Natalie Nougayrède
So, as it turns out, the far right did not swamp Sweden in Sunday’s election. Beware doom-laden forecasts about Europe: sometimes they bear less relation to reality than to the ideology of those who seek to undermine the European project, have deep qualms about it, or just think it’s going to the dogs. Loud, scary headlines make for more clicks. Polarised discourses breed oversimplification. I’m not sure I’ve always avoided it. But something else is at work in the way Europe is increasingly framed and distorted: an insidious Brexit-Trump lens is too readily slapped on to the old continent. The English-language international media play a big role in this. Taken together, they produce a “reading” of Europe in which the EU is headed for the scrapheap of history, sliding irrevocably towards a political crash in much the same way the UK and US did in 2016: a brutal, overnight departure from much of what pre-existed, and was up until then deemed secure. What’s happened to us is coming your way.
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This Anglosphere take on Europe comes loaded with confirmation bias, if not schadenfreude. It flourishes in digital information feedback loops. Crisscrossing the Atlantic and the Channel, it spills out of both “alt-right” and “alt-left” milieux, which can easily converge in their hostility to the European project, if for different reasons. Even among moderates it exists, cloaked in the thick layers of anxiety and confusion surrounding the Brexitnegotiations, with even stalwart remainers starting to look for continental foes out to harm the UK, as a result of domestic populist pressures.
In the familiar doom-and-gloom script, the far right overruns us all. Racist rioting in the eastern German city of Chemnitz is just the start: street violence will soon become the new normal (no matter that a week later, 60,000 people turned up at an antiracist concert there). Sweden’s election is just another turn of the fascist wheel (never mind that the far-right Sweden Democrats made only third place and the ruling Social Democrats, though weakened, led at the ballot box).
Election after election, the continent falls prey to the worst of the worst. Demagogues thrive. Authoritarianism spreads, Viktor Orbán and Matteo Salvini its flag-bearers. The air thickens with 1930s-style hate, fear and democratic collapse. The EU falls apart.
But what if the premises of this European disaster movie weren’t accurate, or even remotely likely? What if we were busy scaring ourselves rather than looking forensically at the facts in their entirety? What if we were at risk of caving in to the European “carnage” newspeak of hardline Brexiters and Trumpian ideologues, rather than taking in the many shades of grey and colour?
In the US, the craziness of Trump led some to initially turn to Europe as an answer to their own despondency (Angela Merkel as “leader of the free world” or Emmanuel Macron as a global, liberal poster child). And when that didn’t fully materialise, all bets were off and an end-of-the-democratic-world narrative set in.
In autumn 2017 a New Yorker visiting London said to me: “You’re French? Paris is the capital of the resistance!” I was dumbstruck. Over lunch recently in London, a colleague asked me whether I thought England might resemble something Europe is turning into – the suggestion perhaps being that antisemitic, neofascist militias would soon roam the streets of our capital cities.
1:55 Swedish general election results leave main parties in deadlock – video report
Take into account the difficulty and cost of regular, in-depth media coverage of Europe’s almost unfathomable patchwork of political cultures and national histories, and what you end up with is a fabric of preconceptions. Don’t get me wrong. There are brilliant British and American journalists working in Europe. But the UK and US obsession with Brexit and Trump results in coverage that depicts Europe through a navel-gazing lens.
Not enough attention is being paid to pro-democracy, pro-EU networks of young, grassroots activists across Europe. They hardly make headlines, while a mindless minority trying to hound foreigners in Chemnitz does. For all the talk of Emmanuel Macron coming undone as a result of a rail strike earlier this year (remember the speculation about a repetition of Paris 1968?), he’s now working to build alliances ahead of next year’s European elections. Marine Le Pen may have Steve Bannon as a friend, but she has run into serious financial trouble as a result of her party being accused of misusing funds earmarked for aides’ salaries. The prospect of Angela Merkel’s political death was again exaggerated when she was challenged this summer by her own sister party, the CSU. Signs are, she has now come out the winner of that tussle. The German Greens are on the upsurge. Who’s shouting about that?
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This is not to say Europe’s problems should be minimised. It makes sense to trigger alarm bells rather than be complacent – especially when you read about a crowd screaming “National socialism, now, now, now!” somewhere in Germany. With immigration the overarching theme of Europe’s political debates, there is a logic to Macron and his allies talking about an existential moment in which just two blocs – “progressives” and “nationalists” – confront each other.
But Orbán’s and Salvini’s importance can be overstated: they and their allies remain but minorities when scrutinised on the scale of a continent. Eurobarometer polls show that EU membership is highly popular, even in countries whose leaderships lambast it, such as Poland. People want Europe to do more and better, not to pull out of it altogether.
Looked at from a distance, it’s tempting to simplify continental Europe. There is mental comfort in drawing patterns that supposedly apply systematically, indifferent to geography barring a few details. Just as there is a Brexit-Trump lens, there is its opposite number: a high-minded, romantic, EU-power-or-bust narrative from those who want to keep EU founding father Jean Monnet’s construct alive.
I’m unashamedly part of the latter, but it’s important to be aware of the dangers of the former. As Monnet once said, ask not whether we must be optimistic or pessimistic; ask whether we are determined. Getting Europe’s nuances right is hard, but that’s where solutions will surely lie.
• Natalie Nougayrède is a Guardian columnist
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