When the Berlin Wall fell, I was in high school. When the planes hit the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, I was a rookie reporter in New York. When Britain voted to leave the European Union, I woke up to the news at home in Paris and was stunned, but not entirely surprised. I’ve covered Europe for The New York Times for the past eight years, and I’ve learned that voter anger, or voter apathy, is always a clearer gauge than politicians and pundits.
Still, the news stung. For me and others of my generation, this vote was about more than Britain’s relationship with Europe. It signaled the definitive end of the era of transnational optimism in which I came of age: the ’90s. Back then, we believed that interconnectedness was a strength. People wanted to study human rights law. Nationalism was out of fashion — at least in Western Europe — and weaponized Twitter didn’t yet exist to galvanize political change. (Or rather, to take down institutions, not build them.)
In June 2011 I was on assignment in Athens when the government of Prime Minister George Papandreou collapsed. A year earlier, Mr. Papandreou had asked for a foreign bailout. The country’s lenders agreed, but only if Greece met terms that would soon prove politically toxic. Mr. Papandreou resigned that November, and his once-powerful Socialist Party imploded.
For years to come, I covered countless middle-of-the-night votes in which the Greek Parliament pushed through packages of austerity measures at the 11th hour. There were lots of riots and billows of tear gas. Before each vote, there were many political messages from Europe warning that if Greece didn’t pass this or that measure, it would be kicked out of the eurozone, and everything would fall apart.
Regular people didn’t understand what was going on, and neither did many European leaders, cocooned in their provincialisms. Sometimes there was chatter that no, Greece wouldn’t get kicked out of the euro, but that maybe one day Germany, Europe’s largest economy, would leave. Never mind how Germany had grown rich because its banks had lent Southern Europe money to buy German goods, a fact that didn’t fit into the “lazy Greeks” narrative of the German tabloid news media.
This week, it wasn’t Greece that was kicked out. It was Britain that voted to leave, after a campaign of open xenophobia. Leaving the euro isn’t the same as leaving the European Union, but the differences are too technical for many people to parse. That’s the problem.
The European Union hasn’t done a good job of explaining its purpose — it’s too opaque, too bureaucratic, too confusing — and its slow handling of the debt crisis, especially in Greece, where it acted fast so French and German banks could cut their losses, but left Greece asphyxiated, had devastating consequences for all. Decisions made for short-term financial stability have led to long-term political instability.
I’m struck by how the critiques of Europe from the right and left wind up converging. The Democracy in Europe movement, begun this year by the leftist Yanis Varoufakis, a polarizing former Greek finance minister, hits some of the same notes as Nigel Farage’s right-wing U.K. Independence Party, criticizing Europe as antidemocratic and less than transparent.
Still, the right appeals to nationalism and the left does not. The right sells a nostalgic version of national identity that resonates viscerally but doesn’t reflect reality, especially not for young people born into a Europe of Erasmus scholarships that let them study across borders, and EasyJet, which lets them travel around on the cheap.
These critiques of Europe from the left and right aren’t really ideological in the way that the 20th-century battles between communists and fascists were. Instead, voters have the sense that abstract economic forces are determining their fates, that their countries have given up part of their economic sovereignty to Europe — but that Europe, a vague construct, has not assumed that power and can’t act on it. Europe hovers in a kind of purgatory of semisovereignty. In this confusion, nationalists thrive.
It’s all terribly confusing: The idea of a united Europe was to allow citizens to prosper. When the economy was booming, countries wanted immigration. In recent years, the economic crisis hasn’t allowed citizens in many parts of Europe to prosper. Does this mean that a united Europe is to blame, or that global economic factors are? Or does the fault lie with entrenched local economic realities, like national labor contracts, which exist for older workers but are often an impossible dream for younger ones? Was the promise of growth overly wishful?
This week I reread one of the most prescient texts on the European Union: the historian Tony Judt’s 1996 essay “A Grand Illusion?” In it, he maps out everything we are witnessing today, from the slow erosion of the welfare state to the return of nationalisms to the realization that the idea “that social and political institutions and affinities naturally and necessarily follow economic ones” is a “reductivist fallacy.”
“Just as an obsession with ‘growth’ has left a moral vacuum at the heart of some modern nations, so the abstract, materialist quality of the idea of Europe is proving insufficient to legitimate its own institutions and retain popular confidence,” wrote Mr. Judt, who died in 2010.
“Since 1989 there has been a return of memory and with it, and benefiting from it, a revival of the national units that framed and shaped that memory and gave meaning to the collective past,” he wrote.
When I was on assignment in Russia last year, where the government of President Vladimir V. Putin has been playing up the country’s past military glory in television programs, films and history exhibitions, a film producer told me a sardonic and painfully accurate commonplace: that in Russia, “the future has become unpredictable — and so has the past.”
This seems accurate for Russia and for Eastern Europe, where governing parties play the nationalist card because it’s one of the few cards they can play — since they certainly can’t play the economic card, the bright-future card. The vote in Britain on Thursday was also a vote for revisionist history, for a vision of Britain for the British — of England for the English, really — that hasn’t existed in a long time.
