Europe’s big churn

On Wednesday evening, I sent a one-line message to an Italian friend. “Bro, what do you think of [Giorgio] Meloni’s win?” He replied, “Not good. She is an expression of old fascism cult. We are facing a severe crisis due to the cost of energy and its not a great moment. She hasn’t the competence that [Mario] Draghi demonstrated.”

Much has already been written about the rise of Meloni, her ‘fascist’ — she disagrees and calls herself conservative — approaches and the whys and wherefores of her win so I won’t get into that. She is also not the first ultra-right leader to bid for power and/or win it. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, is another one. Orban has had many run-ins with the European Union, the latest about EU sanctions against Russia.

France’s Marine le Pen and her party, National Front (since rechristened Rassemblement National) are the beacon for far-right parties in Europe. Le Pen bid for France’s presidency in 2012, 2017 and 2022. While the French voters denied her the prize, her popularity has been increasing. Last Wednesday, her party tabled a motion to set up a commission of inquiry to assess foreign influence on political parties, a counter move after her party was accused of being influenced by Russia.

Almost every European country has far-right presence now and while many such parties have so far failed to rise vertically in their respective states to form governments, they have horizontal linkages across states even as they espouse nationalisms, advocate protectionism, European (read, White) essentialism, and what some observers have called the “myth of the ethnic purity of ‘our people’.”

It is somewhat ironic that Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine has served as the catalyst for Europe’s big churn. This is not to argue that the war has somehow caused this. In fact, in some ways Putin’s aggression seemed, for a brief moment, to bring Europe together and push Euro-scepticism back. But as the war has dragged on, and will likely drag on further, well into 2023, the initial, surface unity has begun to show cracks. But let’s park that thought for a while.

Most analysts of European affairs believe that there are multiple causes — economic, social, cultural and political — for the rise of far-right parties and sentiment across Europe. Some trace it back to the 2008 economic crisis. Others believe the situation got a fillip by EU’s (and also national governments’) pursuit of ‘neoliberal deficit-control and austerity measures’. As one analyst has noted, “Such economic policies increase the gap between the privileged élite and the brunt of the population and thus offer the far-right opportunities to harness the dissatisfaction of those who have been left behind.”

Again, ironically, US-NATO wars in the Middle East have created a problem of refugees from the MENA region crossing over many borders into Eastern, Southern and even Western Europe. This development, NATO’s own creation, has also strengthened nationalist and racist far-right ideologies. Interestingly, however, ‘balanced immigration’ from the MENA region was encouraged by Europe because of stagnating European populations. A 2012 book, Migration from the Middle East and North Africa: Past Developments, Current Status and Future Potentials, argued, “It therefore seems clear that states in the EU-27 [the book came out before Croatia became an EU member in 2013] will need some immigration to balance the tremendous changes they will be confronted with in the coming decades, and immigration seems to be an appropriate instrument with which to break this ageing process.”

The edited volume also argued that Eastern Europe, which traditionally provided the labour force to the more affluent Western Europe, ‘will not be able to fill these gaps in the long run for three reasons: most of the states in this region are now EU member states, their economies have been catching up with Western Europe, in some cases with remarkable speed and, last but not least, their populations, like those in Western Europe, are decreasing due to falling birth rates and emigration.”

Alongside this, many European states ‘have been trying to increase the fertility of their populations by introducing measures supporting families and increasing the number of child-care facilities’. This, again, plays into the hands of far-right, which calls for banning immigration, stresses family values (and larger families) and argues against abortion.

This was/is the evolving landscape into which Putin has stepped in. By most estimates, his war is not going the way he and his planners had assessed. Ukraine has fought back and while it is being heavily armed and trained by the US and its NATO allies, one must credit the Ukrainian military and volunteers for putting up stiff resistance against an adversary which had (and still has) the asymmetric advantage.

The Ukrainians have retaken some captured territory in the north and northeast. Repeating that in the south will be likely more difficult. But the counteroffensive has forced Putin’s hand in putting more boots on the ground through partial mobilisation. That has sent thousands of military-age Russian males scurrying across the borders into Kazakhstan, Georgia and Armenia. It’s clear that at least those who are trying to avoid being enlisted are not particularly interested in dying for Putin.

Despite these difficulties and setbacks, Putin still has cards to play. He warned Europe of a very cold winter and he wasn’t bluffing. While the European governments are running around, trying to find alternate sources and supply of energy — oil, but more importantly, gas — energy prices have sharply risen.

A recent article in Foreign Policy titled Putin’s Energy War Is Crushing Europe, says “Factories, businesses, and families across Europe are battling for survival as Russia’s chokehold on the continent’s natural gas supply sends prices to astronomical heights, unleashing a brutal economic storm that has tested European solidarity about Russia’s war in Ukraine and fuelled fears of an impending recession.”

Testing solidarity is the key point here. Putin is well aware of it and is banking on it. “Public frustration is already boiling over in the United Kingdom, Moldova, Germany, Austria, and Italy, as protests erupt over skyrocketing energy costs and fuel concerns of wider unrest. In Prague, as many as 70,000 people poured into the streets in early September in a ‘Czech Republic First’ demonstration against rising energy prices as well as to demand greater government action.”

Energy companies in Germany are ‘pushed to near-bankruptcy’ and the government might have to nationalise them to save them from going under. The catalytic impact of the war, which I noted above, is important because it is during adversity that existing fault-lines begin to get deepen.

This is also the ideal scenario, the big churn, in which far-right parties can and will play and push their agenda. The significance of Putin’s war lies in bringing to the fore the cracks within the economic and socio-political make-up of European societies. And, as Emile Simpson argued in War From the Ground Up, wars are often not ‘single units’. The terms World War I or II give us a sense that they were single units; they weren’t. They contained many wars. As Hew Strachan argued in Strategy and the Limitation of War, “Each actor fought its own ‘war’ for its own ends.”

This war is no exception. Russia has its own objectives; Ukraine’s of course run counter to Russia’s. US, NATO, EU have certain convergence of interests, but there are also divergences within Europe on how far to push Russia and, extrapolating from there, how much to support Ukraine. Into this mix come nationalist governments, dealing with recession, high energy prices, declining relative incomes and domestic unrest. In other words, the war is impacting, affecting and speaking to multiple audiences and is being interpreted by multiple actors within states and societies and across Europe.

While West Asia and the MENA region remain embroiled in wars started by the US, the fires have come to Europe now. It will be interesting to see how long Europe’s experiment with the Kantian ‘perpetual peace’ survive the forces this war is likely to unleash in a Europe already drifting towards ethno-national essentialism.

The writer is interested in foreign and security policies