Europe set to drown in river of radical right

The transnational character of the EU is often supposed to be behind Europeans’ dislike of it. Yet those who resist the current bloc do not do so because it is too cosmopolitan. Very simply, and not unreasonably, they resist it because it fails to represe

Europe is awash with worry. Ahead of parliamentary elections widely expected to deliver gains to the hard right, European leaders can barely conceal their anxiety. In a speech in late April, President Emmanuel Macron of France captured the prevailing mood. After eloquently warning of threats to the continent, he pronounced the need for a newly powerful Europe, a “Europe puissance.”

As I watched the speech, I was reminded of Niccolo Machiavelli’s comments in the opening pages of “The Prince,” the 16th-century philosopher’s seminal treatise on political power. In a dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of the Florentine Republic, Machiavelli suggested that politics is in many ways like art. Just as landscape painters imaginatively place themselves in the plains to examine the mountains and on top of mountains to study the plains, so too should rulers inhabit their domains. “To know the nature of the people well, one must be a prince,” Machiavelli wrote, “and to know the nature of princes well, one must be of the people.”

Here was a politician grappling with the first part of Machiavelli’s sentence, an officeholder trying to comprehend the lay of the land. What is power in contemporary Europe, and how should it be exercised by the European Union? Macron answered in princely fashion, showing awareness of both the finite nature of every political community — Europe is “mortal,” he said — and its cyclical vulnerability to crisis. He concluded with a passionate defense of European “civilization” and urged the creation of a paradigm to revive it.

Yet for all his aspirations, Macron neglected the second half of Machiavelli’s sentence: that people also form views on their rulers, which rulers ignore at their peril. Macron brushed aside the many Europeans who feel the bloc is aloof and inaccessible, describing their disenchantment as a result of “false arguments.” The dismissal was no aberration. For decades, the leaders of the European Union have overlooked the people in the plains, shutting out the continent’s citizens from any meaningful political participation. This exclusion has changed the contours of the European landscape, paving the way for the radical right.

When Machiavelli reflected on the crises of his time — among them conflicts between major European powers, discontent with public officials and the collapsing legitimacy of the Catholic Church — he turned to the Roman Republic for inspiration. When there is skepticism about values, he wrote, history is our only remaining guide. The secret to Roman freedom, he explained in the “Discourses on Livy,” was neither its good fortune nor its military might. Instead, it lay in the Romans’ ability to mediate the conflict between wealthy elites and the vast majority of people — or as he put it, “i grandi” (the great) and “il popolo” (the people).

While the inherent tendency of the great, Machiavelli argued, is to accumulate wealth and power to rule the rest, the inherent desire of the people is to avoid being at the elites’ mercy. The clash between the groups generally pulled polities in opposite directions. Yet the Roman Republic had institutions, like the tribunate of the plebs, that sought to empower the people and contain the elites. Only by channelling rather than suppressing this conflict, Machiavelli said, could civic freedom be preserved.

Europe has not heeded his advice. For all its democratic rhetoric, the European Union is closer to an oligarchic institution. Overseen by an unelected body of technocrats in the European Commission, the bloc allows for no popular consultation on policy, let alone participation. Its fiscal rules, which impose strict limits on the budgets of member states, offer protection for the rich while imposing austerity on the poor. From top to bottom, Europe is dominated by the interests of the wealthy few, who restrict the freedom of the many.

Its predicament, of course, is not unique. Businesses, financial institutions, credit rating agencies and powerful interest groups call the shots everywhere, severely constraining the power of politicians. The European Union is far from the worst offender. Still, in nation-states, the semblance of democratic participation can be sustained through allegiance to a shared constitution. In the European Union, whose founding myth is the free market, the case is much harder to make.

The transnational character of the bloc is often supposed to be behind Europeans’ dislike of it. Yet those who resist the current European Union do not do so because it is too cosmopolitan. Very simply, and not unreasonably, they resist it because it fails to represent them. The Parliament for which Europeans will be voting next month, to take one glaring example of the bloc’s lack of democracy, has little legislative power of its own: It tends to merely rubber-stamp decisions made by the commission. It is this representative gap that is filled by the radical right, turning the problem into simple binaries — either you or them, the state or Europe,

the white worker or the migrant.

It is perhaps surprising that the bloc’s democratic deficit has become a rallying cry for the radical right, but it explains much of its success. A recent poll, for example, showed that Europe’s citizens are much more concerned about poverty, jobs, living standards and climate change than they are about migration. This suggests that the appeal of the radical right lies less in its obsessive hostility to migrants than in its criticism of the bloc’s failures to address people’s everyday concerns. European politicians could seek to remedy that by changing institutions to improve citizens’ bargaining power and make them feel heard. Instead, they prefer to give stern lectures. The radical right may be on the rise in Europe, but it does not have to be this way. Politics is always at the mercy of fortune. Yet fortune, as Machiavelli emphasized in “The Prince,” is like a river whose overflow can be prevented by building dikes and dams. If European politicians are increasingly trapped in emergency management, it’s because they have failed in the first task of politics worthy of the name: to diagnose the causes of crisis, to explain who is represented and who is excluded and to defend those whose freedom is endangered.

The politics of the people presented by the radical right may be narrowly ethnocentric, but it is the only one on offer that speaks directly to people’s disillusionment. Our modern princes may choose to look away. Yet as long as the radical right continues to dominate the terms of mainstream debate, while its historical roots are discreetly ignored, no appeal to European values will stop the river in which we’re all about to drown.

Lea Ypi is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics and the author of “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History” The New York Times