*Deze toespraak is in het Engels
Last Thursday the Law Faculty of Maastricht University and Studio Europa came together to host a conference. Timed with the inauguration of the new term for the European Parliament and European Commission, this conference aimed to dissect and understand the EU’s ‘big narratives’—its core values, overarching agenda, and lofty ambitions.
The discussions focused on how these narratives translate into concrete actions, legislation, and their real-world impacts. The goal was to address the impending challenges for the EU’s political mandate from 2024 onwards. Adding a profound layer of insight, European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly’s keynote speech provided a compelling start, setting a reflective tone for the conference.
I am honoured to be invited to speak to you all today. I last spoke here in 2017 delivering a Jean Monnet lecture entitled “Will the EU survive another 25 years?” Donald Trump’s inauguration as US President and the recent Brexit referendum appeared to make the question salient.
I gave a qualified yes to the question and the Gods rewarded my confidence with the unleashing of a global pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the biggest EU corruption scandal in many years. But yet, here we are, in the aftermath of the European Parliament election, discussing, not the dissolution of the EU but rather what kind of EU it will be. The prevailing narrative is that the crises brought us closer, the terror induced compelling us to huddle together for warmth, not to dare to go outside on our own.
New geopolitical realities have further strengthened the narrative of strategic autonomy a narrative whose most passionate and urgent exponent is French President Macron. Inspired by Max Bloch — a French historian murdered by the Gestapo — and whose book on the fall of France criticised French political elites for their pre-war complacency — Macron believes that the same complacency is currently threatening the EU and demands urgent action.
Like the cave dwellers of old, we need to hunt and gather for ourselves, strengthen the fortifications that protect our caves and our families, and rapidly invent and produce the literal and legal weapons that will keep every possible kind of enemy out, from Chinese electric cars to the poor and the dispossessed driven from their own, lesser, caves in faraway places. The solutions will be, must be, European ones. Without them, says Macron, Europe ‘will die’just as older ‘civilisations’ have died.
Much of what he says is not in dispute. It would be rather nice not to have to rely on others for vital goods, services, energy and defence. The Covid and Ukraine crises underscored the need for self-sufficiency. As for approaching death, at the moment the Union does not appear even to have caught a cold. It remains largely healthy, its powers expanded to an unprecedented degree and marching towards an even greater union through the potential accession of multiple new members.
Your gathering here today however invites an examination of the narrative that underpins this optimism, to examinethe clash of hard facts with wishful thinking.
The post-election narrative is that the anticipated far-right takeover of the European Parliament did not materialise, that the centre held. President Macron is putting that even further to the test with his decision — a work of madness, hubris, or genius — to dissolve the national assembly, compelling the French public either to end their dalliance with the far-right or put them into power and face the consequences. The necessity of the centre to hold, the fear that it might not, is an anxious mindset long woven into global politics and which found cultural expression in the WB Yeats poem The Second Coming written in the wake of the First World War and the devastation of the Spanish flu.
Things fall apart, he wrote,the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. An — unnamed — beast is slouching towards us.
Since then, the poem has been routinely invoked in times of geopolitical and other drama. The election of Donald Trump prompted more online and other quotations from the poem than at any time in the previous three decades. Movies as diverse as Wall Street and Battlestar Galactica, and dramas such as the Sopranos have invoked it. But, and in the interests of identifying inconvenient truths, what and where exactly is that centre? And if we do identify its geographical coordinates, is it the wished-for centre of Yeats’ imagination or does it contain a hint of that slouching, approaching beast that he fears?
Post EU elections the Parliaments largest single grouping, the centre-right European People’s Party was the loudest in declaring the holding of the centre.We have won, let us celebrate, said the EPP Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Yet that centre is, at the very least, numerically different from the centre that held in 2019 and that is where convenient narrative and inconvenient truth diverge.
If we take the centre to comprise the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats/EPP and the Liberals, then the last 20 years has seen a drop in their combined percentage seat total of 20%. The two main groups alone received — roughly — 75% in 2004, the three combined 59 % in 2019, and in 2024, 56%.
Meanwhile the two far right groups have gone from 18% in 2019 to 20% this time and a possible 24% should some from the non-aligned decide to join them. And, just as the catastrophising over climate change reaches ever higher levels of panic, the Greens/European Free Alliance grouping has emerged with the lowest percentage of seats since 1984, and dropping approximately from 10 to 5 per cent in this election. So, while technically the centre has just about held, arguably, the Christian Democrats and others held on precisely because they shifted their own dial further to the right and notably vis a vis the climate crisis and migration.
