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THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN EUROPE: THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES
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policies dictated or imposed by Brussels. As a
result, the EU has come to be identified with a
process in which ongoing globalisation has
combined with the economic crisis to under-
mine social rights and create unemployment, in
an attack on the bastion of traditional security
represented by member states.
Clearly, if European economic policy had
yielded positive results in terms of growth and
employment, the consequences would have
been different. But the reality is that hardline
austerity has been the norm, and this has un-
dermined the EU. As a result, in the countries
that have suffered most from the crisis, such as
Greece and Spain, the discourse of left-wing
populism has always included a significant dose
of criticism of the EU (if not outright hostility)
and persistent calls for a return of the “national
sovereignty” that has been seized by Brussels.
This has also been reflected in the electoral
growth of the non-socialist (but non-populist)
left in Portugal, a longstanding advocate of na-
tional sovereignty.
This discourse has also had an impact in
more central countries, such as Germany, France
or Italy, as a result of growing unemployment
and increasing job insecurity. In some of these
states, and in other wealthy countries –Scandi-
navia, Finland, the Netherlands– this has been
compounded by the growth of selfish senti-
ments among the population, who refuse to
share welfare provisions with those that they do
not consider to be members of the national
community: immigrants. In other words, al-
though 2015 was a year of recovery, low
growth, high unemployment (around 11 % for
the Eurozone) and the casualization of the la-
bour market all provided fertile ground for the
growth of populism and contributed to Euro-
scepticism.
The triggers, II: refugees
In the EU, 2015 will be remembered as the year
of the refugee crisis. The EU’s incapacity to man-
age this crisis was the result of the inability of
the international community to end the war in
Syria, the failure to predict the vast numbers of
refugees that this would displace, the lack of
resources to deal with it, and the refusal of
member states to meet the resultant costs in
accordance with European values.
Politically, the response to the crisis repre-
sents a chicken and egg problem. It is unclear
whether member states adopted a stance that
rejects solidarity in the face of the flow of refu-
gees, and thus caused the growth of populist,
racist and xenophobic discourse, or whether
they adopted this posture in response to the
prior existence in their countries of these cur-
rents of intolerance, with the aim of pre-empt-
ing criticism by them, but achieving precisely
the opposite effect: strengthening them, and
incorporating some of their positions.
Whatever the causes, it is clear that in a
large number of EU member states, nationalism
and far-right populism have been directly fuelled
by the refugee crisis and mistakes in how gov-
ernments have responded to it, with no signs of
any improvement in 2016. The refugee crisis has
played an added role in the stance of many Eu-
ropean parties with regard to the longstanding
issue of immigration in general, and in particu-
lar of the flow of migrants across the Mediter-
ranean.
The closure of borders between many mem-
ber states, the construction of walls (such as the
175 km fence built by Hungary along its border
with Serbia), the questioning of the Schengen
Agreement, shameful squabbling about the
quotas of refugees to be accepted by each coun-
try, the refusal of almost all the new members of