EU is reeling from Merkel’s unwitting damage
rejected a proposed constitution for Europe. Undeterred, European leaders repackaged the constitution in the form of the Lisbon Treaty. In 2008, Irish voters rejected the treaty. Still undeterred, European leaders finagled a revote. All of this stirred popular resentments.
Then came the debt crunch. And the refugee crisis. And the terrorist massacre at the Bataclan theater. And Brexit.
Now Europe’s crisis has finally reached Germany, even as the objective state of affairs remains remarkably placid. Growth is sluggish, but unemployment is at a record low. Refugees are no longer arriving in droves, and the ones who are here are finding jobs. Crime is down steeply.
But Germany has been infected with the temper of the times. The proximate cause is a bitter dispute over asylum laws between Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union party and Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union, which is the CSU’s more-centrist sister party outside Bavaria.
That dispute was at least temporarily resolved this week when Merkel agreed to establish “transit centers” along Germany’s borders for secondary migrants — those who have received asylum elsewhere in the EU but are seeking to enter Germany. That will most likely require setting up border controls and checkpoints, meaning an end to the borderless continent that is the most visible expression of European unity.
The deeper cause of the crisis, however, is that the CSU, which has dominated Bavarian politics for decades, is threatened by the growing popularity of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, the bigoted nativist party that is now the country’s third largest.
That's mostly because Merkel created the conditions that gave the enemies of the European ideal their opening. She refused to cap the number of asylumseekers Germany would take and then pleaded with other European countries to take them. That almost certainly gave Brexiters the political imagery they needed to carry the vote a year later. The AfD was a minor Euroskeptic party before the refugee crisis gave it a rallying cry. The xenophobes of Austria’s Freedom Party, Italy’s Northern League and Sweden’s Democrats have all profited politically from Merkel’s decision.
Knowing how to set broad but clear limits is one of the essentials of conservative governance. Merkel’s failure is that she ceased to be conservative.
There is much that is admirable about the chancellor, but as things now stand she is likelier to be remembered as the EU’s unwitting destroyer. The longer she’s in office, the more the forces of reaction will gain strength.
There is still time for the EU to be saved. Europe needs a real security policy, backed by credible military power and less dependence on Russian energy. It needs to regulate migration strictly outside its borders so that it can remain open within them. It needs robust economic growth and much-lower rates of unemployment, not paeans to work-life balance. And it needs institutions that aren’t mere regulatory busybodies punishing member states for being economically competitive.
What’s the alternative? A passage from Norman Davies’ magisterial history of Europe suggests the darker possibilities:
“Interwar politics were dominated by the recurrent spectacle of democracies falling prey to dictatorship.” He continued: “It cannot be attributed to any simple cause, save the inability of Western Powers to defend the regimes which they had inspired. The dictators came in all shapes and sizes — communists, fascists, radicals and reactionaries, left-wing authoritarians, right-wing militarists, monarchs, anti-monarchists, even a cleric like Father Tiso in Slovakia. The only thing they shared was the conviction that Western democracy was not for them.”
The stakes are too high for a muddler like Merkel to stick around.