FLASH
Shkruar nga Simon Kuper
The lack of enemies weakened Europe for a long time...
It is an old principle of political thought that, in order to build a collective identity, you need an enemy. An adversary can force people to unite. Hitler played this role for Britain, and the Soviet Union for the United States. With the collapse of the Soviet enemy, American unity collapsed.
But the European Union has only gained external enemies in the last decade: first the Brexiteers, then Vladimir Putin, with China lurking in the background, and now, finally, the perfect enemy, Donald Trump. He has done perhaps more to unite Europe than any European has ever done.
The lack of enemies had long weakened Europe. There simply didn’t seem to be much reason to fight for the cause. When I recently researched the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, I was struck by the fact that almost no one opposed it. Here was a centuries-old ideal, a united Europe, that had never before materialized, and yet when a handful of leaders whose countries had just fought each other in a terrible war agreed to it, with little consultation with voters, almost everyone said: okay. The US supported the EEC, the UK did not join but barely opposed it, the Soviets became more concerned about NATO, and large parliamentary majorities in the six founding countries ratified the creation of the EEC.
A technocratic economic union without enemies inspired little emotion. No one would die for the blue and gold flag, and only a few fanatical Ryder Cup fans ever waved it at a sporting event. In TV series and movies, the hero fighting against “geopolitical enemies” was almost always American, not European.
Brexit became the first potential existential threat to the EU. Many people thought it would trigger more exits. In 2018, Italy’s far-right leader, Matteo Salvini, shortly before entering government, compared the EU to “the sinking Titanic.” In response to this threat, citizens’ support for the union rose to its highest level since 1983, the European Commission’s Eurobarometer survey reported in spring 2018. Brexit has quelled continental movements to leave the EU.
Putin then replaced the Brexiteers as Europe’s main enemy and helped advance European unity. By the fall of 2024, even before Trump’s election, 74 percent of respondents to a Eurobarometer survey said they felt like citizens of the EU, the highest level in more than 20 years.
But Trump is the best enemy yet. If a TV writers’ room were to design the perfect villain, he would usurp the home of your trusted protector. He would fill the minds of even people who think about politics for only five minutes a week. He would threaten to harm you, as Trump did during his “Greenland moment” in January. And he would embody the opposite of your group’s stated ideals, in this case peace and democracy. Trump also comes with a fine gallery of sub-villains: American tech oligarchs, whose products inhabit the European psyche like nothing else before.
I have never seen Europeans feel so European before. Last week I attended an elite meeting in the extremely Atlanticist Netherlands, where the prevailing view was that we had lost the US and had to defend ourselves. One participant, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Dutch secretary general of NATO from 2004 to 2009, said that Europe cannot defend itself and that the US still supports NATO, but added: “I fear abandonment, but I am past the mourning phase.”
Then I watched the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland speak at Paris’s Sciences Po university, where the assembled students and even some journalists gave them a standing ovation. Finally, Europe is touching the senses. If the continent is now decolonizing itself from its American master, that is both frightening and exciting. These are not just elite emotions. The latest “Eurobazooka” poll of 7,498 Europeans, conducted for the French magazine Le Grand Continent, is shocking. The vast majority supported sending European troops to defend Greenland. Fifty-one percent said Trump is an enemy of Europe; only 8 percent called him a friend.
Three percent of German Christian Democrats, the staunchest Atlanticists, thought he was a democrat. And, unusually for a foreign policy issue, awareness of the “Greenland moment” was almost total.
The poll identified only one European political grouping divided around Trump: the far right. Some of its voters like him, others don’t. He is dividing the far right just as migration divided the European left. I have always suspected that Europe existed as something more than an unfinished single market. That may be changing. / Adapted from “Pamphlet” by “Financial Times”
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