Europe after

In this book, Ivan Krastev offers us something precious and ultimately quite unexpected: his view from the East, which sheds new light on the European question for us. Some neglected details of the picture of the European crisis suddenly find themselves at the centre of attention. Some considerations that are a bit shameful for the polite Western European are here addressed without embellishment, with frankness and bite.

Bulgarian political scientist I. Krastev has made a certain place for himself in the closed circle of thinkers who are read and listened to in political Europe. This is partly due to his desire to think, not backwards, but ahead of the curve. doxa European studies. Where others are content to consider the limits of European integration, I. Krastev dares to undertake a theory of disintegration, understood as the deconstruction of European institutions and the dissolution of the European political project. The object of the Fate of Europe is not to identify the architectural defects of European construction, nor to analyse the internal contradictions of the legal-political system of the European Union (EU), but to what extent and under what conditions institutional Europe can survive the underlying process of disintegration, the main cause of which lies in the “migration crisis”. Because in I. Krastev’s eyes, it is this crisis, and not the sovereign debt crisis, which threatens to put an end to the European project.

Another disintegration

I. Krastev is not the only one to tackle the issue of disintegration head on. The American political scientist Karen Alter, for example, envisages the possibility that a backlash could reverse the process of European legal integration. The neofunctionalist theory she draws on is based on the idea thatEUas a new opportunity structure established by the European treaties, pushes non-governmental actors to seize European law for their own benefit, whether these actors are non-state (independent European institutions, companies and interest groups) or state (national jurisdictions in particular). By playing the game of European law, they strengthen it, which then gradually establishes its hold on the legal systems of the Member States. This dynamic, which is inherent in the legal-institutional architecture of theEUrelatively out of reach of national governments, could, according to K. Alter, due to a deterioration in the opportunity structure – due to an exogenous shock or a point of internal contradiction – reverse into a dynamic of disintegration.

The idea of ​​European disintegration is also developed by the German political scientist Fritz Scharpf. While the law of the internal market is deepened by the action of independent European institutions, the rules of unanimity and qualified majority decisions within the Council tend to favour the status quo. Member States that benefit, within the internal market, from competitive taxation or more flexible labour law can in fact easily thwart any project of European harmonisation that would go in this direction. The situation of regulatory competition in which the Member States find themselves leads them in return to engage in a race to the bottom, that is to say to develop supply-side policies, or even internal devaluation. Since the system never finds a static equilibrium, its dynamic is negative and continuous: it slowly but surely increases the regulatory competition of the Member States, up to the predictable breaking point. Hence the structural certainty of a “crash” and the need to think about the situation that will arise “afterwards”.

I. Krastev departs significantly from these analyses. Abandoning approaches centered on configurations of interests and the rational actor, his thinking draws on political theory, history and literature. Interest fades behind identity. The opportunity structure of the legal-institutional game ofEU or the macroeconomic instability of the Eurozone are reduced to secondary variables. The migration crisis is now superimposed, which re-enacts the double divide between East and West and between the winners and losers of globalization.

The migrant as a new figure in history

In I. Krastev’s eyes, the migrant is the new actor in history, the driving force behind a revolution of individuals who march to change their country, and no longer their government. It is no longer the class struggle, but the struggle between nationals and migrants that is at work in societies. Faced with the influx of migrants, the argument of fundamental rights tends to turn around: the question of the State’s capacity to guarantee the effectiveness of fundamental rights takes precedence over their legal ideal.

More dramatically, the migration crisis is casting a sense of normative threat over European societies: that of endangering the integrity of the moral order. The democratic imagination of threatened majorities is transformed into demographic insecurity. Democracy then turns in on itself and becomes distorted: from a regime of inclusion of minorities, it turns into a regime of exclusion. The democratic requirement stands against the liberal order and merges with the call to defend one’s community of belonging. This is what I. Krastev calls “the return of majority regimes”.