As the Brexit champion Nigel Farage once said of an increasingly right -wing UK Conservative party,I didn’t change, I stayed exactly where I was. They just came closer to me.So, is it an illusion to say that the centre has held? Would it not be more honest to say that something we are choosing to call the centre held, when it’s not quite the same centre it was five years ago?And to what extent, therefore, will policies from climate to Ukraine to enlargement to migration be affected by that shift, by the desire to hold the ‘centre’, a centre as capable of changing shape and form as a desert mirage?
Another inconvenient truth of this election is that young people are no longer the mass bloc of liberal, progressive, climate crisis warriors of our sentimental imagination. Significant numbers abandoned the Greens, significant numbers supported far right candidates and notably in Germany and in France.
Is this an attempt to rattle the cages of the centrist establishment before business-as-usual returns, or something deeper, more enduring, a howl of protest at the failure of the centre to deal with the existentialist angst of those young people, their tentative future lives and are they therefore more willing than ever to hear the siren call of the extremes and particularly that of the right. The French election may tell a lot. So, given the drama that envelops us, what narrative of the Union is now unfolding? On what is our ‘community’ built?
Rejecting old nationalist ideals as intoxicating and dangerous, supporters of the EU believe in an imagined European community with a destiny beyond the dull logic of market efficiencies and harmonised regulation.
20 years ago, on the eve of the biggest round of enlargement in its history, the narrative was clear. In a speech to the European Parliament, the then-President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, declared that:
“No other — and I repeat, no other — player on the world stage can boast the same drawing power. The reason is clear. The Union has succeeded in putting the highest ideals into practice: peace, on which we have founded our Union; democracy, which we defend through all our policies; greater opportunities for economic prosperity and solidarity towards the least-favoured regions and groups. Why our model is so successful today is also clear. On its own, each country would be at the mercy of greater and more powerful political and economic entities, but, united, we can direct the process with due regard for democracy and the human dimension.”
Alone among the nations and continents of the earth, Mr Prodi had implied, the EU had succeeded in putting the universal ideals of peace, democracy, economic opportunity for all and solidarity into practice. It sat comfortably, perhaps even smugly, atop the apex of human development as an example to all. The force of its attraction, as demonstrated by the rush to enlargement, was unstoppable.
At the same time, the former President of the European Parliament, Pat Cox, painted a distinctly post-nationalist and post-identitarian vision of “conflict resolution, prosperity and creative reconciliation”. The old conflicts based on nationality and ethnicity would disappear in the melting pot of pooled sovereignty and shared prosperity, a f*ckuyama style end of history forecast. But was this in fact the high water-mark of liberal democratic hubris? We know what happened next — failed nation-building in Iraq and elsewhere, the financial and eurozone crises, a decade of institutionalised austerity, the growing awareness of the climate crisis, Trump’s presidency, and the rise of China, Russia and other authoritarian states whose ‘drawing power’ was to compete with the EU’s.
The idea of the EU as the best exemplar of universal ideals may seem overblown, but it was at least an attempt to articulate a clear and elevated purpose for the union and with democratic ideals front and centre. With a little creativity, one could almost imagine any country meeting the Copenhagen criteria if they embraced fundamental values and rights although Morocco was rejected when it applied to join in 1987. Nonetheless, in this vision, the European Union is merely a stepping stone to a global community. But is this vision now threatening to disappear, becoming more imaginary community than imagined community?
High-minded ideals were always accompanied by the promise of prosperity but when the Eurozone crisis put a brake on the convergence to German living standards that was promised to citizens of Eastern Europe and elsewhere, rule of law standards were also challenged. One might be tempted to think of Prodi’s idealism as one untested in real-world conditions — a narrative that failed at its first contact with reality.
I personally do not believe so. As I said in this university seven years ago: “no matter how old [the EU’s] old narrative becomes we must never forget that it came from a place…that put the rights of the individual, rights born of nothing more than the fact of our individual humanity, to the front and centre of our European value system.”
