Europe’s Deplorables Challenge the Liberal Elite

The proverbial Martian who comes down to see how things are done on Earth would find it difficult to avoid coming to the conclusion that the European Union is in serious trouble and, equally, that those who are running it seem quite unable to recognise the crisis. To be precise, these are multiple, interlocking crises and they’ve been accumulating for a while. Some of these are global, like the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine; some are the EU’s very own, like the intractable problem of the euro, Brexit and the future of Italy. But above them all looms the legitimation crisis, the EU’s failure to provide an answer to the questions: Why integrate? and How to create accountability for the powers that have accumulated in Brussels?

To the former, the answers of the past—democracy, prosperity, open borders, peace—are largely exhausted. Even worse, while the EU does indeed offer a means of conflict resolution, this is increasingly being displaced by “human rights”. Conflict resolution requires a readiness to compromise and is focused on Europe, but “human rights” makes a universal moral claim and has a propensity to be absolute. Beyond a certain point the two are irreconcilable.

Our Martian would presumably conclude that the EU had more than enough on its plate and, applying the rule of prudence, would not open another front, one where the likelihood of success was rather low. Yet—should we be surprised?—this is precisely what the EU Commission has done.

Just before Christmas, the EU Commission decided to launch an Article Seven procedure against Poland. If this procedure succeeds, Poland would be deprived of its voting rights in the EU and would find itself in a kind of quarantine until it mended its ways. Article Seven of the EU Treaty is widely referred to as the “nuclear option” in the armoury of the EU in the context of recalcitrant member states who pose a serious threat to the basic values of the EU, as detailed in Article Two.

This is where the story gets complicated. First, Article Seven is almost impossible to implement, given the legal and political hurdles that its initiators have to jump. Besides, the entire point of a nuclear option is that it should never be used, but to establish a constraint. And the launching of the Article Seven procedure against Poland is bound to have unintended consequences. We can quite safely assume that, unlike in the Cold War, “mutually assured destruction” is not on the cards. But other kinds of damage cannot be excluded.

The EU Commission, which started the procedure, takes the view that it has legality on its side, that the restructuring of the administration of the law in Poland is so far-reaching as to destroy the autonomy of the rule of law. The Polish government says no; what is happening in Poland is the removal of judges who were a part of the communist power apparatus and, therefore, are seen as incapable of rendering objective judgments. These two positions are irreconcilable, whether by legal or by political criteria. The net result is that political assessments have acquired primacy. This is bad for legality, of course, because seemingly legal decisions are perceived as driven by political interest.

Whether the EU has the legal right to take this step is itself hazy. It is unclear whether there has been a corresponding “conferral of power” by member states to the EU, as laid down in Article Four. What is clear is that if the member state believes that the Commission’s move is not justified legally, it can appeal against it to the EU Court. Once again, the legal and the political are confused. Still, the central question is whether the EU is a single legal space. If so, then the Commission should be treating all member states even-handedly. This is manifestly not the case. There are serious dysfunctions in the administration of the law in several member states.

A few examples will suffice. In Slovakia, the Constitutional Court is barely functional—there are only ten justices in office out of thirteen. There is a several-year-long dispute over the appointment of new members of the court. The government nominates, the President approves, except that the President refuses to accept the government’s nominees, on the ground that they are political placemen (and women). In the Czech Republic, there’s a long-running turf war between the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court, with the latter ignoring decisions of the former. Something similar happens in Slovenia and Spain. But the EU Commission takes no interest in these parallel cases, which raises the question of a double standard. And there is nothing like inconsistency to undermine credibility.

Hence we are back to politics, to the political background of why Poland has been singled out. In brief, the elections of 2015 brought to power the national-conservative PiS government that has repeatedly outraged Left-liberal opinion, essentially by seeking to get rid of the remnants of the communist regime. These remnants retooled themselves as liberals and democratic socialists, which the West accepted without question. Note another double standard here. The remnants of the German Nazi system were not so accepted, and when East Germany reunited with the West, there was a purge of the communist remnants.

Poland, on the other hand, may not do likewise. The reason is the EU’s defence of liberalism as currently understood and practised. This liberalism has never really taken root in Central Europe, not least because in a way it was hijacked by the former communist power elite through a sophisticated operation during the shift from communism to democracy. Hence in Central Europe the liberal worldview of the West has been restricted to, at best, maybe 10 per cent of the population, mostly in the capital cities. The recent presidential elections in the Czech Republic demonstrated this clearly. The candidate favoured by the left, Drahoš, won about two-thirds of the vote in Prague; Zeman, written off as a right-wing populist, won with the support of the countryside. Capital cities can no longer dominate the country.

The dominant liberal elites of the West have never accepted or understood this, hence they are all too ready to see Central Europe as deviant. The narrative of “democratic backsliding” is accepted as “a truth universally acknowledged”. Hence the proposition requires no proof. (I was present when Hillary Clinton pronounced these very words during a formal visit to Budapest in 2011, voicing a not-too-subtle disapproval of the Hungarian government. She offered no proof either.)

This liberalism has come a long way from its forefathers—Mill and Tocqueville—and sees itself as the sole and exclusive arbiter of what is right and wrong in the world. It has its origins in Blair’s Third Way, in the exit strategy of the Left in Europe after the collapse of communism, and in its triumph in the great culture wars.

