From Viktor Orban in the east to Marine Le Pen in the west, defiance of the European Union’s multilateral, multicultural, open-borders traditions is on the rise.

But with issues like refugees and terrorism at the top of the agenda, there’s little the 28-nation EU can do about it. The popular clamor for security has strengthened the cult of the insular state that Orban champions in Hungary and Le Pen espouses in France.

The collective blame lies with EU leaders for looking the other way, according to Sophie In’ t Veld, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, who says it is time to upgrade the bloc’s “very weak instruments” to enforce civil liberties and democratic due process.

“People are beginning to lose faith in European integration,” In’ t Veld said in an interview on Thursday in Brussels. “We have all these wonderful values, and then it turns out that in practice they’re not being upheld.”

The EU reached for literary heights to mark its eastern expansion on May 1, 2004, commissioning Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney to compose an ode to unity and inclusion: “On a day when newcomers appear, let it be a homecoming.”

That the newcomers didn’t feel at home became clear by 2010, when Orban returned as prime minister of Hungary and set out to build a more centralized state. Once a communist-era freedom fighter, Orban came to view democracy with its plurality of voices as a recipe for gridlock, for not getting things done. He championed the ideology of untrammeled majority rule -- provided he had the majority -- along with the rejection of multiculturalism in what he termed the “illiberal state.”

Now Poland has elected a religiously tinged, anti-foreigner, anti-gay, family-values party, capturing the east’s discontent with the Europe it got after breaking free of Soviet domination. It has sought to pack Poland’s supreme court with party faithful, triggering a constitutional impasse.

Breakthroughs by anti-immigration parties across northwestern Europe -- reaching an interim peak with the successes of Le Pen’s National Front in the first round of French regional primaries -- showed that eastern Europe doesn’t have a patent on the more virulent strains of nationalism. The decisive runoff in France is on Sunday.

The anti-European moment may pass, but for now, its originators are feeling vindicated.

“The export of Western democracy has failed,” Orban said on Dec. 2, in remarks directed at the U.S. but applicable more broadly. “It’s time for realpolitik. The era based on the export of democracy and human rights is coming to an end.”

EU treaties foresee two ways to enforce democratic checks and balances: either a targeted “infringement” procedure to pick apart individual national laws, or the suspension of a country’s voting rights in case of a “serious breach” of what the bloc stands for.

David Fuller's view

Note the third paragraph at the beginning of this article, starting with:

“Europe’s multiple crises – first debt, them migration, now terrorism, all festering simultaneously – have put the established order on trial… “ 

This is short sighted.  Government debt problems soared following the US-led credit crisis which unravelled in 2008.  The much more recent problems of mass migration and terrorism are merely the rods which are now beating the EU’s fragile spine. 

Europe’s problems began much earlier.  The European Economic Community, launched in the 1960s and which Britain joined in 1973, was actually a very good idea.  Perhaps naively, I was happy to vote in favour of it during the UK’s referendum in 1975, because I did not fully realise what European political leaders were trying to achieve.   

The EEC worked reasonably well until it morphed into the European Union shortly after the Maastricht Treaty was signed in February 1992 by the 12 member nations. In other words, the EEC had been no more than a Trojan horse for the European Union, leading to an economic and monetary union. 

Anyone with some understanding of economic history knew that a single currency before a federal system was a bad idea.  EU officials probably knew this as well but they also realised that European citizens were unlikely to vote away their hard earned sovereignty. 

A European Currency Unit (ECU) was slipped under the door in December 1995 as ‘an accounting currency’, and the Euro was launched in January 1999.  It is only a slight exaggeration to say that it has been mostly downhill for the Euro’s popularity and the EU’s achievements ever since.

The problem, as some wise heads pointed out, was that single currencies have had a chequered history, to put it mildly, especially without political union in a federal system.  From the 1960s until today, the European project has been run by politicians and bureaucrats, who apparently did not consult the region’s more experienced economists, perhaps because they feared what they would hear.  You can imagine what Roger Bootle would have said!  

Sadly, the EU has become less democratic and more expensive over the years, as the bloated bureaucracy in Brussels has increased.  Arguably, Western European countries within the EU have governed themselves less well as part of this idealistic, socialist club.  Eastern European countries joined to escape Russia’s yoke but have quickly become disillusioned as the article above points out.  The biggest indictment of the EU has been its persistent economic underperformance.  Historic enmities within the region are increasing once again. 

The European Union is now a failing experiment, more likely to shrink than increase in size.  An acrimonious breakup would be extremely damaging.  The least damaging outcome would be to forget the unrealistic objective of a ‘United States of Europe’.  Instead, national leaders should press for more independence in managing their economies, leading to a downsizing of the Brussels interference machine.  The Euro could be retained as a regional economic currency of convenience, while EU countries reissued their national currencies.  This would increase economic flexibility, national responsibility and reduce ‘one size fits all’ bureaucracy.  In other words, the successful European Free Trade Area, previously know as the European Economic Community would be back in business.