As the procedure for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU gets under way, the rebalancing of the EU’s institutions and economy that will follow promises to be nothing short of revolutionary. Brexit will have consequences not only for how the EU will function going forward but also for how transatlantic relations will evolve.
In a nutshell, Europe is on the threshold of a systemic adjustment comparable in scope with that seen in 1989–1990. Then, the winding down of the Cold War and the decomposition of the Soviet empire ushered in a fundamental reframing of what constituted Europe, as NATO and the EU moved Eastward. Today’s process of reorganization is likely to be anything but orderly.
With the UK on the way out, the dramatic shift of the EU’s economic center of gravity to the eurozone is just one factor that is poised to remake Europe’s overall structure. Yet although the impending change in Europe may be accelerated by Brexit, it has been driven by larger economic and political forces, including the reawakening of Europe’s nationalisms since the 2008 economic crisis and large-scale migration flows from the Middle East and North Africa. The deconstruction of the post–Cold War EU has now been under way for close to a decade and is poised to produce a qualitatively different Europe.
One increasingly likely end state is not a Europe of two speeds, as many analysts have advocated, but a much more profound change that will impact the nascent European identity, the continent’s politics, economics, and security, and, in the end, Europe’s broadly understood culture. As the cumulative pressures of the past decade gather, Europe may be on track for a change beyond the EU’s institutional bifurcation into a Carolingian core of France, Germany, and Italy and an Eastern periphery.
If current trends continue, a multivector Europe may emerge within the EU’s partly hollowed-out institutional shell. New, self-generated fault lines could become established not only between inner and outer states but also within regions. For instance, the Baltic states and Slovakia may hew closer to the eurozone on economic and governance issues while engaging with the noneurozone Central Europeans and Scandinavians when it comes to security.
The story of the EU of late is of two centripetal forces working concurrently in two different regions. On the one hand is the increasingly self-serving illusion that the eurozone can restore its economic momentum as long as it keeps its distance from the EU’s noneuro area. On the other hand is Central Europe’s increasingly self-centered regionalism, which is seeking to configure itself around various geostrategic visions—be it through a reinvigorated Visegrád Group consisting of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia or a so-called Trimarium linking states that border the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas.
Both trends will ultimately undercut the post–Cold War EU vision of a wider and deeper union, making regionalism in both East and West ever more likely. Furthermore, rather than yielding a clean-cut division into the EU’s West and East, the transition will have to factor in deteriorating security along NATO’s Eastern flank. That will make clear regional alignments along economic priorities difficult to sustain when Europeans are confronted with the security imperative of deterring a resurgent Russia.
Such a transformation would have lasting implications for European security. Although NATO and the EU were created as separate institutions, they developed complementary roles in structuring the larger West. If the EU bifurcates and possibly even implodes, NATO will need to pick up much of the slack at a time when the appetite for further alliance enlargement has greatly diminished. Should Europe revert to bilateralism as it fragments into subregions, this will add a new layer of complexity to the U.S. relationships with individual European countries, as regional security optics will no longer be parts of a larger continental landscape.
The EU cannot sustain its current multivector pull without fundamentally altering the institutional framing of the European project—and possibly returning to bilateralism as Europe’s modus operandi. In fact, member states have already created a momentum that is pushing the EU into establishing its own potential fault lines on various national policies, such as immigration or security. Today, as Brexit becomes a reality, the European project itself is at risk, as the political and economic momentum that has built up over the last decade is leading Europe ever faster back to the future.
Andrew A. Michta is the dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. Views expressed here are his own.
