Who is really 'wrecking' Europe? | Mark LeVine || Aljazeera

The 'nationalist onslaught' is a symptom, not a cause of Europe's crisis.

by Mark LeVine

"The idea of Europe is in peril."

So wrote 30 leading intellectuals in the Guardian last week - including an assortment of Nobel laureates and other literary prize winners and a sprinkle of philosophers - as the threat of Brexit and the May European Parliament elections loom on the horizon.

Europe indeed appears to be in bad shape. An Italian-Austrian-Hungarian-Polish axis of xenophobic populism is coalescing in the heart of the continent, Swedish Democrats are threatening to derail what's left of the quintessential European liberal welfare state in the north, and a powerful far right is tearing apart the centrist German political establishment. To the west, Brexit UK and Trumpian US are a cause of much anxiety, to the east, scheming Russia and an increasingly authoritarian Turkey are a constant source of tension. And from the south, millions of forced migrants are on the move seeking safe haven on European shores.

...

What is Europe?

It's too much to ask a manifesto-like polemic to provide a monograph's worth of historical analysis. But acknowledging and accounting for Europe's bastardised, highly problematic history is, in fact, a sine qua non for moving towards the liberal Imaginarium the signatories seek to enable. 

Laying aside the evident elision in the text between Europe and the EU (which isn't mentioned in the manifesto though it's clearly the idea more in danger today), even the origin of the word points to a core problem faced by "European patriots" such as the signatories.

Did Europe arise from the idea of "eruba", the Akkadian/Mesopotamian term for the western horizon or the Phoenician "erub" meaning evening or west? And did the Ancient Greeks adopt it into the myth about Phoenician princess Europa of Sidon (modern-day Lebanon), who was kidnapped by Zeus and brought to Crete? Or did they come up with the word combining "eurus" (broad) and "opt" (eye)?

Although various uses of the word can be found as far back as the Roman Empire and became more common with the Reformation, it was Napoleon who first imagined a politically "United States of Europe" with one overarching identity and set of laws and culture. In the centuries before and after Napoleon's grand imperial vision, millions would die fighting over precisely who had a legitimate right to define European identity. That definition was never arrived to.

…

By the early 20th century, well over a million poor Europeans wound up in North Africa, with cities like Tunis, Tripoli and Alexandria becoming home to hundreds of thousands of Italians, Greeks, French, Maltese and other migrants from the north. At the same time, both France and Italy offered at some point full citizenship to colonised Algerians and Libyans ("Muslim Italians" as Benito Mussolini would say) in return for supporting continued metropolitan rule. 

From illiberal empires to neoliberal fantasies

Indeed, Europe's colonial past is also completely absent from the discourse of the manifesto, even though the "idea" of Europe has always been inseparable from the nearly half millennium of inhumanly brutal, massively exploitative and often genocidal imperialism, colonialism and slavery. 

In this context, it's tellingly ironic that when the Italian deputy prime minister, Luigi di Maio, wanted to blame France for the migrant crisis that has sent untold tens of thousands of Africans towards Italy's shores, he accused the French government of "taking the lead" in "never stopp[ing] colonising tens of African states" and "impoverishing Africa." "Africans should be in Africa," he continued, "not at the bottom of the Mediterranean." Of course, Italy was no less brutal in its own colonial wars and rule in Africa (nor were any other European colonial powers). 

Ultimately, Europe is both deeply and implicately related (to borrow a sadly underused concept from Israeli geographer Juval Portugali) to its Muslim and African neighbours and could not have become the bastion of liberal and Enlightenment ideals the present manifesto's signatories rightly strive for without the massive violence perpetrated or supported by European states during the last half millennium.

More to the current point, the financial and broader corporate elites of every EU member state have benefited greatly from the policies of neoliberal "openness", "export-led-growth" and "foreign investment" imposed on the very countries that currently threaten to flood it with refugees, often with the support of brutal and corrupt authoritarian regimes that enriched themselves mightily in the process. 

None of this is mentioned in the manifesto, even though the policies at the root of the political "wreckage" across Europe today lie in neoliberal policies, which, in fact, have been visited directly upon European populations as well. Indeed, neoliberalism in the Euro-American contexts can be well understood as the application of colonial ideologies and policies to metropolitan populations.

…