Historian Eric Hobsbawm was no friend of nationalism.
Raised as a Jew in the ruins of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, he was instinctively suspicious of all claims to national belonging. But in the early 1990s, when a new group of nationalist parties entered the European Parliament, arguing that immigration was a deadly threat to communities, he offered a surprising interpretation. The appeal of anti-immigrant politics, he surmised, lay less in national pride than in its ability to fill a hole at the heart of European self-understanding. “The only way to define group identity was to define outsiders who did not belong to the group,” he wrote.
This word has a strange ring to Europe today. More than six weeks after tens of thousands of migrants crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in hopes of gaining passage to mainland Europe, the topic of immigration continues to dominate the conversation on the continent. A common reaction across Europe’s capitals has been to blame Spain, which blames the surge on relatively lenient immigration policies, and to promise to make its borders less permeable. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and thousands of others are still camping in Ceuta. struggle Despite efforts to contain the fallout, the problem is unlikely to subside anytime soon.
This uproar is clearly concerned about more than immigration. Opinion polls show that European voters are very concerned about immigration and want it addressed, but such concerns outweigh objective reality. Instead, the topic became a useful kaleidoscope of discontent, a prism through which to view all of the continent’s ills. Such a worldview is fraught with problems. But there are deeper reasons for the entire continent’s obsession with outsiders than the continued arrival of immigrants. That’s because Europe doesn’t know what it is.
In European debates, immigration is not simply presented as a problem to be managed. Instead, governments are now held responsible for everything from poor social services to stagnant wages and crime. For Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders, the country’s housing crisis and debt level It is best explained by the influx of foreigners. This kind of thinking is no longer confined to the periphery. For example, in Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s coalition government cause It conveys to newcomers the dilapidated condition of many cities in this country.
Attempts to fact-check such claims – claiming that the impact of immigration is ambiguous, or warning that an aging continent needs new immigrants to survive – miss the point. the study indicates The far right’s surest foothold is in areas with relatively few immigrants, like the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where Alternative for Germany just won in a landslide. European migration anxieties seem increasingly free-floating, through which they can make sense of the continent’s overlapping crises. This idea will continue to occupy European minds for the foreseeable future.
The first reason is external. The effects of global inequality were already evident in Hobsbawm’s time. He pointed out how in the 1990s Europe was “surrounded by poor countries with armies of young people looking for modest jobs in a wealthy world that enriched men and women by the standards of El Salvador and Morocco.” His conclusions were prescient. “These frictions will be a major factor in national and global politics for decades to come.”
In fact, these tensions are actually deepening. While global inequality has technically declined over the past three decades, that decline can be largely attributed to one country. China. In general, the difference in living standards between Western countries and the rest of the world remains dizzyingly wide, a stubborn fact of world politics exacerbated by regional conflicts. It has also achieved an amazing new level of visibility on the screens of smartphones, which are now widely used in developing countries.
The second reason is internal. Because the European Union was built as a common market before becoming anything like a nation-state, it has always been difficult to clearly articulate what it represents. In the late 1990s, this problem became apparent in the design of the banknotes that made up the union’s new currency. Eventually, the euro came to be decorated with abstract shapes such as arches and aqueducts rather than the recognizable letters of European heritage. For some scholars, this indicated that the union was above all a federation of consumers.
In recent years, unions have embarked on a quest to define a “common European homeland,” as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen puts it. Together with the EU Research Chair, the EU’s executive branch is currently funding initiatives aimed at increasing Europeans’ self-awareness. One was a highly publicized campaign by a committee called “.protect what’s important”, in which the public was asked to value the union’s founding principles: “freedom of speech,” “freedom of science,” and “freedom of the press.” Also set to accept banknotes transformation.
Such initiatives will no doubt appeal to some in the continent’s besieged border regions, such as Ukraine and Georgia, where young, educated populations still have high hopes for European membership. However, it is unclear how successful such campaigns will be. A series of primarily economic, but also cultural and social crises have made the argument for unification even more difficult. At the same time, the disorientation was further exacerbated by the transformation of many European countries into tourist-driven service economies.
This uncertainty about the nature and future of the continent is surprisingly – and perhaps ironically – evident on the far right. One of Wilders’ favorite places in the Netherlands is the Fairytale Forest. eftelinglocated in the southern part of the country. This theme park features gnomes, dragons, and other characters from fairy tales, but rather than being an example of local folklore, it is a world of imagination that lies entirely outside of history. The far right likes “”lord of the rings” suggests a similar relationship between fantasy and reality.
Perhaps we shouldn’t expect political coherence from 450 million diverse people without a unified nation or a single language. However, nationalism at the member state level is rarely fragile because it relies on the boogeyman of immigration. Unable to systematically wrest power from Brussels, Europe’s far right clings to anti-immigration antics where opposition no longer exists. After all, centrists and the far right are in agreement on strict border enforcement and deportation efforts.
The results are something of a mystery. Immigration is attacked from virtually all sides as a threat to European identity. However, in the 21st century, it is unclear what exactly that identity is. No longer the home of a world-spanning empire, much less a global hegemon, this continent has an impression of both prestige and provinciality, a cultural power suffering from geopolitical marginalization. Civic Europeanism, despite all the best efforts of the Commission, will prove to be a weak antidote to such ills. Instead, it is up to immigrants to fill the void at the heart of Europe’s self-image.
Anton Jaeger contributes as an opinion writer. He is a researcher at the University of Leuven in Belgium and the author of Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences.
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