Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1 - [80]

On the one hand, the EU has been the ultimate technocratic sphere. It is true that European integration has been driven by larger-than-life politicians such as Schuman, Adenauer and De Gasperi at the beginning of the European project and Giscard and Schmidt and Kohl and Mitterrand later on.

But the EU's day-to-day agenda has always been driven by practical steps rather than grand political visions. The “Monnet method” named after the key architect of European integration, the French official Jean Monnet — was designed to generate a consensus among European diplomats for limited projects of practical cross-border integration. The idea was that each of these projects would lead to the integration of further policy areas — from Europe's single market to its foreign policy.

By building the EU in an incremental way, the technocrats managed to lower political temperatures in national capitals and find agreement among bureaucrats who were more interested in negotiating deals than grandstanding for the national media. They first created a coal and steel community, then a customs union, then a single market and finally a single currency. But, as the EU matured as a political project, its very success as a bureaucratic phenomenon fuelled a populist backlash at a national level.

It started in Britain in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher famously wielded her handbag around Europe. But what began as a localised phenomenon gradually grew following Maastricht into a pan-European force embodied today by such disparate forces as Geert Wilders, the True Finns, Umberto Bossi and Marine Le Pen. There are now populists from the north, south, east and west as well as from the left and right. But although they have different ideologies, they all share a sense that politics has become the preserve of elites who are serving themselves rather than common people. In particular, they portray the EU as a conspiracy to build “Europe against the people”. In its place, the populists aim to mobilise the “people against Europe” — leading, in the words of one senior Dutch diplomat, to the “democratic destruction of the EU”.

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For many populists, the EU looks after the welfare of big business and banks; removes border controls and protects minorities at home; while promoting globalisation abroad. According to Le Pen, this is leading to a new split between so-called mainstream parties and the new populist movements: “Both left and right are for the EU, the euro, free trade and immigration,” she has said. “For 30 years, [they] have been the same; the real fracture is now between those who support globalisation and nationalists.”⁶⁴

Technocracy and populism are mirror images: one is managerial, the other charismatic; one seeks incremental change, the other is attracted by grandiose rhetoric; one is about problem solving, the other about the politics of identity. They also have different models of legitimacy. The technocrats have sought to build legitimacy for the EU by trying to deliver positive outcomes for different interest groups — businesses, farmers, students, etc. Populism, on the other hand, has emerged during a period in which politics is organised not in factories or party meetings but on the internet. Its claims about distribution centre around identity.

However, although European technocracy and national populism are opposites, they are also mutually reinforcing. At a European level we can see this in the saga of the Lisbon Treaty. In 2005, the people of France and the Netherlands rejected the European constitution; Europe's leaders responded with a technocratic solution that sidestepped public opinion. Thus, on the one hand, as EU leaders try to remove European integration from national politics, the EU's legitimacy becomes more brittle, which in turn means that policymakers want to evade public opinion even more. On the other hand, as the EU becomes even more technocratic, the calls for democracy and referendums become stronger, which in turn creates a space for populist parties to emerge. The situation in Italy and Greece shows the reverse: that national populism can lead to a technocratic backlash. Here, European markets, following a signal from Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, forced

Berlusconi and Papandreou out of office. Berlusconi was being punished for his populism and Papandreou for failing to develop the power to govern. [...]

Thus, from Athens to Helsinki, besieged elites are now caught between the destructive power of feral markets and Eurosceptic populists. Germany seems to be bucking the trend as its political class rediscovers its traditional pro-European rhetoric while its technocrats in the ECB and the Constitutional Court make common cause with the tabloids to set a Eurosceptic agenda. Across the rest of Europe the populists define the political options for all parties. In Slovakia, the ultimate cosmopolitan, European-minded government found itself opposing the bailout of Greece (although it claimed that it was anti-European to expect a poor country like Slovakia to bail out the richer debtor-nations). In Finland, a coalition of passionate pro-European politicians signed a deal on collateral that nearly sank the EU's entire plan to save the euro.