Europe has been a warzone for centuries. Amongst other delights apart from two world wars, there’s been the Franco-Prussian war, Thirty Years War, the Scottish Norwegian War, The Polish Teutonic War, the Hundred Years War, the English and Byzantine Civil Wars and of course the Napoleonic Wars and the regular spats between the English and the French. Europe has been a continent that has had war as an almost constant backdrop.
The industrialised carnage of World War One shocked people as a whole and shocked the intellectual classes. The post WWI period was one where once fringe 19th century ideas about pacifism and pan-europeanism gained popularity because of the damage that total industrial war had caused. Something different was required some said but what happened was Europe got more of the same, as in war, between 1939 and 1945.
Post WWII some European nations thought that pooling sovereignty was the way to go and formed into the bloc that would eventually become the European Union, as if this was the way to defeat aggressive nationalism and its problems of war. All Europe could be a mutual aid society was the idea with all nations in the EU helping one another.
The trouble is it hasn’t really worked out like that and the Chinese Covid19 virus emergency has shown just how badly it has failed. The EU has done nothing to help France, Spain or Italy and in the case of Italy has basically washed their hands of what was once an integral member of the bloc.
A multinational entity has failed to support individual nations to deal with this problem. Brussels has become the People’s Front of Judea of the European continent complete with its own useless ‘Reg’ in the form of the European Commission and Parliament passing meaningless resolutions and passing even more meaningless bits of paper to each other, but doing sod all on the ground. It is being left to the individual nation states to sort out the problems that Chinese Covid19 is causing.
The EU was in a bad state when Britain left it. No longer does it have the UK to squeeze for cash or blame for its own problems. Covid may be finishing the EU off. We could be seeing the end of the great Europroject as nation states, those smaller more agile and responsive units, do the jobs that the EU cannot or will not do.
There’s a brilliant article on the Gatestone Institute website that takes a similar view to mine that the Chinese Coronavirus problem is showing up the weakness of the EU as an institution. In this article the author, Soeren Kern, outlines how Europe’s nations have shut their borders, seized medical goods for their own use even when those goods were destined for other EU nations and have displayed, as has the EU in Brussels itself, a distinct lack of solidarity.
Soeren Kern said:
As the coronavirus pandemic rages through Europe — where more than 250,000 people have now been diagnosed with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and 15,000 have died — the foundational pillars of the European Union are crumbling one by one.
Faced with an existential threat, EU member states, far from joining together to confront the pandemic as a unified bloc, instinctively are returning to pursuing the national interest. After years of criticizing U.S. President Donald J. Trump for pushing an “America First” policy, European leaders are reverting to the very nationalism they have publicly claimed to despise.
Ever since the threat posed by coronavirus came into focus, Europeans have displayed precious little of the high-minded multilateral solidarity that for decades has been sold to the rest of the world as a bedrock of European unity. The EU’s unique brand of soft power, said to be a model for a post-national world order, has been shown to be an empty fiction.
In recent weeks, EU member states have closed their borders, banned exports of critical supplies and withheld humanitarian aid. The European Central Bank, the guarantor of the European single currency, has treated with unparalleled disdain the eurozone’s third-largest economy, Italy, in its singular hour of need. The member states worst affected by the pandemic — Italy and Spain — have been left by the other member states to fend for themselves.
I really can’t see the EU surviving in its present form once Covid19 is beaten. The response by Brussels to this emergency and the reversion to naked nationalism by individual countries is going to leave a lot of bad blood in its wake. That, and the coming financial problems that are going to hit the EU once the UK ceases to pay into the club, could end up pulling the bloc to pieces. I hope what comes out of the destruction of the EU is not a return to Europe’s history of wars, but I doubt that we will see as much enthusiasm in the future for the sort of sovereignty sharing that has been so much in fashion in Europe in past decades.