Who inherits England? It’s a question that has obsessed British novelists for decades. And who inherits Europe? Today in Europe the past ishttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/25/world/europe/brexit-britain-european-union.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-abc-region®ion=span-abc-region&WT.nav=span-abc-region&_r=0 equally unpredictable, and the path ahead looks very uncertain.
Still, the news stung. For me and others of my generation, this vote was about more than Britain’s relationship with Europe. It signaled the definitive end of the era of transnational optimism in which I came of age: the ’90s. Back then, we believed that interconnectedness was a strength. People wanted to study human rights law. Nationalism was out of fashion — at least in Western Europe — and weaponized Twitter didn’t yet exist to galvanize political change. (Or rather, to take down institutions, not build them.)
In June 2011 I was on assignment in Athens when the government of Prime Minister George Papandreou collapsed. A year earlier, Mr. Papandreou had asked for a foreign bailout. The country’s lenders agreed, but only if Greece met terms that would soon prove politically toxic. Mr. Papandreou resigned that November, and his once-powerful Socialist Party imploded.
For years to come, I covered countless middle-of-the-night votes in which the Greek Parliament pushed through packages of austerity measures at the 11th hour. There were lots of riots and billows of tear gas. Before each vote, there were many political messages from Europe warning that if Greece didn’t pass this or that measure, it would be kicked out of the eurozone, and everything would fall apart.
Regular people didn’t understand what was going on, and neither did many European leaders, cocooned in their provincialisms. Sometimes there was chatter that no, Greece wouldn’t get kicked out of the euro, but that maybe one day Germany, Europe’s largest economy, would leave. Never mind how Germany had grown rich because its banks had lent Southern Europe money to buy German goods, a fact that didn’t fit into the “lazy Greeks” narrative of the German tabloid news media.
This week, it wasn’t Greece that was kicked out. It was Britain that voted to leave, after a campaign of open xenophobia. Leaving the euro isn’t the same as leaving the European Union, but the differences are too technical for many people to parse. That’s the problem.
The European Union hasn’t done a good job of explaining its purpose — it’s too opaque, too bureaucratic, too confusing — and its slow handling of the debt crisis, especially in Greece, where it acted fast so French and German banks could cut their losses, but left Greece asphyxiated, had devastating consequences for all. Decisions made for short-term financial stability have led to long-term political instability.
I’m struck by how the critiques of Europe from the right and left wind up converging. The Democracy in Europe movement, begun this year by the leftist Yanis Varoufakis, a polarizing former Greek finance minister, hits some of the same notes as Nigel Farage’s right-wing U.K. Independence Party, criticizing Europe as antidemocratic and less than transparent.
Still, the right appeals to nationalism and the left does not. The right sells a nostalgic version of national identity that resonates viscerally but doesn’t reflect reality, especially not for young people born into a Europe of Erasmus scholarships that let them study across borders, and EasyJet, which lets them travel around on the cheap.
These critiques of Europe from the left and right aren’t really ideological in the way that the 20th-century battles between communists and fascists were. Instead, voters have the sense that abstract economic forces are determining their fates, that their countries have given up part of their economic sovereignty to Europe — but that Europe, a vague construct, has not assumed that power and can’t act on it. Europe hovers in a kind of purgatory of semisovereignty. In this confusion, nationalists thrive.
It’s all terribly confusing: The idea of a united Europe was to allow citizens to prosper. When the economy was booming, countries wanted immigration. In recent years, the economic crisis hasn’t allowed citizens in many parts of Europe to prosper. Does this mean that a united Europe is to blame, or that global economic factors are? Or does the fault lie with entrenched local economic realities, like national labor contracts, which exist for older workers but are often an impossible dream for younger ones? Was the promise of growth overly wishful?
This week I reread one of the most prescient texts on the European Union: the historian Tony Judt’s 1996 essay “A Grand Illusion?” In it, he maps out everything we are witnessing today, from the slow erosion of the welfare state to the return of nationalisms to the realization that the idea “that social and political institutions and affinities naturally and necessarily follow economic ones” is a “reductivist fallacy.”
“Just as an obsession with ‘growth’ has left a moral vacuum at the heart of some modern nations, so the abstract, materialist quality of the idea of Europe is proving insufficient to legitimate its own institutions and retain popular confidence,” wrote Mr. Judt, who died in 2010.
“Since 1989 there has been a return of memory and with it, and benefiting from it, a revival of the national units that framed and shaped that memory and gave meaning to the collective past,” he wrote.
When I was on assignment in Russia last year, where the government of President Vladimir V. Putin has been playing up the country’s past military glory in television programs, films and history exhibitions, a film producer told me a sardonic and painfully accurate commonplace: that in Russia, “the future has become unpredictable — and so has the past.”
This seems accurate for Russia and for Eastern Europe, where governing parties play the nationalist card because it’s one of the few cards they can play — since they certainly can’t play the economic card, the bright-future card. The vote in Britain on Thursday was also a vote for revisionist history, for a vision of Britain for the British — of England for the English, really — that hasn’t existed in a long time.
Who inherits England? It’s a question that has obsessed British novelists for decades. And who inherits Europe? Today in Europe the past ishttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/25/world/europe/brexit-britain-european-union.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-abc-region®ion=span-abc-region&WT.nav=span-abc-region&_r=0 equally unpredictable, and the path ahead looks very uncertain.