Comments(4)
one should not surrender to fatalism for nothing is preordained, as recent political setbacks of the political right demonstrate. Neither should one succumb to wishful thinking, an idle belief in a preordained arch of history. Both beliefs are extremes which deny a more complex reality that cannot be directly managed but can nonetheless be influenced. Europe, and indeed the western world, are experiencing an outbreak of a latent virus otherwise known as fascism. So called European elites desperately need the courage to acknowledge this. Fascism, first and foremost, is a disease of the mind which, if unattended, can lead to profound social consequences and devastating warfare. Rather than surrender to "the inevitable" one needs to counter it, with clear understanding that fascists will play the victim, which is part of their act. Play the victim until you win, by which time it is too late for the society at large to resist anything. Fascism operates through propaganda. Democracy is vulnerable to propaganda because of democratic commitment to free speech. Nonetheless, the threat that propaganda causes has to be confronted. It can be confronted by the legal requirement of truth in public discourse. This will not eliminate propaganda, but it may push it further into the corner. Democratic forces need to engage in their own effort to educate about fascism, even though they will be accused of engaging in their own propaganda. A major mistake was made at the end of WW2. The reality of widespread fascism in interwar Europe was culturally suppressed in favor of blaming the Germans for everything. Well past time to tell the truth forcefully. Those who suppress history are condemned to repeating it. The democratic forces do need to attend to underlying economic issues as well, but this would be another post.
I got to the following and groaned: "If the EU bifurcates and possibly even implodes, NATO will need to pick up much of the slack at a time when the appetite for further alliance enlargement has greatly diminished." The EU is on its own to thrive or die. The EU's problems are not NATO's to fix. The EU's problems are especially not the U.S.'s to finance and subsidize through NATO.
Thank you for sharing the visions you saw in your crystal ball, Mr. Michta. You are giving precious little evidence for your sweeping statements. How can you be so sure that developments "will ... undercut the ... vision of a wider and deeper union", for instance? Furthermore, I think you are attaching far too much importance to Brexit; it is merely a continuation of the thwarting tactics that the UK has been using in the EEC and EU since 1973. We can handle that. And I can understand that you are worried about additional complexity in US-EU relations; the US appears to be afraid of complexity, full stop, these days. You are totally ignoring the idealism and optimism that prevail among European citizens such as myself. We can do without your doomsaying, thank you.
The default state of the warring states of Europe is systemic adjustment; what we see now is what they have been doing for millennia, first time without war. The permanent state of war has allowed them to develop advanced weapons and transportation means; with greed and ruthlessness they made the world their playground. The war of 1914-1945 provoked the collapse of the British Empire, the global hegemon of 1914 and 1939. The Empire was supposed to find a way to keep world peace, be it just to keep extracting wealth from India. In 1945 Churchill was still dividing what was not his (Europe) on napkins with Stalin, while still having an Empire; in 2016 the Empire is long gone, and Boris Johnson was misleading Empire nostalgic seniors about NHS money, to get a Brexit victory nobody really wanted. It is very difficult to see a rebalancing; the UK is a major economy and was a major provider of EU integration funds. After absorbing close to half a trillion in such funds Poland doesn’t appear to be ready to pay it forward, similar funds needed to expand the EU to Ukraine and later Belarus. One question nobody seems to ask is why the EU, the largest and wealthiest entity in the Western world, with the best universities in the world was incapable to avoid the 2008 economic crisis. The EU is after all a closed economy for non-members and was supposed to find the means to insulate herself against the amateurish mistakes of a Clinton of Greenspan; do you really take economic advice from somebody who brought coffee to Ayn Rand? Do you really believe that the “Free to choose” series has anything to do with socioeconomics? The answer is simple: Europe has recently been dependent on the US for defense against Russia. They expect the US to fight to the last soldier and last dollar, and they paid a heavy price for this: the possibility to be truly independent. This dependency never allowed the EU to truly ascend to global leadership. The first step would have been to deal with Russia without US involvement, including by developing a common EU MAD nuclear triad. EU states should have also stayed in NATO, seen as a defensive alliance against the super hyper powers of India and China, which are developing similar triads at an accelerated pace. But now it is too late; the warring states of Europe have transferred their technology to the rest of the world and disunited will have to face the consequences. Never forget that the gun powder and rocketry were invented in China.
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