The 18th of December is a date that bears no personal significance whatsoever. I don’t even think I know anybody born on that date but if any among you do have a birthday then, let me know so I can send you best wishes.
Yet this date has been stuck in my mind for a couple of months now and it surfaces every time I start thinking about Europe’s current situation, which unfortunately I do a lot, the way I bite my nails. Bad habits, we all have them.
It’s clear that the image of a neat, ordered, happy Europe is unravelling and the unravelling seems to be accelerating. I didn’t expect protests against energy bills to begin before October, for example. And I certainly didn’t expect the EU to start considering — wait for it — price caps for Russian oil just two months before an embargo on that same Russian oil comes into effect in that same EU.
Italians are voting this weekend and it appears the dominant expectation is for a far-right party to win. I believe this expectation is correct because of the pendulum effect, which I take every opportunity to mention.
The pendulum effect I’m seeing in Europe right now is not so much along the lines of left and right, however, although politicians are quick to brand dissenters with their policies as far-right extremists because it’s such a good scare for would-be-dissenters.
The pendulum effect is along the lines of eurocentrism and euroscepticism. I am an unabashed sceptic but I do try to not treat my hopes and wishes as facts and I do hope it shows. I would be happy to celebrate any EU proposal or decision that does not beg for the attachment of “hare-brained” in front of it, just show me some. And it seems that scepticism is spreading.
This week, the IEA’s Fatih Birol issued a stark warning and this time it’s not something I will mock. It’s an important warning and I completely agree with Birol it needed to be made.
The warning: the European Union risks dissolving into a “Wild West scenario” as countries scramble for energy. “The implications will be very bad for energy, very bad for the economy, but extremely bad politically,” Birol said, as quoted by the FT. “If Europe fails this test in energy, it can go beyond energy implications.”
Though I won’t mock Birol this time I will dare ask: what exactly took you so long? There’s been talk of an EU breakdown for months now, since February, really. Apparently, some of us can see further than others but for some reason it’s the latter who are making the decisions for the former instead of the other way round and I do not claim to belong to the former.
This is where 18th of December comes in. I strongly believe that by that date the future of the European Union will become clear, one way or another. As Birol accurately notes, there are only two ways the crisis could go: solidarity or each country for itself. There is no third option, really.
Now, I have tried to see signs of solidarity outweighing national interests but all I seem to see are people protesting their national governments’ decisions that have caused their utility bills to balloon.
Oh, yes, there have been reports of Dutch people learning to take five-minute showers, which I would count towards solidarity, but I wonder what those same people would say if they are asked to turn off their heating for certain periods of time every day.
Perhaps some would do just that but not all. Cold is misery and we don’t like being miserable for someone else’s good especially when that someone else is the government whose policies have made energy conservation necessary.
A lot could happen by the 18th of December. A lot will happen. More protests. A general strike in Belgium. Lower temperatures as we move from autumn to winter. More scrambling for LNG, coal, and oil. More energy minister discussions in Brussels as the details are hammered out of how every member state will use the EC-proposed revenue caps and windfall profits to help struggling households and businesses.
All this, I believe, will pull down the veneer of solidarity because it was never very thick to begin with. I have yet to meet someone from a European country who feels more European than they feel Italian, Romanian, Polish, [fill-in-nationality]. I’m not saying there are no such people but I would argue that they are a minority.
The tougher life becomes, the higher the prices of everything go, the less European we would all be feeling. As someone said recently, solidarity is easy in good times. I’d say it can be strong in bad times as well, if it has a sound basis. The basis underneath European solidarity has been eroded by years of policies that for all their stated fairness for all have been along the lines of Orwell’s notorious words about all being equal but some being more equal than others.
I would even argue that the basis for European solidarity was never very strong. The European Union could have never been a federation of the U.S. kind, for instance, or Australia. And that’s because the EU is not one nation and it will never be.
It is 27 nations and I can’t begin to tell you how different these are. You already know it, I’m sure. And the call to solidarity is the only ace in the EU administration’s hand. This should scare them. it should scare them a lot because nationalism is returning.
Remember the pendulum? The perfect illustration of Newton’s third law. EU authorities have been pushing the pendulum in the solidarity direction for far too long for comfort and it was already beginning to return before the crisis hit. The return will only accelerate as we enter a full-blown cost-of-living crisis. And they will wonder what hit them.
What will hit them, and by “them” I mean politicians, is reality. There’s not a lot I remember from middle-school history but I do remember what makes a nation and it’s not some set of abstract shared values. It’s shared culture, history, language, and religion.
If you look at the history of Europe over the past 500 years, that would be enough to see why the EU could never become one nation. Perhaps it could over the course of centuries because that’s how cultures and nations evolve. But the European idea demanded that a push is made to treat 27 different nations as diverse as they come as one nation and that push was made. Now it is backfiring right into our faces.
“Adoption of the cap would also require member states to put national interests aside in favor of European solidarity,” Bloomberg wrote in a story about the latest oil price caps on the discussion table in Brussels.
Good luck with that I’d say but the truth is that neither path is very bright. Breakdown or a slow agony — both will be destructive developments. Too bad there is no third path. The silver lining: we just might learn something from this ordeal and avoid making the same mistakes again. Who cares if history teaches us this never happens?
Its an interesting view on left and right. It seems dead. Today is 0 or 1 , a binary lack of critical thought - believe or blaspheme. Context and background facts are missing from public assertions by politicians and even the head of the UN comes out with some really silly comments. Journalists have largely become activists which is resulting in truth going behind paywalls? How does the EU navigate the crisis in a sea of bullshit.
Excellent article.