The EU and the conflict between Good Policy and Good Politics
- By Mitchell Blatt and Sumantra Maitra
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 29, 2014
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Newly-elected UK Independence Party MP Douglas Carswell poses for photographers with a copy of the local paper in Clacton-on-Sea, in eastern England, on Oct. 10, 2014. |
On October 9, the U.K. Independence Party sent tremors through the British establishment and proponents of European unionism in general when it won the Clacton by-election and took a seat in British Parliament. UKIP had already shown its influence in May, when it won a plurality of the British seats for European Parliament, but this is the first seat it has won in the country's Parliament, and there will be arguably many more UKIP victories in elections in the United Kingdom next spring.
The mainstream U.K. political establishment is rattled that the party Prime Minister David Cameron dismissed as "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists" in 2006 will upset their order and potentially cost the Conservative government its majority (as Cameron warned in the aftermath of UKIP's victory). But the factors behind UKIP's rise are not just evident in Britain; throughout Europe, radical populist Eurosceptic parties are thriving.
Eurosceptic parties also won pluralities in France and Denmark and did well in Hungary, Austria and the Netherlands. The populist parties are varied ideologically and in their tone. Many are right-wing, but there are also left-wing parties like Syriza in Greece which have surged in response to austerity. Some, like Golden Dawn, which won three of Greece's EU Parliament seats, are outright neo-Nazis. What generally binds these parties together is support for Euroscepticism, xenophobia, and anti-migration policy.
The ongoing economic stagnation in Europe since the 2008 economic crisis has created fertile ground for populism. EU GDP grew at a rate of 0.1 percent in 2013 after decreasing by 0.4 percent in 2012. Countries with a history of profligate spending, like Greece, have been sent bailouts with austerity measures attached, angering locals who see a loss of sovereignty and raising the ire of citizens of countries like Germany that have been fiscally responsible.
While a lot of these concerns play into cultural issues, it is evident that the EU has a lot of problems as an economic entity. Each EU member country, though part of the same economic system, has different competitive advantages, different efficiencies, different amounts of labor mobility, and different laws based on the specific and unique conditions of each country, in addition to different structural and economic fundamentals and geographic locations. To put them all together in a currency union that is not strictly federalized would necessarily have draining and detrimental effects, which have been evident in the ongoing Eurocrisis of the past two years. There are far too many mismatches. One cannot compare Greek labor laws and French working hours, or German productivity and Spanish efficiency.
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