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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 oneway 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
