The weird resilience of Nato and the EU

To Dublin, where “triple lock” has an altogether different meaning. In Britain, it is a rule that protects the real value of the public pension. In Ireland, it is a set of tests the government must pass to send armed forces abroad. If unpicking the British lock is too provocative for politicians to consider, imagine fiddling with the Irish one, bound up as it is with the republic’s non-belligerent self-image.

Yet the government proposes change. Allies have long nudged Ireland to do more, noting that democratic Europe has enemies who might not exempt a “neutral” state from their menaces. (Subsea cables near the Irish coast are candidates for sabotage.) And while Nato membership isn’t even a remote prospect, Ireland has signed up to a new co-operation scheme with the alliance.

In fact, Ireland, where support for EU membership amounts to a near consensus, is a good spot from which to observe one of the under-told stories in the world: the resilience of the west’s two most important institutions. Having been diagnosed “brain-dead” in 2019 by no less an eminence than the president of France, Nato is now wider, in that Sweden and Finland have joined, and deeper, in that member states are spending more on defence. Some are even mulling the revival of conscription. Whatever is missing from the alliance that convenes in Washington this week — a vigorous US president, for example — it isn’t a raison d’être. The Kremlin has seen to that.

And Nato might be the second most resilient Brussels-headquartered entity. A fact has got lost amid the (warranted) panic about Rassemblement National, Alternative for Germany and other nationalist movements. The EU is popular. And has become more so in recent times. Readers who find this implausible should take it up with various polling companies.

According to YouGov last month, a referendum on membership would result in a crushing Remain win in each of the large EU democracies. German support for Leave is 18 per cent. In Spain, it is in the single digits. Eurobarometer, a pan-continental pulse check, finds that 74 per cent of respondents now “feel” like citizens of the EU, against 25 per cent who don’t. Those numbers were 59 and 40 around a decade ago. The Pew Research Center reports that supermajorities think well of the EU throughout Europe (save Greece) and as far afield as South Korea, having not always done so.

Survey after confounding survey reveals the same trend: a reputational slump for the EU in the mid-2010s, amid the sovereign debt crises, then a recovery to remarkable highs ever since. It explains some odd twists of events in national politics. To get as far as she has, which isn’t far enough to govern France, Marine Le Pen had to soften her line on Europe. The Italian premier, Giorgia Meloni, has been constructive with an EU that some expected her to fight. The return of Donald Tusk as Poland’s leader happened, in part, because his predecessors’ tiffs with Brussels sat ill with a pro-EU electorate. Across the continent, lots of voters with ultraconservative instincts on immigration, crime, net zero and, yes, Brussels, balk at EU exit, or anything close to it.

None of this assures the EU a serene future, or even a future. While populists didn’t sweep the European parliament elections last month, they did well enough to intensify their spoiling role. If a hard-right president leads France from 2027, he or she could wreck the EU as we know it without ever proposing Frexit. (Just as Donald Trump could undermine Nato without taking the US out of it.) In the end, though, all institutions rest on public confidence. And the idea of an existential crisis for the EU on that front is much harder to stand up now than it was circa 2015, whatever the surge of anti-establishment politics since then. Because, in Britain, someone who is nationalist in general will be anti-EU in particular, the Anglo-American intelligentsia tends to assume the same of Europeans. In fact, millions are able to decouple the two things.

Brexit helped. If Nato owes its second life to Russia, the EU is forever in Britain’s debt. Its great adventure of 2016 has gone badly enough to discourage the rest of Europe from even entertaining the same idea. Apart from its co-authorship of the single market in the 1980s, Brexit stands out as the UK’s kindest service to the European project. (Both happened under the Tories, which will gall that party to a degree that no landslide election defeat ever could.) What a parting gift. And how true, on such different levels, when Brussels says: “You shouldn’t have.”

janan.ganesh@ft.com