The intellectual, and more strikingly the moral superiority that is claimed by this liberal elite can be better understood in the context of the series of historic victories that it has achieved—over religion (no longer “exemplary and binding”), over fascism, communism, conservatism (including Christian Democracy) and over nationhood, especially anything that resembles ethnic solidarity. Seen in this light, its hubris becomes understandable, but nemesis has begun to emerge. Liberalism claims a hegemony over democracy and does its best to suppress anything that might challenge this hegemony.

An argument that liberalism is in the grip of a historicism, and believes itself to have been sent by history to change the world, is very cogent. Indeed, one can take the reasoning further, to the effect that liberalism (in its current iteration) is increasingly moved by a narrative of election, not that of a people chosen by God but by “history” itself. The much-repeated trope of being “on the wrong side of history” is evidence. But does history really have sides? Does it have an inside and outside? A top and a bottom? Beware of metaphors, don’t be seduced by them! The danger of relying on “history” to legitimate one’s narratives is that it is a temptation to see the world as driven by “historical inevitability” and expose oneself to the moral monism that Isaiah Berlin warned against so eloquently.

This liberal hegemony, to use Gramsci’s word, has a solid sociological basis. With local variations in Europe, Western Europe primarily, it has the support of around a quarter of the population. They are the mobile beneficiaries of globalisation, the products of higher education and increasingly they are establishing themselves as a hereditary class, given the tendency to marry within the class and to transmit their status to the next generation. The slowing down of upward social mobility and the rise of status inequality are the concomitants. Large swathes of the population have not only been living with wage stagnation, but even more painfully, with loss of status (these are Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”). They are beginning to demonstrate their dislike of these losses. This is the nemesis moment noted above.

The rise of new political movements, disdained by the liberals as “populists”, “xenophobes”, “nativists”, “racists” and the like, is likely to be a permanent phenomenon; liberalism seems to have peaked and to have generated an opposition that does not buy the liberal package and with which the liberals cannot cope. This helps to explain why liberalism relies on technocratic solutions, outsourcing politics to the judiciary, NGOs, lobbies, advocacy groups—anything that keeps the voters away from political decision-making. Hence the excoriation of the Brexit vote and of the election of Trump and, in a somewhat lower key, the denunciation of the Hungarian government’s referenda and national consultations (disclosure: I’m a Fidesz MEP, so you may think I’m not in accord with the liberal hegemony—yes, admitted freely).

How the EU comes into this is a separate, but interlinked story. The Commission is formally “the guardian of the Treaties”, a guardianship that implies—or should—a degree of ideological neutrality. In reality, this neutrality is rather weak now, because the Commission has overwhelmingly accepted the liberal package and understands Europe as a liberal Europe, despite the slogan of unity in diversity; the latter increasingly exists in rhetorical terms only. Historically this shift is interesting, because the origins of European integration are unequivocally Christian Democrat.

There are several inferences to be drawn from this proposition. First, the integration process is seen as a liberal project, which means that non-liberals are painted into the Eurosceptic corner. Any questioning of what the EU does is, therefore, automatically deemed both Eurosceptic and populist. Second, the supporters of a federal Europe have come to regard the Commission as their key redoubt, as their stronghold against the populist tide, which then moves them yet further towards technocracy and the greater exclusion, to the extent that it’s feasible, of the voters. For them, the idea of a demos-free democracy is more than a pipedream. And, third, liberalism seems committed to yet another social engineering project, that of converting the population of Europe into European federalists (or else). Dream on.

This brings us back to Poland and the liberals’ determination to bring the PiS government into line. There is no sign of this actually happening, indeed precisely because the confrontation has gone so far, neither the PiS government nor the Commission can retreat. In any dispute this is a dangerous situation. The Commission has become a de facto actor in Polish domestic politics, and whether it has either the legal right or the political legitimacy to do so is very much open to doubt.

The stand-off is beginning to resemble a frozen conflict. We are familiar enough with these outside Europe, but if we look without blinkers, there is a seepage. Divided Cyprus has been around for so long that it’s below the radar. Independent Kosovo is not recognised by five EU member states. Brexit has thrown up the problem of the intractable border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, as well as the status of Gibraltar. The crisis in Catalonia is far from resolved. The opposition to migrant quotas remains in being. The frontier dispute between Slovenia and Croatia has just reached the agenda of the EU, and the future of the Eurozone is still open. In these circumstances, adding the conflict with Poland seems like a luxury.

That may well be an understatement. The European integration process was initiated after 1945 to act as a conflict resolution mechanism, above all to ensure that there would never be another war between France and Germany. This has been brilliantly successful. Others can be added, like the Good Friday Agreement that settled the Troubles in Northern Ireland. From this perspective, the conflict with Poland seems counter-productive if not bizarre. Could a political solution have been found?

In this connection, think of the 2019 European parliamentary elections. The slogans of “Who rules?” and “Take back control” are ready to be deployed and, who knows, the European Parliament could find itself with a blocking minority of Eurosceptics, which will make EU legislation difficult, to say the least.

Finally, a hypothetical: suppose that somehow the Commission is successful and Poland is deprived of its voting rights. But a member state of the EU also has a nuclear option. The Polish government could call early elections and win on a “Who rules?” campaign, possibly with a constitutional majority. What then? What is the EU’s exit strategy? Could the integration process cope? How would the other twenty-seven member states respond? If the Austrian boycott of 2000 is a precedent, they would be decidedly uneasy.

Beware of the unintended consequences of your actions, not to mention of what you wish for. Scenarios, however well plotted, never quite turn out as you would like them. Kant’s crooked timber comes to mind all too readily.