By SHERI BERMAN
The collapse of the Soviet Empire left Europe more united than ever before. Most of its countries shared a political (democratic) and economic (capitalist) system; Germany and Russia — the great powers that had caused so much instability in the past — were no longer threats, and the European Union was on the verge of incorporating much of Eastern Europe and creating a single currency. At the end of the 20th century, the view that a “united Europe” was on its way to becoming “the next global superpower,” and the West was at the dawn of a new golden era, was widespread.
Could history prove itself any more unpredictable? Today, there are growing fears that Europe and the West have entered a period of terminal decline. How did we get from there to here? How did the unified, peaceful Europe of the late 20th century turn into the fractured, discordant continent of the early 21st?
William Drozdiak, a former editor and chief European correspondent for The Washington Post, has written a book examining the current crisis from the vantage point of various European capitals — providing a colorful narrative of how it is being experienced differently in each place.
From Berlin, the international aspects of the crisis appear front and center. Drozdiak finds in Germany a reluctant hegemon, unsure how to repair the postwar liberal international order now so disdained by the Trump administration. In Riga, Drozdiak discovers Europe’s increasingly precarious security situation. Russia threatens countries on Europe’s periphery and the conflicts in Syria, Libya and elsewhere are spilling over into its borders. Whether Europe can protect itself — again particularly with the Trump administration’s ambivalence about NATO — is an open question.
In London and Warsaw, the regional dimension of the crisis looms large. Although reflecting particularly British worries, the political and societal factors that led to Brexit revealed European-wide concerns. Frustration with the European Union’s technocratic nature, its “democratic deficit,” its ineptitude in dealing with the financial crisis and the loss of national sovereignty are all sentiments that exist in other countries as well. And the E.U.’s inability to check creeping authoritarianism in Poland and Hungary raises questions about whether it can fulfill its original and most basic function: promoting and protecting democracy.
From Paris to Copenhagen, Rome and Athens, “Fractured Continent” provides sketches of Europe’s many domestic problems. Drozdiak agrees with the portrayal of France as a “stalled society,” stymied by divisions between immigrants and “natives,” globalization’s winners and losers, urban and rural areas, and the young and old — not to mention societal-wide disgust with traditional elites and parties. These conditions have fed the rise of left- and right-wing populism. Denmark, meanwhile, is a perfect example of a country trying to protect its national identity and welfare state while confronted with the poor, uneducated and often culturally distinct refugees pouring across its borders. And in Rome and Athens the brutal social and political fallout of the financial crisis is painfully obvious: Alongside rising unemployment, inequality and social suffering, democracy itself has been undermined. Italy’s Mario Monti was neither elected nor supported by traditional political parties when he became prime minister and Greece’s Tspiras government was forced by its European neighbors to enact policies rejected by its own citizens.
It is easy to forget how difficult democracy, prosperity and social stability are to sustain. During the postwar period the achievement of all three in Western Europe depended on social democratic, welfare-state capitalism at the domestic level, European integration at the regional level, and a liberal economic and American-led security order at the international level. Today all are crumbling. “Fractured Continent” doesn’t tell us whether these arrangements can be revivified and what Europe’s fate will be if they aren’t, but it does remind us that the challenges faced by Europe and the West right now are seriously daunting.
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