Political society is an amorphous blob: there is no center except for where the observer sits himself. The author has a clue, however:
“With the economic crisis, and the negative effects of globalization, the socialists couldn’t convince the populations in their respective countries that the future lies in a liberal Europe,” said Gérard Grunberg, a historian of socialism at Sciences Po in Paris. “This is the end of the European utopia.”
Europe does not have an economic crisis, it has a half-dozen of them, exacerbated by an increasingly clumsy attempt to manage these diverse economies through a single monetary policy. It was doomed from the start. For evidence I cite the economic disaster that all the earnest pundits predicted that has somehow failed to materialize in Great Britain as a result of Brexit. Surely fellows with degrees from a prestigious European École could never be wrong? These are, after all, the hands at the wheel. Brexit was a miss, the policies were a miss, and their current panic is very much of their own making, not the voters'.
The social crisis is as well. Clearly - actually, self-admittedly - the intake of unassimilable immigrants was not driven by popular opinion but very much in opposition to it and remains so with only minor adjustments as a fillip to the outraged people who actually do have to live with the problem. Tarring this with the names "xenophobia" and "racism" does not serve to dismiss it, it is a transparent attempt to remove it from the bounds of discussion. It too has failed and rightfully so.
This Utopia carried with it several assumptions that are proving threadbare to put it politely: that societies built around a massive shift of resources from defense to social spending would be sustainable, that the actual proprietors of that defense would not someday tire of the expense, that nationalism was the same as sovereignty and eradicable by sufficient propaganda, that nationalism even was the true source of Europe's problems to begin with, that central authority, central planning, and a government divorced from the citizens could muster support from the national governments they were doing their best to supplant. That is not a Utopia except for the ones at the top. We've been down this road before, it's called Empire.
“All these continental parties are nostalgic for the interwar nation-state, which was a total disaster,” he said. “There was never any moment when they were happy, independent nation-states. There was never such a time, and their nostalgia is a kind of disguise."
A straw man, that - the issue is not whether there ever was a happier time but how best to avoid making this time worse than it is. Certainly the first assertion is in error: there were a number of times where there were perfectly happy nation-states and this is one of them. There are, unfortunately, some signally unhappy nation-states as well, most of which a consequence of governments who want to advance their aims at the expense of other nation-states. That the EU itself falls into this category is resolutely denied, but it's a fact, it's what Trump is talking about when he states that we don't want to fund the project's defense deficit any longer.
And then there is a stubborn tendency to attempt to address the whole thing by framing it into a convenient narrative:
..a billionaire tycoon using appeals to xenophobia and racism to scoop up support from voters who no longer believe the party of the working man has their interests at heart.
There is no "party of the working man", there are two parties vying for his support, one of which failing badly and defiantly. There is no xenophobia, only a recognition the uncontrolled immigration is as bad for the immigrants as it is for the citizens, among whom are immigrants themselves. And there is no racism except for the very real racism the Democrats attempted to convert into a broad social movement that itself contains only racists and cranks. They lost. They deserved to. And they're losing in Europe too, and will go down with blinders over their eyes insisting that they were right all along and the citizens unworthy of their grand ideals and schemes.
Great rebuttal points. Well written.
Thanks.
BTTT!