EUROPEAN UNION

Europe's credibility is at stake

The EU is in crisis and under fire over its handling of Greece, its treatment of refugees and its neglect of fundamental values. As Jan-Werner Müller writes, its elites should take heart and a lesson from its citizens.

Our word "crisis" derives from the ancient krinô, which for the Greeks meant "to separate" or also "to decide" or "to judge." As the American scholar Janet Roitman has pointed out, the term was used initially in law, theology, and medicine - but the medical usage eventually became dominant; "crisis" was the moment when a patient's fate was decided: the sick person either got well or died.

The EU's recent crises have not been like this: the euro crisis has now lasted for more than half a decade; what is today commonly called "the migration crisis" has in effect been going on for years; and, less obviously, a crisis of liberal democracy in some of the Union's member states - most notably Hungary, where a right-wing government has attacked the rule of law and civil society - has been festering for five years. But while "crisis" in Europe has not come down to a decisive moment, it does lead us back to the other, older meaning of crisis: a judgment, in this case a severe judgment of the EU's rapidly diminishing credibility. When its leaders preach - both inside Europe and to the rest of the world - values of solidarity and tolerance, audiences are now bound to think of images such as Hungary's barbed-wire fence with Serbia.

Loss of credibility

Less obviously, the EU is losing credibility in advocating its particular method of addressing political challenges through long, drawn-out processes that are supposed to result in compromise or even consensus. The very approach that made European integration work in the past - politics as negotiation, often over years and always avoiding crises that could be resolved only through all-or-nothing decisions - now adds to the EU's shame: the longer various crises drag on, the more there's a sense that Europe is a place where certain things once deemed unthinkable - such as violating the dignity of refugees, hateful nationalist rhetoric (whether about Greeks or about Germans), or member state governments in flagrant violation of the Union's professed "fundamental values" - are effectively condoned.

Jan-Werner Müller

Of course, not all of Europe's various crises are of the same nature - and it would be foolish to pretend that the EU had not gone through various critical periods before. We should distinguish crises of competence - essentially failures of governance - and crises of values or, put more bluntly, political morality. The particular dynamics of the euro crisis is that the former have eventually led to the latter: what initially was just a badly designed currency union came to encourage the very immoral nationalism - both at elite and popular level - which the EU had been founded to prevent. With the so-called migrant crisis and the crisis of democracy in Hungary, it's the other way around: what at the beginning was a flagrant violation of the EU's professed fundamental values - human rights and democracy - came to have European-wide effects that give the impression that the Union's overall policies, such as the Dublin regulation on refugees - are simply dysfunctional.

Dysfunctional

The crises of competence and the crisis of morality eventually merge into a crisis of credibility which suggests that the EU simply cannot live up to its own promises. Up until the euro crisis, champions of the EU presented the Union as the most important institutional innovation in politics since the creation of the democratic welfare state. They never failed to emphasize its great "normative power" - its sheer attractiveness based on peace as well as prosperity achieved through the common market and, less obviously, a coherent supranational legal order. The EU was presented as a global model; it exercised a pull on countries in its vicinity to transform themselves, or in fact try to join the club.

Yet recent years have hardly been good ones for EU power, whether normative or not. Europe was more or less absent from the Arab Spring (it has been an all-too-convenient excuse to say that memories of colonialism prevented a more extensive engagement by the Union); it has been unable to formulate a strategy for how to deal with Ukraine (the Union does not want to leave the country out in the cold, but is also not willing to map out a path for taking it in); and Brussels has been unable to defuse the tensions created by the euro crisis; instead, a narrative has taken shape which pits nation against nation: Germans against Greeks, instead of different groups across different nations, such as banks and trade unions, pursuing conflicting interests.

Learning from ordinary Europeans

Thus the crises of the past few years really have been existential in a way previous crises - and conflicts - about economic interests or national glory (just think of de Gaulle's attempts to shape what was then the European Community to his own liking) have not been. They have sown doubts about the innermost political logic of the EU according to which a drawn-out process is always better than anything quick and decisive; they have shown that the idea of letting institutions, as opposed to individuals, do the political work will yield reasonable compromise has not really worked.

Is there anything positive about the crises of the last years? One should not be tempted by the cliché that every crisis is an opportunity - for European elites certainly have not shown any kind of courage in leading their own peoples in a direction that would conform more clearly to Europe's declared "fundamental values." If anything, it is ordinary Europeans - all those who resisted the nationalist passions potentially provoked by the euro crisis or the migration crisis - who have demonstrated that Europe on the ground is actually more credible than the official EU. European elites could take heart - and a lesson in political morality - from the crowds welcoming refugees in Munich and Vienna.

Jan-Werner Müller is a Professor of Politics at Princeton University. His recent publications include "Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe."