Pandemonium: Saving Europe by Luuk van Middelaar

Author:Luuk van Middelaar [Middelaar, Luuk van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788214230
Google: u60ozgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1788214234
Barnesnoble: 1788214234
Goodreads: 60277320
Publisher: Agenda Publishing Ltd
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

DISBURSEMENT UPROAR (10 DECEMBER 2020–10 MAY 2021)

In Year One of the Pandemic, the final political fight within the EU was over the rule of law. During the summit in the summer, Budapest and Warsaw had refused to conform to the constitutional conditions laid down for the spending of money from the coronavirus recovery fund. In accordance with the customs of rules-politics, the government leaders passed the hot potato on to other EU institutions (such as the Court), as they have been doing ever since Viktor Orbán returned to power in 2010 – but this time in vain.

In the dynamics of the pandemic, the highest democratic values became the focus of debate for the first time. The European Parliament, which traditionally throws itself into the breach on this subject, felt supported by the public. Northern European voters who in the spring of 2020 hesitated to help the ravaged South were told, “Europe is not just about money, it is also about values”. The discovery of Europe’s geopolitical isolation, caught between the Chinese-American geomedical politics of divide and rule, made it all the more urgent to know and articulate what binds Europeans together, how its narrative goes about the uniqueness and unity of the 27. Thus the debate about the rule of law and democracy became ideologically loaded, almost a clash of non-negotiable values, such that any compromise meant betrayal.

Yet the leaders did reach a compromise in December 2020. The EU Court of Justice was given a role in assessing compliance with the rule of law, although it will probably not reach a definitive verdict on a case until 2023. That meant everyone could go home without losing face: the prime ministers of Hungary and Poland, with their threats of a veto, because they have won time and their countries will not be excluded from the coronavirus fund; the other leaders because the new instrument remains in place (the main concern of Western Europe) and the coronavirus recovery fund can make a start (the priority of the South). The urgent need to provide funds to those worst affected overrides the desire to curb autocratic tendencies within the Union immediately.

The conflict reveals a tension between Europe’s democratic values and its geographic ambition, between faith in liberal democracy along nineteenth-century lines, as anchored in the Treaty, and an ambition realized step by step since 1989 to encompass the whole of the continent. The pandemic, the great revealer, makes it hard to paper over this conflict. Europe’s founding dilemma looks oddly like that of the young United States between the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Civil War of 1861–65, which put an end to slavery in the southern states. As in the US, it may take two or three generations for the tension between founding principles and continental unity to be resolved (all the more so because the EU will not go to war, as President Lincoln did, to bring value-violating states into line).

This tension between fundamental democratic values and geopolitical aspirations is stronger in Germany than in any other member state.

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