Europe Has Traded Technocracy for Drama

Earlier this year, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the European Parliament in Brussels, he was received as a hero. It was an incredible spectacle, rarely seen in Brussels. Parliamentary assistants, interns, and kitchen staff streamed out of their offices in the huge parliamentary building, occupying the galleries along the stairway over six floors to catch a glimpse of the man walking the red carpet downstairs. People applauded, cheered, and shouted “Slava Ukraini.” Others positioned themselves along the walls of corridors where Zelensky would later pass through on his way to the plenary hall to deliver his speech. The Ukrainian national anthem was not played once, but twice. Zelensky was offered a European flag. The plenary hall was packed with MEPs filming and tweeting the event.

Something was happening here, something new and truly remarkable: Political drama had conquered Brussels, a city that, until recently, was considered not just Europe’s capital but also the capital of technocracy. And this is not a one-off. The drama is here to stay.

In his book Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (2013), the late Irish political scientist Peter Mair wrote that the widening gap between citizens and their political leaders in Western democracies eats away at the political legitimacy of the governing class, fueling populist mobilizations against it. This, in Mair’s view, erodes parliamentary democracy because what politicians are saying barely reaches the electorate anymore. Voters see few real debates they can identify with. They feel less and less represented, lose respect for the state’s institutions, and finally drop out of the political process altogether. When they vote—or if they vote—they do it to protest, supporting “anti-system” parties.

The emotions surrounding Zelensky’s visit to the European Parliament are all the more intriguing because, as Mair wrote, the political erosion is stronger on the European level than it is on the national level. After all, what happens in Brussels is even farther away from voters than what happens in national parliaments.

This is now changing. The war in Ukraine is reversing the trend Mair signaled 10 years ago. It injects emotion and drama into European politics, because the big issues of our time suddenly play out there.

For decades, political drama was utterly lacking in Brussels. Europeans had little understanding of what happened there. At school, they tend to be taught how national laws, not European laws, are made. Most citizens have no idea how Brussels works.

Moreover, since its inception in the 1950s, the essence of European integration was to de-politicize issues that European countries would previously go to war over from time to time. By establishing a common market and slowly harmonizing national laws and regulations, it made war less likely on the continent. Pragmatic compromise instead of military escalation was the idea. But after some decades, citizens got used to this peace process—because that is what it was, and is—forgetting the political idea behind it. All they saw was a lot of technocratic regulations and debates on issues that they did not really care about. Jacques Delors, the most visionary president the European Commission ever had, often said Europe could only capture people’s hearts and minds if the single market would be balanced with a social Europe and more political federalism, because “you don’t fall in love with a common market.”

The historian Fernand Braudel warned in the 1960s that a “cold,” technocratic Europe would cause disaffection: “It would be mistaking human nature to serve up nothing but clever sums; they look so pallid beside the heady, though not always mindless, enthusiasm which has mobilized Europe in the past. Can a European consciousness be built purely on figures? Or is that not precisely what figures may fail to capture, what may develop in ways that cannot be calculated?”

But Braudel’s and Delors’s warnings fell on deaf ears in the member states, who feared (and still fear) that a more federal and social Europe would undermine national sovereignty. For many years, sensitive issues most citizens feel strongly about—health care, security, education, and defense—remained firmly national. So, while Europe dealt with the color of headlamps of cars, child-resistant lighters, and the “abnormal curvature” of bananas, the real political drama remained national. This drama even increased in recent years, with the growth of populist parties using strong emotions like fear and hatred to attract votes. Those parties immediately took aim at Brussels’s technocracy, often advocating exits from the European Union. They did this mostly on the national political stage. Their leaders sometimes refused to take up their seats in the European Parliament.

The cover of Mair’s book reflects the way many perceived Brussels at the time: a photo of the plenary hall of the European Parliament, with just one man in a suit among dozens of numbered, empty seats. Quite a contrast with MEPs bringing down the house for Zelensky in February. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminded Europeans that the essence of European integration is, in fact, not bendy bananas, chemical directives, or fishing quotas, but “never again war”—the rest are just instruments to that end. Zelensky reminds Europeans of this: While they moan about overregulation and technocracy, he values it and would like to have more of it. Much more. His country is being bombed every day because it prefers technocracy over Russian autocracy. Zelensky, in other words, lets Europeans look in the mirror. That is why many felt emotional the minute he set foot in the building.

