After Europe

"Ivan Krastev is a Bulgarian academic. The clue, I guess, is in the title. His point is that immigration is the biggest threat to the EU. And this taps into something that I’ve long felt, which is that two years ago, we were being asked whether to stay in or leave an organization which is constantly in flux. No one knows whether, 20 years from now, we will have been the first of many and will look like the ones who predicted the future or whether we’ll be left on the outside of an increasingly prosperous club, kicking our heels and wishing we hadn’t done it. No one knows, because no one knows which way the EU will go. Krastev’s other point, which I found really interesting, was the gap between western and eastern Europe. Obviously the broader the EU becomes, the harder it becomes to keep everyone’s interests aligned. When it was purely a western European club, everyone was more or less singing from the same hymn sheet. Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the carrot of EU membership was held out to all those countries that had been part of the Warsaw Pact or the Soviet Union. And a lot of them came in in 2004. “I think one of the reasons it is so divisive is that we’ve got, fundamentally, two countries here.” Krastev argues that in western Europe, people tend to trust their own politicians more than Brussels politicians. In eastern Europe, it’s the other way around. They’re so used to their own politicians being crooked, that they believe that the EU has got greater standards of governance, of transparency of regulation and so on. And therefore they respect the EU more. That, in turn, further erodes trust in their own governments and also means that more people go from east to west than vice versa. Krastev’s big thing is that by 2050 Bulgaria’s population will be down by a third and that third will be entirely the kind of people that a country needs. You’re losing all your youngest, best, brightest, most dynamic people and you’ll be left with older, more tired, less educated people and you will not have a country that can run itself properly. It is slightly doom-laden, but it’s an interesting look at how it could all evolve, which is important. The flipside I guess is that if you look at China, one of the reasons it worked after 1977 when Deng Xiaoping started the economic reforms was that there was such a diaspora worldwide of Chinese people, especially in other countries in Asia. They had business skills and money they could bring back and that became one of the main drivers of China’s economic expansion. They weren’t actually starting from scratch. I guess Krastev’s fear is that what will happen to the likes of Bulgaria and Romania is that they will have all the downsides of being in the EU and none of the upsides. It’s a fairly gloomy look at the whole thing, quite a Bulgarian look, if I may say so. Yes. Again, he’s big on this idea of citizens of somewhere and citizens of everywhere. You can see where the fault lines are already. Greece is a big fault line, Italy is an increasing fault line. It’s not the United States of America, which took relatively unsophisticated states and put them together. They now have a very successful, functioning country, where states have their own autonomy but everyone buys into the idea of the United States of America. The United States of Europe is not and is never going to be that. You cannot force some of the most advanced countries in the world to knuckle under a single political system. You just can’t. A few years ago I wrote a thing for a client about the world in 2050 and mischievously—and without any kind of evidence—suggested that Europe would split North-South, with the French in the middle trying frantically to decide whether they were northern or southern. The Spanish, the Portuguese, the Italians, the French to a degree, the Greeks, look at life in a very different way from the British, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Belgians, the Dutch. A lot of it is simply climate. But there’s a reason why we go on holiday there a lot more than vice versa, it’s because it’s a lovely place to go on holiday. But there’s also a reason why they come and work in London. Yes, we would have been the first rats off the sinking ship and will look very wise after the event."

"I’ve never met the author of this book because I’m stuck here in Tel Aviv, at the far end of the world. I love this book because Krastev explains to us the way Eastern Europeans think and this is something we don’t naturally see. A lot of the resentment in Eastern Europe to liberalism has to do with resentment to the previous process of Russification of these countries and their desire to come back and gain their autonomy, to re-identify themselves as nations. He rightly says that the celebratory mood in the 90s that ‘We’re all liberals seeking national self-determination’ was a misguided view. Eastern Europeans said, ‘We’re going back to our roots and those roots were never liberal. They were more Romantic roots and very different from the West’. The West just imposed an interpretation on the East and I think this is very important to understand why Europe is never—or not likely, or at least not at the moment, who knows, no one dares to predict anything now—going to create unity. There’s more populism in the East. He doesn’t write about it but, for me, the German case is always fascinating. East and West Germany were separated only for 45 years in history, it’s a very short period of time, but still the differences are there. You go to East Germany and, immediately, you know you’re in the East. It’s not something that has evaporated. Reading Krastev opened my mind to a new and very interesting way of thinking. I think it’s true."