This narrative is indeed old now, and has lost its previous shine, but risks being supplanted by a new narrative that represents its opposite. That narrative reflects a temptation to mimic nationalist themes at a European level — a ‘civilisational’ discourse or what the author Hans Kundnani has called “regionalism”.
Unlike political communities where citizenship defines belonging, such a regionalism can take on flavours of ethnic nationalism, identity based on a shared ethnicity, language, culture or religion, sharply defining itself by what it is not.
Such ideas are not new. In 1948 Oswald Mosely, the former leader of the British Union of Fascists, sought a new vehicle for his anti-democratic and racist brand of demagoguery and founded the Union Movement, shortly afterwards launching his ‘Europe-a-nation’ policy, which called for the integration of Europe as a single entity. He believed that the common culture of European nations would allow them voluntarily to agree on political and economic union, and become a third force to compete with the two post-war superpowers, the USA and the USSR.
In 1962, a gathering of neo-fascist parties in Venice endorsed the ‘European Declaration’, which basically repeated the main principles of the Europe-a-nation policy. The vision of ‘democracy’ outlined in this policy might find a contemporary echo in some quarters. Opposition parties would be permitted, for example, but “they [would] not be able by obstruction to impede the work of an elected government and thus to thwart the people´s will”.
This movement was on the fringes of European thought and politics at this time, but it is a reminder of how ideals of European integration do not need to have post-nationalist or universalist flavour. Increasingly now policy-makers are speaking of ‘European sovereignty’ as the EU’sraison d’être.
Take President Macron’s speech on Europe in April, setting out his vision for the continent ahead of the European elections. In contrast to Prodi’s calm conviction about the EU’s magnetic ‘drawing power’, Macron displays an anxious concern about its diminishing appeal:
“Our liberal democracy is increasingly criticized…everywhere in our Europe, our values and our culture are threatened…with people thinking that authoritarian approaches would somehow be more effective and attractive, threatened also because our dreams and our narratives are less and less European…Above all, it is much less powerful in its ability to produce grand narratives. There are grand narratives that make the world dream and the world is increasingly consuming narratives produced elsewhere.”
Notice the emphasis on a distinctly European culture that risks being submerged by cultural narratives produced elsewhere. The solution is to create what he calls “a Power Europe”, which he defines as “a Europe that commands, respects and ensures its security. It is a Europe that recognises that it has borders and protects them”. The need for these borders is not only a question of security or efficiency, but of our very existence. He says:If we want to protect our borders, if we want our continent to stay strong, produce, and create, it’s because after all, we’re not like the others. We must never forget that. We’re not like the others”.
In the President’s imaginary, this emphatic European exceptionalism is a product of the love of freedom, humanism and democracy deeply embedded in the ideals of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. His intent is, rightly, to inculcate pride in what Europe has brought to the world but this call to protect our borders in the interests of an endangered European culture has found echoes in other parts of our political spectrum, parties that are happy to subscribe to the notion of an existential threat without also subscribing to President Macron’s remedy. With this narrative, it is harder to distinguish the centrists from the extremists.
At a National Conservatism Conference in Brussels that same month, the Belgian neo-conservative essayist David Engels said, “As Westerners, we have not only the right, but even the moral duty, to prefer our civilization to the others”. This thinking now increasingly resonates with a large body of voters, particularly in the three largest member states.
The European Parliament still has, numerically, a working centrist majority. But winning is not just a question of power, a question of who gets this or that political bauble, but also a question of who is winning the argument, which narrative dominates. In these terms, it is much harder to remain optimistic that the ‘pro-EU centre-ground’ is holding. The main battle of narratives is no longer between pro-EU and anti-EU forces but between those who have different visions of what the EU stands for. Europe’s imagined community appears increasingly fearful, eager to draw hard boundaries, and suspicious of spies within its ranks.
When called upon to ‘defend democracy’ in a recent policy package, the European Commission’s main legislative proposal did not concern electoral reform or inclusive decision-making or improving the integrity of parliamentary politics, but instead aimed to identify which organisations might be serving foreign agendas, a move prompted by the Qatargate scandal and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but with consequences that may reach beyond that.
This may seem a long way from the work of the European Ombudsman but it is absolutely fundamental. A running theme of President Macron’s Sorbonne speech is the recognition that, globally, the “rules of the game have changed” and that is why we must build this ‘Power Europe’. The main function of an Ombudsman is to act as a check on the powerful administrative state. With non-binding powers, it can do so only if everyone agrees to abide by the rules of the game. Those rules used to be relatively clear — not only the EU’s hard, codified rules and regulations, but also common standards of justice, decency and fairness thatin themselvesconstitute the highest court of appeal.
