For Remainers, the EU has always been a bastion of grown-uppery: grown-up policies, grown-up attitudes and grown-up attitude towards humane, collective action. Writers make pilgrimages to Brussels, Berlin and Paris to report back in glowing terms on how the grown-ups do it, making unfavourable comparisons to horrible infantile Britain, with its poor impulse control and malfunctioning economy.
The last week has provided a potent reminder of how misplaced this veneration of the EU’s heavy hitters is. Before we get to Germany, let us begin with France, which is, once again, in the grips of an apocalyptic rioting spree. Streets are literally aflame following the police shooting of a 17-year-old boy. Although rioting, mass disruption and thuggish violence occur with comparative regularity in France – the sinister mob of gilets jaunes and recent protests against Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms provide just two
examples – these appear to be the worst in 18 years.
In France, this means public buildings burnt, over a thousand arrests, fireworks galore, looting and arson attacks on schools, town halls and police stations across the country. Imagine something on even a fraction of that scale occurring now in Britain. Precisely. You can’t.
And surprise, surprise, Macron – the Remainiac posterboy – appears once again to have precisely zero control over his country. He has been urged to declare a state of emergency, and he has called the violence “unjustifiable”. That’s all very well. But the underlying tensions between French police and its ghettoised minorities show no signs of improving. Macron is presiding over a society coming dramatically unstuck.
Yet until last week, reading the outpourings of die-hard Remainers you’d have thought Europeans had never had it better. You could easily find rhapsodies about how, freed from Britain’s toddler tantrums, the EU had been able to forge ahead and “deepen” its partnerships and develop greater geopolitical clout.
One has to laugh. Greater geopolitical clout without Britain? Leaving aside America, it was Britain and Britain alone that gave Volodymyr Zelensky prompt and forceful assistance, all while Europe, seemingly held back by pacifist Germany, made pointless gestures as Putin’s bombs rained down on Kyiv.
Indeed, as recent months show all too clearly, and contrary to the views of some, the Germans do not do it better. They are in recession, while Britain is not. The far-Right Alternative für Deutschland is in the ascendant: Thuringia just became the first state in Germany to hand the party victory in a district council election. The day after, a man wearing apparent neo-Nazi clothing was filmed handing out leftover AfD balloons at a local kindergarten.
Wow. If only we could be more like them.
In fact, unlike in Britain, far-Right parties are on the rise all over the bloc – which, also unlike Britain, has a terrifying track record where such parties are concerned. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly the National Front) is in the French parliament in force, and her vote share has only been climbing. In Spain, the populist far-Right party Vox is growing its power base and just took power in a regional coalition. In the Netherlands, the ironically named Forum for Democracy has parliamentary representation. In Sweden, the imaginatively titled Sweden Democrats won a little over 20 per cent of the vote in 2022, overtaking the Moderates to become the second-largest party. They now have a say in government policy.
Across the bloc, populists are resurgent. Many are disdainful of Brussels, its immigration policies and its federalism. Even beyond their views, the EU is hardly the paradise of unity and collaboration Europhiles like to picture. Last week, Germany raised objections to the European Commission’s idea of seizing frozen Russian central bank assets for reconstruction of Ukraine, the latest example in a lengthy catalogue of confusion about how to respond to Moscow’s aggression and threat to Europe.
This confusion is partly why the bloc’s geopolitical clout may well be a mirage – unless by “clout” one means Macron sucking up to Xi Jinping, to whom he paid a warm visit in April, and where, no doubt to his pleasure, he found himself greeted like a rock star by Chinese students.
But I can’t help but remember the semiconductor crisis during Covid, when the bloc’s auto industry was derailed so severely by disruption to Taiwan’s supply chain of the chips that Germany’s economics minister had to plead with his counterpart in Taiwan to hasten delivery.
But when it comes to the all-important rollout of semiconductor foundries in the West, Taiwan has told the EU it will need to deepen ties if it wants continued Taiwanese investment in its production.
Britain is hardly in the pinnacle of health. But the spectacle this week of a burning, rioting, disordered France is a sobering reminder that the version of the EU clung to by the “they do it better” crowd
is laughably wrong. If anyone can be said to do it better – and granted that’s not saying much – it’s Britain.
