The European Union continues to face a number of challenges after the United Kingdom’s referendum resulted in an advisory vote to leave the EU. Brexiteers, as the media refers to those who voted in the close majority, hope that Europe can return to the former status of a continental trading bloc. More recently, the Dutch voted against a proposed deal with Ukraine. Meanwhile, Greece continues to harangue the EU about further bailouts and limiting the admission of refugees. In the words of the modern media, today the European Union is in crisis. In response one needs to ask why European idealism waned and faded.
It began after the Second World War with the laudable desire to prevent future conflict in a region that had previously been rife with it. To do so, two approaches were required. The first was to make people better off economically, akin to the argument used by the United States to turn nations away from communism. The second approach involved somehow making people of different nations recognise that they had much in common with each other.
The first approach explains why the European Union began as the European Economic Area internally and the European Economic Community externally. The members of the EEA recovered from the economic consequences of World War II together. As they did so, the Community later became a Union but not a more perfect one. The new EU’s constating documents did not contain the aspirational words from the preamble of the American constitution.
And therein lies the problem generally and with the second approach. In retrospect, in order to show how much people of different nations had in common, there appears to have been a subconscious impetus to make Europe one grand society.
Over the years, homogeneity seems to have been the precise aim toward what was hoped would become a federal Europe. For example, the same brand name businesses can be found in all of the High Streets around Europe. Shopping in a foreign country has now become a bland experience, for what is on offer everywhere else is also always available at home.
At the same time, the European Commission and the European Parliament have worked on over-regulating the lives of all its citizens in the same way. This legal blanket applies to all regardless of any other possible factors.
Today, most countries in the Union are using the same currency as if the economies are the same across the board, ignoring the fact that the economic powerhouses of Germany and Sweden are not the same as their poorer cousins in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy.
What the European Union is now facing is a popular rebellion. What has inadvertently been created is a region where difference is not welcome and the different can be excoriated and shunned.
For years Europe has avoided fitting square pegs into round holes. This may explain the refusal to allow Turkey into membership and current issues facing the UK Labour Party and elsewhere over antisemitism. At least Protestants and Catholics are both Christian, both mainstream. Jews and Muslims are not. But why should they be excluded from modern European life or at the very least not be considered proper Europeans no matter what they contribute to the countries in which they live?
Until Europe recognises that differences can help cement what different peoples have in common, the Union will continue to be inherently or subconsciously racist.