A no-deal Brexit approaches

March 29, 2019 has come and gone and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains a member state of the European Union. But probably not for long.

I interviewed my Brookings Center on the United States and Europe colleague Amanda Sloat on Facebook Live that morning just before Parliament voted Theresa May’s exit deal with the EU down for a third time, as we expected. Amanda’s been watching and explaining the twists and turns of Brexit, including nine blogs for Brookings on the “Brexit Endgame.” I’d also recommend her recent Foreign Affairs piece, her paper “Divided kingdom: How Brexit is remaking the UK’s constitutional order” from last fall, and her Time piece on Northern Ireland from last summer.

My own intuition for the past month or more is that the U.K. and the EU are headed to a break without a deal. May is a Conservative prime minister who set out to deliver a Conservative Brexit, and she negotiated one representing the weaker side against a unified European Union which prioritized Ireland’s bottom line of no hard border on the island of Ireland. But with May reliant on Northern Ireland’s hardline Protestant Democratic Unionist Party for her parliamentary majority since the 2017 snap elections, no special economic arrangement could be worked out for Northern Ireland. The hard Brexiteers in her party, heedless of the interests of the people of Northern Ireland, eventually made clear that they preferred the substantial risks of a no-deal Brexit to the potential that the U.K. stays in a customs union with the EU - if only in the contingency that they can’t come to a negotiated arrangement otherwise in 2020 under a backstop set up to guard the gains of the peace process. And May didn’t have enough votes between the two parties and from a few Labour MPs willing to buck their party to get her Conservative Brexit deal over the finish line.

Unless a fourth try by May works, we’re down to a no-deal crash out (which some hardliners welcome) on April 12 (or as late as May 22 if the EU is feeling generous enough to give the Brits more time to prepare), or the Parliament wresting away control to deliver a softer Brexit with the help of the EU for another extension which might well require general and European Parliament elections in the U.K. The crash out still seems likeliest to me, because the alternative is complicated and precarious - it requires an affirmative majority for something, which has been lacking thus far, it requires the acquiescence of 27 other EU countries with reasons to be torn about keeping the U.K. in for longer, and it faces hostility from both the lame duck prime minister and the hard Brexiteers. That alternative is still possible - fear of no-Brexit is what led the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and Dominic Raab to vote for May’s deal on Friday when they are on the record preferring no-deal - but time is running out. It’s going to be an interesting week in the British Parliament.

The mutating left of Western Europe and the illiberal states of Central and Eastern Europe

Last week, Brookings published a suite of 20+ “Democracy & Disorder” papers covering democracy issues around the globe and implications for geopolitics and international order. Given the troubled state of Europe and the West these days, a number of them focused on the Old Continent. I co-authored two of them.

Célia Belin and I have followed up our March 2018 American Interest piece on the “Macronification” of Europe with a paper on how "the challenges of globalization, identity, democracy, and the governance of the European Union have weakened social democratic political parties over the past 20 years.” In the second half of the paper, we categorize political parties on or stemming from the left in Western Europe into four categories “based on radical versus mainstream ideology and experimental versus traditional methods” - the Established Left of the classic center-left social democrats (but also including Germany’s rising Greens, on the more experimental side), the Radical Left which yielded Syriza’s revolt in Greece four years ago, the Experimental Left which includes Italy’s Five Star Movement, now governing in coalition with the far-right League, and the Extreme Center embodied in Emmanuel Macron. We recommend U.S. policymakers do more to engage to the European left on Russia and understand its approach to sovereignty and that the American left engage its transatlantic counterpart.

We published another long-in-the-works report the same day, on “The anatomy of illiberal states,” analyzing the tools that illiberal leaders of NATO and EU member states have used to erode checks and balances on their power, which I co-authored with Alina Polyakova and Torrey Taussig plus Kemal Kirişci, Amanda Sloat, James Kirchick, Melissa Hooper, Norman Eisen, and Andrew Kenealy, who wrote case studies on Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Our many recommendations boil down to a tougher but not carrot-free approach for the U.S. Congress and executive branch, key actors in the European Union, and NATO to member governments which have damaged their countries’ democracies.

I encourage you to check out the reports, hope you find them interesting/useful, and welcome your thoughts.

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.

European Politics is Turning French

I have a piece out in The American Interest, co-authored with my Brookings Institution Center on the United States and Europe colleague Célia Belin, titled "European politics Is Turning French." (If you're blocked by the paywall, the full text can also be read at Brookings' Order from Chaos). We describe ongoing political realignment in Europe, with the pro-EU center consolidating against centrifugal nationalist-populists, a process that damages the center-left in particular given the center-right bent of economic governance in the bloc. 

The 2017 French electoral cycle may be the textbook example of this overhaul of European politics... With Macron’s rise to power, French politics have gone through a process of “Macronification,” a unification of centrist constituencies around a pro-European agenda, leaving little air for anything but radical far-Left and far-Right parties adopting an anti-EU line... While both of France’s mainstream parties were badly wounded by “Macronification,” the Socialist Party (PS) was obliterated...

Indeed, in France and elsewhere, commitment to Europe feels increasingly like the kiss of death for social democrats. Although the European project is, fundamentally, a politically liberal idea—designed to transcend the dark forces of nationalism—to which the European Left is deeply attached, the European Union of today hardly resembles the leftist ideal of a “United States of Europe"... The European Left finds itself in the paradoxical situation of defending the symbolic value of the European Union while deploring its current policies. Paying a high price for their European commitment, leftwing parties either accede to power as responsible stakeholders stripped of their ideology and identity, or watch from outside government as the Right chips away at what remains of the legacy of 20th-century social democracy.

Where the left / center-left in Europe and America are going in this age of right-wing populists on the rise is one of my primary research interests and one I have in common with Célia, so expect more from us on this topic. 

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.