Just when you thought things couldn’t get much worse for the European Union after Britain’s vote to leave the bloc, along comes Donald Trump.
The anti-establishment Republican outsider’s upset election victory is a giant setback for the EU’s vision of a global order with a rules-based governance system, evidence-based policy, open trade, social diversity, free movement of people and joint action to fight climate change and promote collective security and development.
Trump’s worldview — in as much as one is detectable — seems closer to the Hobbesian “war of all against all,” in which power and tribe count for more than cooperation and community and the life of man is “nasty, brutish and short.” His raucous appeal to blue-collar and provincial Americans alienated by globalization and multiculturalism runs counter to the values of the core EU.
But of course, as a German proverb puts it, nothing is ever eaten as hot as it is cooked. There is, perhaps, a remote chance that Trump, ever unpredictable, could leave behind everything he said in a long, ugly campaign and choose to govern in the tradition of internationalist Republicans from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan.
Many Europeans were horrified at Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, which fueled the growing anti-nuclear “peace movement” in Europe and sparked several years of transatlantic tension over how to deal with the Soviet Union. Some of the same fears about America being led by an unqualified “cowboy” — a supposedly ignorant movie actor — were voiced then as now.
In the United Kingdom, a popular poster parodying the movie “Gone with the Wind” depicted Reagan carrying British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in his arms against the backdrop of a nuclear mushroom cloud with the caption: “She promised to follow him to the end of the earth; he promised to organize it.”
Trump’s election is a triumph for the angry, anti-immigration nativism that drove the Brexit vote in June.
Yet Reagan left office widely admired in Europe after clinching far-reaching arms control agreements with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and challenging him to tear down the Berlin Wall. He is now seen by many historians as having hastened the collapse of communism and the peaceful reunification of Europe.
A flicker of the possibility that Trump might chart a similar course could be seen in the president-elect’s strikingly conciliatory and consensual acceptance speech. But it nonetheless doesn’t seem very likely.
For starters, Trump’s election is a triumph for the angry, anti-immigration nativism that drove the Brexit vote in June. It is the revenge of the little white man over the forces of cultural, ethnic, religious and gender pluralism encapsulated in the EU’s motto of “unity in diversity.” It may also herald a retreat from the neoliberal globalized market economy and a lurch toward protectionism and national capitalism. We know where that led in the 1930s.
Trump’s campaign rhetoric carried the seeds of a cultural conflict between the West and Islam and a potential trade war between the United States and China, either of which would be wrenching for a demoralized Europe.
Similarly, the West’s second major electoral earthquake this year will send wider tremors through the political systems of Europe at a time when the European Commission’s core powers to negotiate trade deals and regulate competition and state aid to business are under assault.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which the EU has been laboriously negotiating with the Obama administration, was already in deep trouble after leftist anti-globalization forces in Europe obstructed an EU-Canada trade agreement. It now looks dead in the water.
Last year’s Paris global agreement on fighting climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions also looks threatened, just after it came into force. Trump, who dismisses the scientific evidence that global warming is man-made, has suggested he would go back on America’s signature.
Trump’s ascendancy blows wind in the sails of anti-European populists in Northern Europe and anti-liberal far-left movements in Southern Europe. The insurgents are surfing on disenchantment, with a rising wealth gap in Western societies and falling or stagnant living standards for many working people, not to mention unemployment and a sense of insecurity. Hostility to an influx of refugees and migrants is adding to the fire in Europe and America.
“I really believe that the European project could fail” — European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans
Trump’s supporters are the same social and intellectual forces that brought illiberal strongmen to power in Hungary and Poland.
It’s no surprise that the first to gloat over his victory were Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, which helped to force the British anti-EU vote, French National Front leader Marine Le Pen, campaigning to take her country out of the EU and the euro in next year’s presidential election, and Geert Wilders, whose anti-Islam Freedom Party is neck-and-neck with Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Liberals ahead of the Dutch general election in March.
Le Pen hailed “the death of the old order” and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has strayed far into her ideological turf in a bid to win the mainstream conservatives’ presidential nomination, said it showed voters wanted full-blooded change and politicians must listen to the people.
The next dominos to fall could be Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in a perilous referendum on his constitutional reforms on December 4 and the largely symbolic Austrian presidency, where the anti-immigration Freedom Party candidate is leading in the polls.
Trump made Brexit his personal cause, in stark contrast to President Barack Obama, who travelled to Britain in a vain attempt to persuade Europeans to stay together.
Indeed, on the eve of the U.S. election, the Republican said his own victory would be “Brexit plus, plus” — whatever that means.
So, we have an incoming “Leader of the Free World” who has openly advocated at least a partial breakup of the EU and questioned the value of NATO, saying allies should do more for their own defense instead of counting on Uncle Sam.
This goes beyond time-honored U.S. pressure for transatlantic burden-sharing. It’s more akin to telling Europeans in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military destabilization of Ukraine and intervention in Syria: “You’re on your own.”
No wonder European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans told the European Parliament this week that for the first time in 30 years in politics, “I really believe that the European project could fail.” Identity politics could lead to a further unraveling and eventual disintegration of the Union.
Whether Trump can emulate the Gipper’s metamorphosis from cold warrior to statesman remains to be seen. For now, Europeans are right to expect him to be an awkward and potentially destructive partner.
Paul Taylor writes POLITICO‘s Europe At Large column.