The revolt of the losers of globalization

Europe’s mistake is Fukuyama’s: like him, it misunderstood the historical meaning of the fall of communism and the concomitant birth of connected globalization. Far from a Western postmodern world where the liberal value of freedom supplants material class interests, we are witnessing, according to I. Krastev, a new global disorder, whose epicentre is located on the old continent.

The new game of globalization is positive-sum only for the winners; the losers realize this and give life to a populism of frustration, a mixture of nostalgia for an idealized past (a “we” preserved from the outside) and fatalism in the face of a future that can only darken (the continued dissolution of what remains of the “we”). The populations kept away from the movement of globalization – the “people of somewhere”, captive to their place of existence, in contrast to the “people of anywhere” – tend to form, if not a majority, at least an electoral bloc that prevents the continuation of the game of regular alternation between the pro-European and liberal economy government parties.

I. Krastev draws on the analyses of Dani Rodrik, who conclude that it is impossible to simultaneously strengthen international economic competitiveness, global democracy and national sovereignty. The “Rodrik trilemma” carries the risk of giving birth to a gentle monster made of a democracy without choice, an emptied sovereignty and a globalization without political legitimacy. In this regard, theEU is faced with a particularly difficult situation, whose principle of justification is based on the idea of ​​universal citizenship which is only fully achievable in practice, I. Krastev tells us, through the absolute free movement of peoples, or through the full elimination of socio-economic disparities between countries; two unrealizable conditions.

Understanding Eastern European

Eastern Europe, which experienced the sudden end of the Soviet empire, nourishes, according to I. Krastev, a deep bitterness in the face of Western Europe’s incomprehension. Its lack of a colonial past and the memory of communist internationalism would explain its “lack of compassion”, its deep-rooted anti-cosmopolitanism. Unlike Western Europe where the memory of extra- and intra-European migrations remains alive, Eastern Europe was in fact rebuilt in the aftermath of 1945 around an ethnic homogenization under the cover ofUSSR.

So what to do? Save the essentials, I. Krastev tells us: free movement, pluralist elections and the rule of law. Avoid the “Putinization” of Europe, in short. And to do this, he asks Western Europeans to better understand Eastern Europe, concretely to be more conciliatory towards the Hungarian and Polish governments, to dare to compromise and, above all, to get rid of any moralizing overhang. Because Eastern Europe is traversed by an existential melancholy, accentuated by the demographic fear of increasing depopulation. Fundamental rights and other regulations imposed from Brussels are translated into minority rights and perceived as an injustice towards the threatened majorities. This strategic balancing of fundamental rights and the rule of law may disconcert the Western European reader.

The blind spot of the scholarly gaze

And yet, paradoxically, there is something dated and almost consensual in I. Krastev’s analysis. The latter is in fact, and without any particular precaution, merged into the new political doxa that obsessively notes the shift in the center of gravity of national democracies, from a left-right divide to an opposition between globalizing or nativist, open or closed, pluralist or authoritarian camps. The migration crisis, in this respect, is understood as a powerful engine or catalyst for the political recomposition of Europe, and not as the effect of a cause that would be different: a crisis of public impotence.

I. Krastev nevertheless notes the contradiction between the “ever closer union of the peoples of Europe” and the imperative of deepening democracy. Perhaps we should start from there, from what weakens democracy within the member states themselves and prevents it from facing a crisis, whether migratory or financial. But I. Krastev invokes more what comes from outside: globalization, the emergence of a new historical force (migrants), the awakening of sleeping continent-states. His erudition and literary verve can be seductive; they seem to skim the surface of things, without penetrating the depths of the European order, its immanent dynamics.

If the migration crisis is more of an effect than a primary cause, what would that be? It is partly to be found in the political order of Europe, its economic and monetary Constitution. It is regrettable that I. Krastev only half-heartedly engages in discussion with the various legal-political theories of theEU as with those on the problematic architecture of the eurozone. Multidisciplinarity here is only eclecticism; and I. Krastev’s thought does not form a system. It does not claim to be, moreover. But this lack of theoretical ambition, covered by the verve of the scholar, may leave some readers dissatisfied.