Modern European leaders do not approach politics as their forebears did. The Schuman declaration of 1950, the founding document of the EU’s institutions, celebrated adaptability. “Europe will not be made all at once or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.” Yet that solidarity has been eroded across the continent, and political insurgents are gaining ground. To ward them off, the EU must rediscover its former spirit of pragmatism and flexibility.
Theresa May reassured the world on Tuesday that even as Britain bows out of European integration, it does not want to see the EU unravel. She was right to do so. The comments made yesterday by Joe Biden, the outgoing American vice-president, are a timely reminder of why. He warned that “Russia is working to whittle away at the edges of the European project, test the fault lines of western nations and return to a politics defined by spheres of influence”. He was right.
A wholesale disintegration of the union would be a victory for Vladimir Putin, generating opportunities for him to pursue his corrosive brand of international adventurism at the expense of a rules-based global order.
Across the continent, Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant parties are on the march, including in countries that have elections this year. In the Netherlands the Freedom Party, which in the past week has called for bans on all migration and on Islam, has raced ahead in the polls. The Alternative for Germany party remains on the fringes of German politics for now, but gained ground in local elections last year. In France Marine Le Pen, of the National Front, is likely to make the presidential run-off. Elsewhere the story is similar. According to the European Council on Foreign Relations, referendums on Europe are being proposed in 18 countries.
The risk now is that if moderate European leaders do not wake up to the concerns of the voters driving this trend, more extreme elements will. Inevitably those concerns centre around migration and the EU’s antipathy towards having firm frontiers.
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The emphasis varies by country. In Britain voters were exercised by the impact of immigration on the labour market and public services. Similar concerns exist in France and Belgium, where cheap labourers who visit for short spells from eastern Europe are undercutting indigenous workers. In Germany and the Nordic countries, worries about welfare tourism loom larger. And all over the Schengen area, in which anyone may cross borders without showing a passport, unease is growing about the threats of terrorism.
The solution is clear enough. Free movement of people, as a guiding principle of the union, is not politically sustainable. That is not a tragedy for the European project. In the early years of integration, free movement of labour, not of people, was the economic imperative needed to sustain the single market. A move back to that model, for instance by requiring would-be immigrants to get a job offer before they move, would not violate the spirit of the union as its founders saw it. Nor would some restrictions on welfare payments of the kind advocated by David Cameron in 2015 and now being considered in Germany.
Some politicians are beginning to accept this. In Finland and Denmark free movement is not a political shibboleth. But some leaders are nonetheless closing their eyes. Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, reacted impatiently to Theresa May’s speech this week. “We shall never accept a situation in which it is better to be outside the single market,” he said. But many voters believe that it already is. Mr Juncker and his colleagues need to find a way of changing their minds.