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Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
NEWS ANALYSIS European right taps into fears of an EU 'invisible invasion'
Steven Erlanger The New York Times
Monday, May 6, 2002
VIENNA As the European Union moves inexorably toward completion, Europeans
are awakening to a less sovereign, less comfortable world, prompting the kind of
anxiety among the elderly and the poor that continues to feed the growth of the far
right.
The strong showing of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of France's presidential
election seemed a new endorsement of the racism and xenophobia that the 73-year-
old has been pressing for 30 years. Though he lost to Jacques Chirac in the final
round Sunday, Le Pen has created an earthquake.
His anti-crime and anti-immigration themes have found echoes across Europe, from
Austria and Italy to Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany.
But Le Pen is also tapping into a new anxiety about the loss of national identity, made
more acute by the prospect of Europeanization and globalization, which he combines
to call "Euro-globalization."
By tying this frightening new world to American actions, Le Pen is planting ground
prepared for him nicely, with fertilizer and nutrients, by France's left, with its
complaints about "Coca-colonization," McDonald's and genetically modified food.
"There is a deep concern over issues of personal and national identity in which the
hard right is rooted," said Simon Serfaty, director of European studies at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies. "People feel an invisible invasion: too many
immigrants, the European Union, the intrusion of American culture."
Europeans are discovering that as the European Union completes itself - both
geographically, as it absorbs nations of the former Soviet bloc, and institutionally,
with its large library of laws and shared currency - the nation-state for which so many
of their parents and grandparents fought and died is itself dying.
The European Union was born out of the cataclysm of World War II, to save the
nation-state. But the concept of union is now inescapable.
"Europeans are recycling the nation-states into member-states, which will have to
keep to a discipline that will deny them the national sovereignty for which they fought
so many wars in the past," Serfaty said.
Tied to all that change is an anxiety that swells from the bottom: that Brussels will
not
take care of its citizens as gently and lovingly as the national capitals have in the
past.
Faceless European institutions now define national monetary policy and regulate
what people drive, what is safe to eat, even how they dispose of their garbage.
Added to these sacrifices of traditional liberty is the phenomenon of immigration, with
the citizens of the colonial empires Europe fought to create now returning to the
metropole - but darker, younger, poorer.
This becomes wrapped up in an increased and hardly illegitimate fear of crime,
which itself becomes tied to the fear of Muslim terrorism that followed Sept. 11.
The main question for Europeans, Serfaty said, is "how do you become something
different without being turned into something else, or something less?"
Europe's major parties have had little to say to this anxiety, said Christoph Bertram,
director of the Institute for International Affairs and Security, which advises the
German government.
"It's political correctness, but we're not airing issues like immigration and crime,"
Bertram said. He pointed to the large numbers of Europeans who say politics is not
relevant to their lives. "The establishment pretends that these are not serious issues,
or if you raise them you side with the unwashed and the fascists."
Exploiting a general disappointment with Europe's mainstream politicians, evident in
the lower voter turnout, Le Pen and others who have modernized their fascism, like
Joerg Haider of Austria and Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands, have made
extraordinary showings in percentage terms. Haider drew 27 percent in 1999;
Fortuyn polled more than 34 percent in local elections in Rotterdam and is expected
to win 20 of 150 seats in Parliament in elections on May 15.
Haider, Le Pen and others have discussed forming a pan-European party to counter
the European Union, a threat centrist politicians are taking seriously.
Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford-based historian, sees Europe's "greatest single
failure" in its inability "to integrate immigrants from the European periphery as
European citizens." The correlation between the Le Pen vote and the percentage of
"non-EU foreigners" in France, displayed by Le Monde in a color map, is startling.
Europe's greatest challenge, beyond job creation, Garton Ash said, "is coming up
with our own European notion of the American dream."
For Mark Hunter, a researcher at Insead, a business school in Fontainebleau,
France, Le Pen's success is partly explained by the failure of mainstream politicians
of left or right to have any serious answer to crime and immigration.
Worse, he said, "the left has been hammering for years on the menace to French
culture and identity of American culture."
By doing so, he said, "the left helped legitimize the idea that French culture is in
danger of disappearing, and this has helped to legitimize the discourse of the French
far right. The National Front has explicitly made the connection."
Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune
End<{{{
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