography – the absence
of land borders with the rest of the continent and the mixed blessing
of a voting system that suffocates small parties.
Keeping Britain in
Europe has always been hampered by its reliance on abstract
liberalism and historical romanticism
Our collective
inoculation against racist politics will be tested in the European
Union referendum campaign. Before the terrorist attacks in Paris, it
seemed that the arguments would hinge on economics. The “leave”
camp would say prosperity depends on unshackling ourselves from the
dead weight of a low-growth, high-unemployment eurozone. The “remain”
side would say that jobs and investment rely on membership of the
huge trading club in our corner of the globe. Those will still be
dominant themes.
But in recent weeks
the lens of British politics has shifted its focus from the economy
to security. When that template is applied, EU membership is either
the necessary mechanism for coordinated anti-terror policy –
sharing data, cross-border arrest warrants and intelligence
cooperation – or it is an unlocked door through which jihadism
sneaks, in refugee garb.
This evolution of
the argument poses a new, more profound problem for the “in”
side. The case for keeping Britain in Europe has always been hampered
by its reliance on abstract liberalism and historical romanticism:
extolling openness and continental engagement as emblems of a modern,
self-confident nation; recalling the founding purpose of the EU as
the elimination of nationalism by blurring borders; rejecting
Euroscepticism as a form of reactionary cultural protectionism,
coloured at the fringes by outright xenophobia. Those were never easy
arguments to configure as campaign themes with mass appeal. But what
pro-Europeans now confront is something altogether more challenging,
not just to the practical pursuit of their cause but to its very
premise. There is still a liberal case for integration with the rest
of Europe, but it gets progressively harder to make when so many
countries in the rest of Europe seem to be turning their backs on
liberalism.
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