A Contented Summer of Europe’s Discontent

One of the subplots of the wavering support of the United States for Ukraine has been whether the European Union can possibly fill whatever void is left if the U.S. radically diminishes its military aid. While the recent reversals of the Trump administration seem to have shifted a dynamic that had become increasingly hostile to the Zelensky government in Kyiv, the future capacity of the EU remains very much a question.

That is of a piece with the rising drumbeat over the past decade that the EU is a dysfunctional union masking a deep political and economic malaise besetting most if not all of its 27 member states. Just this week, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, admonished the European Union, saying “You’re losing… Europe has gone from 90% U.S. GDP to 65% over 10 or 15 years. That’s not good.”

Yet, the plaints of the EU seem like the dreams of most countries from time immemorial. On most metrics, the union is affluent, stable, peaceful. Its 450 million people produce a GDP of nearly $20 trillion, making it the second largest economic bloc in the world behind only the United States. Yes, that masks significant disparities between member nations and also glosses over the fact that while there is an economic union, it is not as frictionless as commerce between American states or Chinese provinces, and there remain trade barriers within the union. Even so, per capita income is among the highest in the world, and it is twined with public health care systems that provide universal care at high quality (again, one can caveat everything with exceptions, but the generalization holds). There are relatively low crime rates, unemployment for the Eurozone as a whole hovers at 6%, life expectancy is high and so is literacy. There is a robust social safety net in most parts of the union, with women near parity in the workforce and an infrastructure for childcare and education. Many of the major cities are routinely ranked as the most livable in the world, with public transport and clean streets, though in many major metropolitan areas the cost of living is prohibitive and zoning restrictions designed by the NIMBY-est of NIMBYs make it nearly impossible to build housing or anything new. But few would dispute that on a global comparison, many of the EU countries are among the most stable, and affluent and offer a quality of life that millennia of humans could only have dreamt of.

Against that backdrop are a chorus of critiques. The EU doesn’t spend enough on collective defense, having over the last 75 years depended on the United States for security guarantees and on a NATO system underpinned by American budgets and equipment. The vaunted “interoperability” of NATO forces has been revealed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 as a myth. Granted, anyone in the belly of various defense ministries in France or the United Kingdom or Germany knew that military systems were not truly interoperable and that the mania for each country having its own specific fighter jets and tanks and artillery and systems would not be so easily plugged and played. The Syrian immigration after 2012 as Syria descended into civil war saw millions of refugees flood into central and then northern Europe, which was greeted not with open arms but with an intense nativist backlash in formerly open and tolerant countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany. Similar dynamics were evident in the face of Libyan refugees into Spain and Italy.

And of course, in Poland and Hungary, democracy and open society have been sorely tested by the rise of semi-autocratic parties that have been spectacularly successful in Hungary with its leader Victor Orban and moderately successful in Poland with the Law and Justice Party. The increasing momentum for far-right parties such as AfD in Germany and Georgia Meloni’s coalition in Italy and the Freedom Party in Austria and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the National Rally (formerly the National Front) in France echoes the rise of Trump in the United States. All are fueled by the widespread discontent and disenchantment with the governing technocrats of the European Union and with the same forces of free-trade and globalization that have generated backlash across the globe in the face of displaced workers and ruptured communities.

Yet, for all the roiling and the handwringing, the European Union remains one of the signature achievements of humanity: a multi-ethnic, multi-national political and economic condominium that has helped bring extraordinary stability and prosperity to more than 5% of the earth’s population. The fact that narratives of things going well are always trumped by stories of all that is going badly distorts the picture of Europe into a funhouse mirror of dysfunction and disrepair.

The negatives are clear and understood: the European Commission, which functions as the EU’s main executive body, is intensely bureaucratic and has an unfortunate tendency to micromanage. In its efforts to harmonize standards across the union, technocrats in Brussels (the EU’s de facto capital) do some laudable things such as mandating one plug for all electronic devices (the USB-C); they also take regulation to the extreme in attempting to define exactly how many gene edits can be done with CRISPR technology before it exceeds some arbitrary number. The pace of new regulations has increased noticeably in recent years, as the commission tries to keep up with digital and technological innovation including large-language models (LLMs) and AI.

Yet even here, the net effect has been to reduce barriers to the movement of goods and people and ideas, and gradually and yes at times sluggishly position the union as a more dynamic place, friendlier to positive change and innovation. A recent report by former Italian prime minister and former head of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi was widely discussed because of its withering critique of the union as insufficiently focusing on future growth and innovation. But the very fact that the report was commissioned and then disseminated can be taken as a sign of an institution that is self-critical, self-reflecting and self-correcting.

Speaking of Europe, here’s another read for you: What the EU Gets Right—and the US Gets Wrong—About Antitrust by Zachary Karabell (November 2020)

If one thing annoys Europeans, it is the assumption that there is a creature called a European or the idea that one can generalize across so many regions, cultures and histories. A Greek living in the Peloponnese does not share much in common with a Dane living in Copenhagen, and a French person residing in Lyon has a very different life and cultural baggage than a Romanian living in Bucharest. All true, and yet the same can be said of an American living in the Mississippi Delta compared to one living in Palo Alto or Parsippany. There are differences galore, but there are commonalities aplenty.

And one commonality of Europe today is that collective security and affluence and some concord that the state has a vital role to play in assuring health, housing, education and collective security. It is the latter that is now receiving urgent attention in the face of a Russia seemingly intent on rebuilding the empire and a United States seeming bent on reducing its commitment to the collective security of Europe. That urgency is a good thing: it shakes up what had been a glacial complacency. It may seem like a crisis, but if so, it is a necessary trigger to get more of the states of Europe to plan for a less utopian world even as they continue to strive for one.

If one thing is clear from the present day, it’s that humans – or at least humans shaped by modern civilizations – do not do well with stasis. Things going well doesn’t sit well with the roiling passions of people and societies, and that reality that things can often be better is both an irritation and a spur. Europe today is the apex of what humans have worked for and dreamt of, and yet it is now not enough for the actual humans who inhabit it. Both truths can be true, and both should be honored.