Recent polls confirm that while European citizens may criticize the EU’s functioning, their appreciation of membership has risen from 50 percent over 10 years ago to 72 percent now. When it comes to Europe, they see the bigger picture again. They instinctively grasp why John Major, the former British prime minister, told MPs this year that Brexit, because of this larger geopolitical narrative, was a “colossal mistake.” In a world where there are just three major power blocs left, Major said, “the future is better [for our grandchildren] if they are part of a really big bloc.”

Europe’s far-right populists understand this, too. Since February 2022, most of them have stopped advocating exits. They now want to stay in the EU and change it from the inside. To borrow from the late economist Albert Hirschman, they chose “voice” over “exit.” So, they have entered the European political arena, bringing the drama with them.

Today, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and many others are strongly investing in European politics. Despite their obvious differences, including on the war in Ukraine, their political groups are increasingly active in Brussels, weighing in on big, transnational issues of our time, from climate change to migration and the rule of law.

Next June, European elections will be held. Many predict that the center will more or less hold in parliament, but that the far right and left will get a little stronger. Marc Lazar, of the Institut Montaigne in Paris, writes that “populists of the right and the left will be an important component of politics in Europe. Even if they don’t win elections.”

Anticipating this, center-right parties in Brussels are already shifting to the right because, as an insider told FP on condition of anonymity, “they want to prevent voters from leaving to the far right.” For example, they recently started to oppose several European draft laws, part of the European Green Deal to combat climate change, that they previously supported. Angry farmers’ protests in several member states—the Netherlands, in particular—made them change their minds. Negotiations preceding the parliamentary vote on the nature restoration law in mid-July were particularly heated. With climate campaigner Greta Thunberg and sympathizers camping outside and some MEPs defecting from their own political groups, the law was narrowly adopted in the end. The media, Politico in particular, had a field day, reporting on mud-slinging and backstabbing and profiling some protagonists. This is quite something in a city on which the Economist once wrote: “Announce that you work as a journalist in Brussels and you are likely to get a pitying look and a polite inquiry. ‘Do you find that interesting?’” What is more, similar battles are expected when a controversial “green” pesticides draft law comes to a vote in October.

European political debates about controversial issues like these are increasingly attracting citizens’ attention. This is not just because citizens start feeling strongly about those issues, which have indeed become common ones, but also because the war in Ukraine and Europe’s geopolitical dilemmas give them more significance. The controversy on the rule of law in Hungary and Poland, for example, is not just about the two countries anymore. With Russia trying to reconquer parts of Europe and threatening the Baltic States and Poland, and with some seeing the world divided between autocracies and democracies, the question becomes civilizational. It touches Europe’s destiny. With far-right populists weighing in, insisting that Christian Europe has to be protected against wokeness and immigration, additional drama is added. No wonder 67 percent of Europeans feel inclined to vote if European elections were to be held now. In 2018, 58 percent said they would do so. The turnout during the last elections in 2019 was 50.6 percent, the highest since 1994.

Another reason for citizens’ increased interest in European politics is their staunch support (69 percent) for the EU’s response to the war in Ukraine. Before the war, the EU’s enlargement policy was largely on hold because of voters’ “fatigue” with it in several member states. Now, because of the war, a majority, 64 percent, backs Ukraine’s future membership. Practically overnight, enlargement changed from a technocratic issue that for many citizens made little sense to a deeply political one—because fundamental geopolitical choices, not market forces, are driving it.

A decade ago, Mair was worried that the technocratic “politics of depoliticization” would lead to the demise of liberal democracy in the West because voters would not feel represented anymore and lose interest. Well, it looks like in Europe, the process is now being reversed. There is a politicization under way, with all the drama and adversarial politics that go with it. This will inevitably bring new risks, such as growing tensions between member states and the far right weighing in on the European agenda. But for citizens, this politicization has already made Europe a little more understandable—and a little bit more interesting.