Just finished reading yet another depressing Eastern European dispatch from Franklin Foer (link) about the rise of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, recounted as an oral history of his attack on the Central European University, an institution George Soros heroically founded to help his native country not fall back into the dark ages. The attempt failed, it seems, and the story is probably the saddest you could come to feeling for a billionaire on account of his philanthropy. But it got me thinking something that's recurred to me recently: what exactly is the point of the European Union?
In the US, we love talking about "the American experiment" because it casts our weird and diverse country as technology. We're all subjects in this thrilling test flight that could go wrong the way a safety-tested roller coaster could go wrong. But we also like the idea of our particular experiment because it's persisted: through one main fracture and countless small ones, in a narrative arc of triumph (if not untrammeled, then monotonic), with an unbroken government linking us to a glorious blood myth of an origin story. The American experiment is cool because it's working.
But not all experiments work, and right now, the European experiment is struggling. Elites talk about the successes of Mario Draghi and the aspirations of Macron and the stewardship of Merkel and undergird all these concepts with the assumption that a sewn-together Europe is better than the alternative. I understand the trauma, within living memory, that founds that assumption. But as the fissures appear in this drywall plaster of intense nationalities and catastrophic immigration policies, I've begun to wonder what preserving the European Union really does for anyone outside the continent, and maybe within as well.
In addition to being unwilling to militate the return of fascism to the continent (Orbán being one racist authoritarian of many, of course, and one hardly sanctioned at all by the EU) I'm also thinking of the EU's total impotence in the face of sanctions on Iran.
The worst thing Trump has done, arguably even more than the migrant detentions, is renege on the JCPOA. Every time I think of it I get angry. I had a senile bellicose idiotic grandparent too, and I knew that irascibility founded their cosmology: the closer someone is to you, the easier it is to start a fight, to get a barb in, to reflect in the sting you've caused someone else. President Nonni has inflicted this nursing home lash-out on the reputation of the United States. It kills me every time I read about how Rouhani is currently facing backlash from domestic opponents who chastise him for trusting the US. It's a fucking humiliation, and it's unstrategic, and it makes me crave nothing more than for the United States to receive due comeuppance.
Unfortunately for the world, there is no one powerful or courageous enough to deliver that comeuppance. The responsibility for this should fall on Europe, but they're nowhere to be found.
How many times have I read that Europe wants to do something, is "scrambling to save the deal," but its hands are tied.
Seriously then, what is the purpose of this institution existing? Recently it's been useful as a vehicle for creating immigration discontent and for funneling German money to southern Europe-- for the purpose, of course, of preserving the institution itself for its own sake. Other than self-preservation for elites, though, why is anyone fighting to keep this behemoth alive if it's not going to be able to act in the manner of a body with the amount of power and influence it has?
For the European Union to have any reason to exist, any benefit beyond the creation of a common monetary system (which, great job) it would need to step up and assert a commitment to the open societies and liberalism that Europe prides itself on having given the world. It would need an articulable policy of subsuming some economic interest to a more magnanimous mission. Instead, these bureaucrats can't do anything but wring their hands at suck each other off at Davos.
Fuck the EU. I hope everyone else leaves after the UK does. Useless apparatchiks fighting to preserve useless titles.
No comments:
Post a Comment