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38 ] Tamás Dezső Ziegler
EUROPEAN COOPERATION
AND THE MAJOR CRISES OF EUROPE TODAY
The European continent, including the EU, has been facing major challenges.
If you read other chapters of this book, they try to explain and analyse some
of these. They also affect European disintegration. For a long time, scholars
openly or implicitly accepted the view that European integration was a one¬
way process, and that nations had to integrate in order to overcome challenges
they faced in the late 20" and at the beginning of the 21‘ century. However,
this way of thinking eroded in the 2000s, and it became especially vague in
the 2010s and 2020s.
As I see it, recent political conflicts within the European continent have
the potential to push countries further away from each other. To start with,
the lack of empathy in times of economic distress has left a lasting impact.
At the time of the economic crisis in the late 2000s, countries like Greece
received less help and support than they had expected. This did not go
unnoticed. With Brexit, a large Member State opted for leaving the EU. One
can hardly avoid interpreting this as a form of disintegration: in fact, this is
an obvious example of political, legal, and economic disintegration, which
was a result of a previous disintegration in values between the UK and the
continental core of the EU.
During the refugee crisis as from 2015, several politicians used the crisis
for inciting xenophobia and gaining political advantage over democratic
forces. It seems that Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris are right when they
claim that there is a return to more materialistic values over abstract ones,
such as tolerance or humanism (Inglehart and Norris 2016). It is as ifa new
nationalistic 21* century tribalism could emerge in many countries.
Moreover, as a result of authoritarian tendencies, the anti-democratic
value system of the far-right is becoming more influential, challenging key
frameworks of the rule of law and of checks and balances. As I explained
elsewhere, many of the far-right’s panels are taken from fascism - and this
new post-fascism is capable of affecting international relations in a negative
way, just like its predecessor (Ziegler 2021). In some Eastern European
countries, like Hungary, Poland, or Russia, it has become an integral part of
political culture, but it is also present in the West. The reactions of the EU
to this phenomenon were so weak that Daniel Kelemen claims that this has
created a new form of democratic deficit (Kelemen 2017).
Talking about democratic deficit: even the old form of democratic deficit
remains unsolved in the EU. As Anna Unger explains in another chapter of
this book, the vast majority of citizens have very limited genuine influence on
(EU, but also domestic) decision-making, and most of them cannot relate to
these decision-making processes (Hix and Follesdal 2006). Even apart from
this problem, the Union stands very far from everyday people: EU politicians