Facing up to extremism in the new Europe

Date: 07/12/00

EU member states got their fingers burned when they tried to isolate Austria after the rise of Jörg Haider's far-right Freedom Party. Gareth Davies of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands warns that the Union may have to deal with similar political powder kegs as candidate countries prepare for enlargement

SOME of the leaders meeting in Nice this weekend are looking forward to enlargement of the Union with enthusiasm.

They see it as a way to extend markets, create a wider area of free movement, and - necessarily, since so much diversity cannot be contained centrally - produce a shallower, more liberal structure.

Others are less happy. They agree about the effects of enlargement but find them negative. They long for an ever-deeper Union, building on the harmony already achieved. Bringing in new countries will pollute the family and disturb precious post-war relationships.

Both views may be wrong. Enlargement will lead to a deepening of the EU, in all but the most bureaucratic sense.

Culturally, the inclusion of central and eastern Europe is a huge step towards the re-establishment of a European identity. For the first time, the European Union may deserve its name.

Yet culture is a soft topic and it makes no waves in the sea of economics which passes for politics today. It is suitable for rhetoric, but not for policy. The important issues, an observer might think, are the economic and legal ones, and here the divergence between the condition of the candidate countries and current member states ensures that enlargement must go with lesser integration.

This is to ignore the popular will, where issues of identity resonate. EU leaders often feel free to disregard this because polls and questionnaires have detected a surprisingly robust, if sometimes bad-tempered, consensus: that broadening the Union is a good thing, and the foreigners and social changes which accompany it are not too high a price to pay.

Despite the upsurges of far-right views in all corners of the EU, the popular masses remain neither xenophobic nor petty nationalist. Europe has delivered them too good a life.

In the candidate states, though, recent history has been different. Their populations have suffered more and been more oppressed, and while this may breed a love of freedom, it also breeds brutality.

It would be naive to expect that the institutions of force - the police in particular - of the other Europe will have dropped the habits of 50 years in the past ten. They were called upon to act against their own citizens in ways properly regarded as criminal. They will not have become angels.

Remember the International Monetary Fund (IMF) summit in Prague. Protesters came out of jails with broken bones, and detention was random and often illegal. The police in these countries have a reputation for harbouring extremism in their ranks, and it showed.

Similarly, the people of the candidate states are vulnerable to extremism. Far-right movements are strong in the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic and Hungary, just to consider some of the applicants. The treatment of Romanies throughout these states is appalling. Taboos against racism and exclusion which have taken decades to build in what was the West do not yet have the same force in the former East.

So it is no surprise that among Union members states it was Austria, which chose after the last world war to retreat to a cultural twilight land of nostalgia and denial, which fell under the sway of demagogues earlier this year. Perched precariously between East and West, participating in neither, it had not undergone the rigorous re-formation of its Germanic neighbour.

But the question for the EU is, how should it react to such events? When a nation is seized by bigotry, is that an internal affair or is it everyone's problem? Enlargement makes this question urgent, because the risk in the candidate states is significantly greater than anywhere else.

Of course, some will protest that racism is endemic. Union members should not smugly point to where the Iron Curtain once hung. What about northern Italy, east London, Mr Le Pen in France, Belgium, or the delinquents of East Germany? There is no monopoly on evil.

The difference, though, is that each of these situations is contained not only by a strong majority which opposes it, but also by a well-tested constitutional and legal system. However disgusting bigotry may be within our own borders, we cannot imagine it being realised explicitly in policy or governmental action. If the people did not stop it through votes, the judges would stop it through law.

The rise of Jörg Haider was the exception to this. For a while it seemed as if a racist party was determining the political direction of the country. Xenophobia had not just achieved popularity, but control. How the Union dealt with this ought to have lessons for enlargement.

Initially, it seemed idealism was rampant. Leaders of nations lined up not just to condemn but to act. The social life of Austrian diplomats was decimated. There was no dealing with racists any more than there would be dealing with terrorists. Austria was returned to the twilight.

Unfortunately this gloom was the natural habitat of the Freedom Party, which fed earlier on the corruption of Austrian politics and now fed again on the outside threat. The response of the population to external condemnation was, predictably, to resist it and unite behind the forces of darkness.

Faced with this stand-off, the Union might have thought about sanctions or other active punishment, but chose rather to slowly slink away. We might think it was a wise move, as the Freedom Party is less popular now and it seems that the danger it posed to individuals was always slight.

But the party remains in government, and the slinking away was not accompanied by an acceptance of this. What resulted was more of a long, dark silence as leaders looked their own impotence in the face.

Nevertheless, this may have been a useful lesson about the limitations of what we can do: that we cannot drive out extremists by this sort of pressure. But if that is the lesson and if, also, we really cannot tolerate extremists at our high table, it is also a warning against enlargement. If we cannot take Haider, we cannot take the East.

For a conspiracy theorist, or even just a cynic, this makes it interesting that the nations which led the charge against Austria are also those most opposed to, and with most to lose from, enlargement.

France is the geographic centre of the Union, spanning the cultures from West to East and North to South. Enlargement threatens this, making the Union less Roman and more Hapsburg.

With a new centre of EU gravity, further to the East, Brussels becomes an impossible capital - its once crucial location in the midst of the power cluster of Paris, London and Bonn is less notable than its position on the fringes of the land mass. It may survive as a Washington, but if it does it will be because decentralisation makes it less important. It will never be the new Europe's Rome.

The solution, perhaps, is compromise - the very thing which was avoided in the case of Austria. The current member states re-invented themselves through a mixture of education and wealth. The same will work with the member states-to-be.

But this requires engagement with their domestic politics, not in a confrontational manner but a constructive one. The noble leaders from the West may sometimes have to hold their noses. They may also face resistance.

Politicians in both the Czech Republic and Hungary were critical of the Union members' stance against Austria. They felt domestic politics were not a matter for outsiders. However, we are all one family now and in that family there are rules of decency. If the Union's current time-wasting with its charter of rights means anything, it means that. It has the right to interfere and will.

To think though that all this will result in a shallower Union is astonishing. Interference in foreign politics is the most intimate participation in national life. Such political engagement is deeper than anything the Union has yet seen. It is truly the fulfilment of that requirement in the preamble to the EU treaty for "an ever closer Union".

It is ironic perhaps that it takes the former Communist states to move the West from mere economics to genuine political integration. To think, though, that we can include them without addressing their politics is dangerous and wrong.

Major feature. EU Member States got their fingers burned when they tried to isolate Austria after the rise of Jörg Haider's far-right Freedom Party. Author warns that the Union may have to deal with similar political powder kegs as candidate countries prepare for enlargement.