Until recently – the watershed came somewhere around the millennium – British perceptions of modern German politics focused not on Germany's government or its main political parties, which were boringly democratic and law-abiding, but on the increasingly distant Nazi past and on extreme parties of the right, which appeared to some eyes to threaten the return to street violence, domestic authoritarianism and foreign aggression.
This perception said much more about the British than the Germans. In the end, given a helpful push by the seriousness of the financial crisis and by the pragmatic leadership of Angela Merkel, the pfennig has finally dropped. Today, better late than never, British perceptions of Germany now focus where they should have been all along – on the resilience of Germany's postwar institutions and on the general good balance of its society and economy in dealing with the problems it faces. It is part of what gives me cautious hope about the outcome of any UK referendum on Europe.
But the conclusion to that is this: one down, 27 to go. That is because, reading some of what is being written and said about the current state of Europe, it feels as if we have been here before. What used to be said about Germany's imminent lurch to the right is now often being said about Europe more generally. Well, it was wrong then and, with certain provisos, it is also wrong now.
The current focus for fashionable doom-mongering about the politics of Europe is the European parliament elections of May 2014. These elections, it is said, are likely to see a far-right backlash across many EU countries. Faced with such a possibility, some observers predict the collapse of the EU itself, and even a new dark age of renewed competing European nationalisms.
It would be foolish to dismiss all these possibilities in every respect, not least because a lot can happen between now and the elections. And foolish, too, to deny that across Europe these elections will be a major opportunity for single-issue and extremist parties – not always the same thing –to make a play for the support of insecure, disillusioned and plain angry voters in the 28 member states. Foolish, finally, because Europe has manifestly not dealt with its banking and fiscal crises in either an even-handed or a sure-handed way.
Nevertheless, these warnings about an impending or a continuing lurch to the right simply do not match the facts. For one thing, they assume that Euroscepticism elides into far-right extremism, when sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. For another, far-right politics is far from homogeneous. Some parties passionately defend the welfare state, while others see it as unworthy of a strong, manly nation. All in all, though, the warnings about the far right amount to little more than scaremongerin
Read more: Europe isn't lurching to the far right. That's escapist fantasy | Martin Kettle | Comment is free | The Guardian
This perception said much more about the British than the Germans. In the end, given a helpful push by the seriousness of the financial crisis and by the pragmatic leadership of Angela Merkel, the pfennig has finally dropped. Today, better late than never, British perceptions of Germany now focus where they should have been all along – on the resilience of Germany's postwar institutions and on the general good balance of its society and economy in dealing with the problems it faces. It is part of what gives me cautious hope about the outcome of any UK referendum on Europe.
But the conclusion to that is this: one down, 27 to go. That is because, reading some of what is being written and said about the current state of Europe, it feels as if we have been here before. What used to be said about Germany's imminent lurch to the right is now often being said about Europe more generally. Well, it was wrong then and, with certain provisos, it is also wrong now.
The current focus for fashionable doom-mongering about the politics of Europe is the European parliament elections of May 2014. These elections, it is said, are likely to see a far-right backlash across many EU countries. Faced with such a possibility, some observers predict the collapse of the EU itself, and even a new dark age of renewed competing European nationalisms.
It would be foolish to dismiss all these possibilities in every respect, not least because a lot can happen between now and the elections. And foolish, too, to deny that across Europe these elections will be a major opportunity for single-issue and extremist parties – not always the same thing –to make a play for the support of insecure, disillusioned and plain angry voters in the 28 member states. Foolish, finally, because Europe has manifestly not dealt with its banking and fiscal crises in either an even-handed or a sure-handed way.
Nevertheless, these warnings about an impending or a continuing lurch to the right simply do not match the facts. For one thing, they assume that Euroscepticism elides into far-right extremism, when sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. For another, far-right politics is far from homogeneous. Some parties passionately defend the welfare state, while others see it as unworthy of a strong, manly nation. All in all, though, the warnings about the far right amount to little more than scaremongerin
Read more: Europe isn't lurching to the far right. That's escapist fantasy | Martin Kettle | Comment is free | The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment