Populist Pressure and Migration Policy in Europe

While Europe is facing critical issues such as the management of Brexit, a rogue ally across the Atlantic coming shortly for a visit that could go quite horribly, and the governance of the euro, the topic of the hour is migration - not because numbers are up (in fact they're down) but because the populist right is seizing the moment to press advantage. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is recently reelected and setting the pace for Central European populists and harder line conservatives across the continent, the leader of Italian's far-right Lega, Matteo Salvini, is an empowered interior minister, Bavaria's conservatives are trying to fend off the Alternative for Germany in upcoming state elections by threatening to bring down Angela Merkel, Austria's right-wing coalition is about to take over the European Council's rotating presidency. And all of these characters have a kindred spirit in the White House and notably good relations with the Kremlin.

My Brookings colleague Jessica Brandt and I wrote about the political developments and what's on the table for migration policy at the European Council summit this week: 

Despite Salvini’s appalling rhetoric (“We need a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighborhood by neighborhood,” he said in an interview last year that received renewed attention after he announced a “census” of the country’s Roma community), Italy needs a common European solution more than any other government present at the summit—with the possible exception of Germany.

Salvini may have a kindred spirit in Hungary’s vitriolic, anti-migrant Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose parliament just passed a series of laws that allow the government to imprison individuals and nongovernmental organizations for assisting undocumented migrants, but geography matters. And Hungary and its Visegrád Group partners—the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia—are largely responsible for the failure to reach agreement on a collective response within the bloc, rejecting EU proposals to implement resettlement quotas that would ease the burden on frontline countries including Italy... Ultimately, if Italy wants a refugee burden-sharing scheme, and the perpetuation of Europe’s system of open borders, Merkel, not Orbán, is its ally.

The fault lines on the issue are deep, and running between as well as within nations, they threaten the EU and the chancellor who has been its dominant leader for the past 13 years. 

All the while, people are at risk. More than 34,000 migrants and refugees have died attempting to find a new home in Europe since the early 1990s. According to survivor accounts, more than 200 people drowned off the coast of Libya in several unrelated incidents just last week. As the stalemate between European countries deepens, almost 350 refugees and migrants remain stranded on two boats in the Mediterranean. The geopolitics of this week’s meeting are salient, but its human consequences are every bit as significant.

Suspicious Minds: U.S.-German Relations in the Trump Era

Earlier this week, the Transatlantic Academy published its latest annual collaborative report, Suspicious Minds: U.S.-German Relations in the Trump Era. I edited the report as the Academy's program officer, and am one of 11 co-authors, along with executive director Stephen F. Szabo and our fellows Frédéric Bozo (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Stefan Fröhlich (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg), Wade Jacoby (Brigham Young University), Harold James (Princeton University), Michael Kimmage (Catholic University of America), Hans Kundnani (German Marshall Fund of the United States), Yascha Mounk (Harvard University), Mary Elise Sarotte (University of Southern California), and Heidi Tworek (University of British Columbia). 

The Academy works on a different topic related to transatlantic relations every year. The future of relations between the United States and Germany was a good fit for the final year of an institution which had been a German-American partnership. Despite the close cooperation between the Obama administration and German government under Angela Merkel, especially close after the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, we saw some long-standing and developing tensions in the relationship - revelations of National Security Agency surveillance badly damaged German trust in the United States including on the elite level, German distrust of U.S. corporate power has made the chances of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership highly questionable and is heightened in relation to digital giants like Google and Facebook in our digital age, Washington has complained about Germany's low defense spending, its unsustainable  policies towards to eurozone, and its huge trade surplus, Berlin joined the BRICS in abstaining on the Libya intervention resolution at the Security Council, and the sharp divide over Iraq - where Germany was far wiser - was not so long ago. 

Into this already more-fragile-than-it-seems situation comes the global catastrophe of Donald Trump as U.S. president. As we write, Trump "challenges four key assumptions on which German foreign policy has been based since the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949: the assumption that the United States’ posture toward Western Europe is predictable; the assumption that the United States sees Western Europe’s security as vital to its own strategic interests and would therefore come to Germany’s defense if needed; the assumption that the United States will defend and extend the liberal international trade and financial order; and the assumption that the German–American alliance is underwritten by such key political values as democracy, the rule of law, and human rights." Trump leaves U.S. allies (and especially security-exposed trade-dependent status-quo ones like Germany) with a nasty dilemma - "If they assume the best and embrace the status quo, they risk being caught unprepared. But if they assume the worst, act suspiciously, and formulate a radically new foreign policy strategy, they could hasten the demise of an alliance that has protected them for many decades. So far, Germany is taking a pragmatic wait-and-educate approach, trying to inform and advise a president unschooled in transatlantic issues and history and hoping that the lessons take."

Our recommendations for the Trump administration essentially boil down to continue to cooperate with the Europeans, don't change U.S. foreign policy too much, and don't try to destroy the European Union. The federal bureaucracy, state and local governments, and the private sector should try to maintain the benefits of transatlantic cooperation amidst the chaos at the top. Meanwhile, Germany does need to do more to provide for its own security, in its own interest, and we have some good suggestions on creative ways to do so including DARPA-style defense research that could yield long-term economic gains and hiring top-notch cybersecurity people away from the private sector with good salaries (for more detail on these ideas, see Heidi Tworek in War On the Rocks). It also needs to strengthen Europe by rebalancing the European economy, and play the long game and not give up on the United States. This Trump shall pass.

Give the report a read if you get a chance - I'm proud of it. The Transatlantic Academy is closing shop at the end of May, but we'll have a few more policy papers come out later this month, potentially in to June, and a few more events. 

Welcome / Reflections on the Election in France

Welcome to my new website. I'm Ted Reinert, I'm a 34-year-old American living in northern Virginia, and I spend much of my time thinking about politics in wider Europe, in my own country, and around the world. I'm planning to use this space to promote my published writings and offer some additional longer-than-140-character commentary, largely on matters of international affairs and politics, but occasionally on some of my other interests like cinema and travel (though I love Twitter as a news source and way of sharing good journalism and more). Since I was last active on my Blogspot site The Penguin Revolutions, I've been working as program officer at the Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, a heavily editorial role working with brilliant fellows on topics like liberal order, religion, Russia, and Germany. I've written and presented some of my own commentary in recent years - most recently on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit to the Trump White House (on Al Jazeera, which can be seen here and here, and on the Academy website) - but am planning more of this going forward as the Academy closes its doors - journalism was my first career and I love writing.

Five years ago, living in Brussels and working as a researcher at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, I visited the northern French metropolis of Lille on a day trip for the second round of the French presidential election, and blogged about it. Sharply critical of Germany's reticence to take steps that might actually solve the euro crisis, I welcomed François Hollande's victory (as did hundred of people on Lille's Place du General de Gaulle), while keeping my eye on the long campaign in my own country, which thankfully resulted in Barack Obama's reelection. In my view, Obama remains the smartest, wisest, and most inspiring political leader of our time, prudent with restraint in foreign policy and successful domestically despite scorched-earth opposition. Hollande, for his part, wasn't so bad. But vexing problems of providing good stable, jobs amidst technological change and global competition continue to haunt the United States and Europe alike, and so do the old xenophobic nationalist demons. Illiberalism has been on the march since May 2012 - Vladimir Putin tightening authoritarianism in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan doing the same in Turkey, Viktor Orban consolidating "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's coup and crackdown in Egypt, continued carnage in Syria, the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, Poland's fall to a vengeful Law and Justice Party, the victory of the mendacious Brexiteers, and the tragic twists that unbelievably brought us U.S. President Donald Trump. Against all this, Merkel's frustrating inflexibility in the management of the common European currency doesn't seem so bad. (Although it too is dangerous. I'm worried about Italy). 

France has averted a catastrophe far right vs. far left runoff with the first round first-place finish of Emmanuel Macron (an alumnus of the German Marshall Fund's Marshall Memorial Fellowship program, by the way, and we're very proud). Macron waved the flag of the European Union, and it helped him to victory. The dike has continued to hold against the far right in continental Western Europe, as Sylvie Kauffmann points out - perhaps the post-World War II wariness of nationalism is stronger there, perhaps the politicians of the center right have simply been more principled there than in the United States and United Kingdom. The defeat of Marine Le Pen is highly likely - and France doesn't have an electoral college to get in the way - but one can't be too complacent. Nor, in defeat, will she be spent as a political force. 

But a President Macron would have his work cut out for him, governing without an established party behind him, and challenging the German position on the euro to try to rebalance the European Union economy - in a German election year. On that note, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis's account of his dealings with Minister Macron two years ago is interesting. 

Thanks for reading.