That is how I have understood my role and indeed how the EU institutions and agencies, on the whole, have understood their roles in serving the interests of European citizens. Will a Power Europe require a change in the rules of the game? Does remaining a player in the geopolitical game mean that considerations of strength, competitiveness, order and security will increasingly trump those values to which an Ombudsman must appeal?
As the European Commission and agencies such as Frontex become increasingly powerful administrative actors in the service of Europe’s ‘geopolitical’ mission, we see some worrying trends. The narrow international relations exemption provided for in the EU’s access to documents legislation has been, in our view, misapplied to requests for documents, ranging from negotiations on energy policy with the US, to the Commission President’s international engagements, to EU sanctions imposed on Russia, to the transfer of citizens’ data outside the borders of the EU.
The number of inquiries opened by my office into the use of the exemption concerning international relations has grown from one in 2016 to eleven in 2022 and likely to increase as the external dimensions of the EU’s climate, digital and industrial policies become unavoidable challenges, in addition to the impact of enlargement and the war in Ukraine. In a similar vein, it is now official EU policy to ‘externalise’ migration management to third countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon. Concerns for the fundamental rights of those seeking refuge from war or persecution increasingly appear weak given the regular reports of state-sanctioned human rights violations in these countries.
Last month a consortium of investigative journalists, in the case of Tunisia, verified 13 incidents in less than a year in which groups of black people were rounded up in cities or at ports and driven many kilometres away, usually close to the Libyan or Algerian borders, and dumped without food or water. My office is inquiring into the EU-Tunisia deal to determine how strongly EU human rights safeguards are applied. In a similar inquiry into the EU-Turkey migration deal in 2016, the answer was clear: political discretion can over-ride the normal procedures and safeguards. At that time, extraordinary circ*mstances suggested this was a one-off. Recent policy would suggest that it may be the template.
President Macron asserts that the rules of the game are changing and the fundamental question is how do we deal with this? Does the shift to the right risk dragging our values along with it?
When we look at migrant deaths in the Mediterranean do we consider only the people smugglers and our failure to defend our borders? Or do we contemplate instead the dead bodies of those human beings, those who believed we would, at the very least, save them from death, who believed that we still believe in the values we so regularly preach to the rest of the world, to the ‘others’.
I want to end this address by remembering the victims of the Adriana tragedy one year ago and their families. Over 600 men, women and children drowned in the Greek waters of the Mediterranean, their position and their distress known of by an EU agency, by civil society organisations, by the Italian coast guard and by the Greek coastguard, the latter who had operational control of the incident. They drowned in the literal plain sight of the European Union. To date there has been no comprehensive investigation into the contested actions of the Greek authorities on that night. My investigation looked at the role of the EU border and coast guard agency Frontex, and found that EU law had rendered it largely powerless. The Greeks alone had control while Frontex chose not to exercise its right to issue a Mayday call, judging that the heavily overcrowded boat was not in ‘immediate’ danger when a Frontex plane had observed it for approximately ten minutes. We also found that on the four occasions when Frontex offered assistance to the Greek authorities, the Greeks did not return their calls.
A devastating BBC documentary — and which I would urge you all to watch — makes further shocking allegations against the Greek coastguard in relation to the Adriana and other incidents. This must prompt not just concern but the kind of action conspicuously absent to date. Brilliant, clear-sighted, journalism has served up some very inconvenient truths.
I have again called on the relevant institutions to explain to EU citizens how accountability is to be achieved in the light of what this and numerous other media and civil society reports have revealed. Is this what we want a Power Europe to look like when it comes to migration? Is this how ‘strategic autonomy’ should be practiced?
As new mandates begin for the major EU institutions, do we look now to the high idealism of Prodi, or to Macron’s urgent concern about our future, or both? How do we protect both our borders and our soul? It is a question for all of us bound to serve the ideals of the European Union, as much a matter of the narratives we create and profess — of who we imagine ourselves to be — as the cold, hard facts on the ground. As the Indian author V.S. Naipul has said about the revelatory power of the novel: “facts can be realigned, but fiction never lies. It reveals the writer totally.”
