What The Hell America!

It was meant to shock. And shock it did.

The European functionaries, heads of state, defense ministers, and NATO bigwigs assembled at Munich’s Bayerische Hof last Friday expected the US vice president to enlighten them on the peace plan for Ukraine just launched by President Donald Trump.

Instead, they were treated to a nineteen-minute diatribe on the betrayal of democratic values by European elites. Vance accused them of resorting to “Soviet-style words” to censure opinions that did not fit their groupthink, using extra-democratic means to exclude populist challengers from power, and more generally showing every sign of growing out of touch with electorates. According to Vance, this was the “enemy from within,” more dangerous than Russia or China.

The killer line was: “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.”

So far, European responses have overwhelmingly been negative.

German defense minister Boris Pistorius’s reaction was typical. Vance’s statements, said Pistorius, “were unacceptable.” Among equals, it is simply not OK to lecture one another on the way democracy is done at home. Instead, we respect one another’s history and traditions — and assume in good faith that the key values of democracy and liberalism are at the root of those traditions.

A second type of response read the speech as an outpouring of the philosophy underlying Trump’s MAGA movement. Here, the piece by the Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour may, again, stand in for many other responses. According to Wintour, the speech marked an ideological rupture between the United States and Europe, a conflict between two different worldviews. In general, an astute observation.

Things get more complicated when Wintour reads into the speech liberal clichés about the MAGA movement. According to Wintour, Vance had faulted Europe for its “multiculturalism, ‘globalism,’ migration, gay rights, [and] liberal wokery.” While Vance may well agree, multiculturalism, wokeness, and gay rights were absent from the speech. Instead, it was all about elite disconnect, censure, and fear of plebiscitarian democracy.

Another type of response focused on the examples given by Vance of European democratic spleen: the firewall against right-wing challengers like Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, the legal annulment of electoral outcomes, and the prosecution of silent protesters near abortion clinics. Fact-checkers quickly pointed out that things were more complicated.

The silent protester mentioned had been forewarned many times and was fined only when he still failed to comply. The annulment concerned only the first round of the Romanian presidential election and came after serious irregularities. While the practice of “firewalling” may sound exotic to American ears, for Europeans — where proportional, multiparty systems tend to predominate — it is a fact of political life. Moreover, this has not prevented many right-wing populist parties from reaching office, as is illustrated by recent governments in Sweden, Italy, Denmark, Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria, and Belgium.

Be that as it may, what is lacking so far is a serious engagement with the core of Vance’s message: What if Europe is indeed showing signs of democratic decay, albeit for different reasons than Vance mentioned?

For not all is well in Europe. As scholars like Wolfgang Streeck and Fritz Scharpf have pointed out since the early 1990s, there is a crucial asymmetry built into the European treaties. “Market making” merely requires majoritarian voting while “market correcting” requires unanimity. The result is an EU that is a neoliberal wet dream, while its social democratic counterpart in the form of “social Europe” has never come of age, as Aurélie Andry has compellingly shown.

The technocratic nature of the EU, where the unelected European Commission is both legislative and executive, and where the European Parliament is more of a supervisory council than law-maker, fits the neoliberal vision of its founders. As Quinn Slobodian has argued, European integration was meant to dethrone plebiscitarian democracy and hand over economic and monetary policymaking to unelected technocrats.

These warnings were to no avail. Every crisis since — banking crisis, Eurozone crisis, climate crisis, health crisis, security crisis — has been used by European elites to deepen, broaden, and extend the EU even further. Each time the unelected European Commission claimed more rights and responsibilities, set up more and larger extra-treaty funds, and extended its mandate even further beyond the treaties, it further transformed the EU into a technocracy over which voters have no say.

Or as former Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker once let slip: “We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”

This would not matter much if the technocrats delivered the goodies.

This, they increasingly fail to do.

Since 2008, the economic performance of the EU has become ever more subpar. Its ambitious green deals have become contested as farmers and autoworkers saw their local interests being sacrificed. Households have been confronted with runaway inflation due to rising energy prices as elites have failed to foresee the inflationary effects of shifting from cheap Russian gas to expensive American liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The same elites have allowed the EU to become a ward of the United States and have let Emmanuel Macron’s vision of “strategic autonomy” fade into oblivion. This has, in the process, burdened their citizens with an expensive war and an equally expensive reconstruction once the Americans are gone — providing lucrative investment opportunities for some and higher taxes for many.

As a result, voters have increasingly signaled discontent: by not showing up at elections to the European Parliament (slightly under 51 percent voted in last June’s election); by voting for populist challengers during national elections; by using referendums to stall further European integration; and by voting to leave as soon as the chance offered itself.

European elites sense it. Take Mario Draghi’s four-hundred-page report last September, which rang the alarm bell over the dismal economic performance of the EU. Filled with graphs with downward sloping lines, the report shows that there had been no growth, no innovation, no productivity increases, no wage growth, no convergence. It is a sobering message that contrasts sharply with the happy agit-prop with which the Commission daily floods its citizens in an attempt to convince them that there is a bright and shining future after all.

The mismatch between official rhetoric and the lived experience of European integration raises questions that Vance, in his own way, hinted at. Why do voters reach out to the same parties denounced as populist challengers? Why don’t they trust incumbent elites? May it have something to do with their underperformance and unaccountability? Why do voters increasingly distrust the legacy media and turn to alternative ones? May it have something to do with the suspicion that official information serves specific interests? Why are critics of Europe’s rulers ghosted, canceled, and ostracized? Why were reasoned objections to invasive COVID measures banned from public debate? And why is it so hard now to challenge the consensus that more weaponry is the only road to peace?

A mature response to the mirror that Vance held up in Munich would be for incumbents to take a bold and brave stare at the ruins of their own making. That must be followed by the hard work needed to regain citizens’ trust.

On one thing at least, Vance was right: “You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.”