Germany’s soft imperialism ushered in a populist revolt

The first modern German empire was announced by Otto von Bismarck at Versailles in 1871; it died on the Western Front in 1918. The second German empire was forged in a swift march of annexations and blitzkriegs; it lasted seven terrible years, from the Anschluss to the bunker, and died with Hitler and his cult.

The third German empire is a different animal altogether. Repudiating both militarism and racist mysticism, it has been built slowly and painstakingly across three generations, in cooperation with other powers, using a mix of democratic and bureaucratic means. Today Germany bestrides its Continent, but German power is wielded softly, indirectly, implicitly.

But still the system is effectively imperial in many ways, with power brokers in Berlin and Brussels wielding not-exactly-democratic authority over a polyglot, multiethnic, multireligious sprawl of semi-sovereign nationstates. And thinking about the European Union this way, as a Germanic empire as well as a liberal-cosmopolitan project, is a helpful way of understanding how it might ultimately fall.

The possibility of such a fall has been haunting the Continent since the Great Recession, as the sense of crisis, the threat of dissolution, has spread from the Balkan periphery to an increasingly nationalist Eastern Europe and a Brexit-chasing Britain. Now with the near-takeover of Italy’s government by a populist coalition, it has reached the original European Union project’s core.

As this crisis has developed and encompassed grievances beyond the economic — immigration and national identity above all — it has been covered more and more as a clash between liberalism and illiberalism, between freedom and authoritarianism. In the wave of liberalism-in-peril books written since Donald Trump’s election, the European and American experiences tend to get folded together into a story of democratic values threatened by ethnic chauvinism and strongmen.

But if the test of Europe’s unity feels like a test for liberal democracy, it’s a mistake to see it only in those terms. It is also a struggle of nations against empire, of the Continent’s smaller countries against German mastery and Northern European interests, in which populist parties are being elected to resist policies the center sought to impose upon the periphery without a vote. And the liberal aspect of the European system wouldn’t be under such strain if the imperial aspect hadn’t been exploited unwisely by leaders in the empire’s German core.

This disastrous imperial dynamic was first manifest in the fiscal policy imposed on Southern Europe in the wake of the Great Recession — a policy that made more sense for Germany’s economy than for Italy’s or Spain’s or Greece’s.

Then the same dynamic repeated itself on immigration, when Angela Merkel took it upon herself to make migration policy for the Continent, in atonement for Germany’s racist past and in the hopes of revitalizing its aging society. The resistance from other Europeans to her open door to refugees and migrants, the refusal to let the German chancellor and her admirers determine immigration policy, is one reason among many that populists won the Brexit referendum and find themselves on the cusp of power in Italy — and it is the major reason that populist parties rule today in Budapest and Warsaw.