Transatlantic relations are at a tipping point following the collapse of European trust in the United States’s commitment to shared interests and values. The resulting tensions are deep-seated, arising from forces at play before Donald Trump’s two presidencies, and they will last beyond him, despite the midterm defeats. There is no going back to what was there before.
The transition under way demands vision, ambition and risk from leaders to redefine the European Union’s role in world affairs. This point was made in a recent panel on transatlantic relations organised by UCD’s Clinton Institute at the Royal Irish Academy. The preferred pathway discussed is through a reconfigured liberal internationalism. It would draw on links with Canada, Norway and Iceland, a new relationship with the UK, a fast-track enlargement process for Ukraine and new relations with international players such as Japan and Asean states. Not mentioned was the need for stronger EU-Africa links.
Can the EU be a superpower like the US or China? If not, how can its collective power be mobilised to optimise its strengths? Do its interests in economic interdependence and security gravitate it back towards some sort of recalibrated and more tightly bordered “West”, representing 12 per cent of the world’s people? Tiny economic elites continue to control most of the Earth’s resources and are chiefly responsible for climate breakdown, as Oxfam reports. Or can the West’s wealth and civic resources be opened up much more to the 88 per cent majority of the world’s states and people demanding more equal shares of its goods? Is that not more in keeping with EU values?
European leaders are ill-equipped to provide the necessary vision and ambition – not to mention risk – because they face potentially big political transitions of their own, notably in forthcoming Spanish, French, German and Italian elections. If these elections bring far-right parties to power they would disrupt and disable European integration – and/or use its transnational mechanisms to pursue quite different objectives much more in line with Trump’s and Putin’s. Western leaders are deeply divided on the Russia-Ukraine war’s endgame between those who advocate dealing with Putin’s regime and Europeans who want to negotiate with or defeat it.
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A particularly serious challenge faces the centre-right and centre-left parties that drove European integration over the last 40 years, coinciding with their common acceptance of the market-driven policies behind globalisation. The consequent hollowing-out of democratic politics followed, as parties walked away from citizens towards alternating – but not alternative – state management of neoliberal policies. They did not tackle the resulting social inequalities which closed off social mobility for the younger generations who are now protesting worldwide against that exclusion.
Miriam González-Durántez, founder of a new Spanish centrist party, says these parties “have developed the habit of watching problems rather than dealing with them”. While “moderates have retreated into myriad bubbles ... the extremes turn up. They join parties. They fill halls. They campaign. They recruit. They post. They protest. They get organised. And crucially they take a lot of money from donors far and wide. They have established networks of foundations, think tanks, wealthy individuals and new networks of communication channels to ensure their political views are heard.” She concludes that the “extremists are using democracy with gusto to promote their views, while the moderates have left them to it.”
She targets far-right internationalism and wants to see the centrists regroup and compete politically – something that is easier said than done. Macronism in France is departing office in a parlous state organisationally, having failed to create the national and transnational movement he promised to other Europeans in 2017. Social democrats are similarly squeezed for vision and ambition.
Meanwhile democratic internationalism is being rediscovered and reinvented on the left and centre by younger liberals in authoritarian settings, as this new generation of activists experiments with new forms and methods. They have their own, mainly online, internationalism – from Serbia through Hungary, to France, Germany, Albania, Egypt, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco and Nepal, as former UK prime minister Gordon Brown points out in a United Nations report. “Liberal democracy itself is now on trial,” he concludes. A new book from another prominent figure on Britain’s social democratic left, Claire Ainsley, recognises this problem in its title, Control: How We Lost It and How to Take it Back.
Control is key – from the top down, the bottom up and increasingly through new direct democratic formats.
