Europeans are starting to worry that Steve Bannon has the EU
in his cross hairs. Here's how the White House could genuinely help pull it
apart. To Bannon, a strengthened EU is nothing less than a risk to
civilization: a body that dilutes national identity and whose border policies
allow Islam to invade the West, one refugee at a time.
Bannon was an executive at Breitbart News, an
activist-editor-gadfly known mostly on the far right, and the “Brexit” campaign
was something of a pet project. He hitched onto the Tea Party movement early in
Barack Obama’s presidency and noticed a similar right-populist wave rising
across the Atlantic, where fed-up rural, white Britons were anxious about
immigration and resentful of EU bureaucrats. The cause touched on some of
Bannon’s deepest beliefs, including nationalism, Judeo-Christian/Catholic
nationalist identity and the evils of Big Government.
Bannon’s vision, as laid out in public remarks and private
conversations, opposes international organizations in favor of empowering
nation-states.
Bannon’s public remarks, and accounts from people who have
spoken with him, make clear he believes Brexit and Trump’s election are part of
something bigger, a global political revolt that could restore what he calls
lost “sovereignty” on the continent.
Bannon told an audience of religious conservative activists
at the Vatican in 2014. “That is really the building blocks that built Western
Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.”
To Bannon, however, a strengthened EU is nothing less than a
risk to civilization: a body that dilutes national identity and whose border
policies allow Islam to invade the West, one refugee at a time. Bannon, who did
not respond to interview requests, has repeatedly made clear his views about
Europe. Most revealing is the widely read transcript of his Vatican talk, in
which Bannon declared that “the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian
West, is in a crisis." Europe’s citizens, he said, are restless for
“sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism.” And, Bannon
added: “They don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union."
Bannon has approvingly cited Maurras’ distinction between
the “legal country,” led by elected officials, and the “real country” of
ordinary people, as a frame for the populist revolt underway.
Bannon “made it clear he had lost faith in Europe as
secularism and arriving Muslim immigrants had eroded traditional Christian
values as the founding pillar of our civilization,” Rose wrote. “Losing the
Christian faith, in his view, has weakened Europe—it’s neither willing nor able
to confront Islam’s rising power and some European Muslims’ insistence on
privileged treatment of their religion."
Bannon’s solution? Rebuilding the firm borders between
European states—to keep the Muslim immigrants out, and to keep in the religious
and national identity. “I have admired nationalist movements throughout the
world,” Bannon told the Wall Street Journal shortly after the U.S. election. “I
have said repeatedly, strong nations make great neighbors."
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/trump-steve-bannon-destroy-eu-european-union-214889
But do they? Many a European leader, not to mention
historian, disagrees. Runaway nationalism led to, among many other horribles,
Franz Ferdinand’s assassination and World War I, and gave us Hitler, Mussolini
and Milosevic. Those things, in turn, drew America’s military across the
Atlantic.
“I don’t get it. Americans have spent a lot of their history
either fighting against Europeans or fighting on behalf of Europeans against
other Europeans,” says Charles Kupchan, who served until January as the top
official for European affairs at the Obama White House. “Anybody who wants to
bring Europe down risks putting us back in the 19th century or the early 20th
century.”
European officials note that this happens to be a goal of
Russia’s president, Putin, who is busily undermining the post-Cold War
internationalist order in favor of a nationalistic, geography-based power
politics. A U.S. effort to dismantle the EU, one Western European government
official says with distaste, “would put America on the same side as Putin.”
The thought is rattling Europe at the highest levels. In
January, Donald Tusk, president of the EU’s European Council—who calls himself
“an incurably pro-American European who is fanatically devoted to
trans-Atlantic cooperation”—sent a letter to member states characterizing the
Trump administration as a menace to the Union, alongside the likes of Russia
and radical Islam. “[W]ith the new administration seeming to put into question
the last 70 years of American foreign policy,” Tusk wrote, America now had to
be considered not a stalwart friend of the EU but a “threat.”
Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to the United
States, put it in starker terms in remarks at a February security conference in
Munich attended by top Trump officials. “Is President Trump going to continue a
tradition of half a century of being supportive of the project of European
integration, or is he going to continue to advocate EU member countries to
follow the Brexit example?” Ischinger asked. “If he did that, it would amount
to a kind of nonmilitary declaration of war. It would mean conflict between
Europe and the United States. Is that what the U.S. wants?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a favorite target of
Breitbart, almost always in the context of her “open door” migrant policy. The
news site, formerly run by Bannon, is working toward opening a bureau in Berlin
in time for the country’s general election later this year, in which Merkel
will seek a fourth term.
Not long ago, Breitbart cautiously praised Emmanuel Macron,
a center-of-left French presidential candidate running as an independent, as a
“French Tony Blair” willing to consider dismantling an unreformed European
Union. But the site has since changed its tone, going all in for Marine Le Pen,
while deriding the “Pro-EU Macron,” in articles such as, “France Blames Russia
For Poor Performance of Left-Wing Presidential Candidate.”
In a January letter to EU member states, Donald Tusk, the
European Council president, lamented the rise of “national egoism” within
Europe, taking a shot at the kinds of Euroskeptic movements Bannon has
encouraged. Still, after a February meeting with Mike Pence, Tusk said the U.S.
vice president had committed America’s “unequivocal support for the idea of a
united Europe.”
Elections to watch:
Netherlands- March- Dutch election results: Europe's far-right populists fail first
test
France - Spring
Germany - September
Italy - Summer
and Mexico - Summer 2018
