“All governments face problems they can’t solve – that’s what governments are for. The essence of political problems is that they cannot be ‘solved’.”
This quote can refer to the nitrogen crisis in the Netherlands, the Supplementary Affair or the misery surrounding Groningen gas extraction. It can also refer to European problems such as climate change or the war in Ukraine. And yet these few lines come from a book that is not about the present but about events from almost two hundred years ago. Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Australian historian Christopher Clark, which appeared earlier this year.
Clark, Cambridge professor and author of the influential Sleepwalkers, about the beginning of the First World War, this time examined the revolutions that rocked large parts of Europe in 1848-1849. Everything then came together: social malaise, crop failures, famines, exploitation, and so on. Governments could not solve all these problems, partly because they were distracted by revolutionary movements that were popping up everywhere.
Initially, heads rolled and social reforms sprang up here and there. Yet the establishment got things under control – and often turned back the clock. How did governing elites get away with that? By focusing on new horizons, Clark writes. By ignoring problems, telling a new story and drawing attention to developments and opportunities. This was a political diversion, to get out of the cul-de-sac.
That new story was a nationalistic one. It caught on in all sorts of places in Europe, a continent with as many real and imagined nations. With a new perspective came a new jargon that could inspire people. Thus, slowly, the word ‘nation’ became a keyword of the post-revolutionary age, the path to a new future, “a word through which time flowed.”
Nationalists fail just as well once they get into government themselves
What will be the new diversionary tactic in today’s Europe? With which new story are politics and society going smoothly? Local, regional, national and European political administrators have become bogged down in complex problems for which they themselves are hardly responsible. Yet they are harshly judged on the fact that they do not find solutions quickly.
Some think that the path to the future lies again in nationalism. The world is becoming unsafe and dangerous. People retreat into small communities, yearning for protection. They have had enough of globalization and fall back on what they oversee and trust. Close doors, close windows. Contemporary nationalists are the first to propagate this story. As multiple crises converge again – war, inflation, social inequality, recession – resulting in economic and political stagnation, they benefit. Of course: in many countries they stand on the sidelines and nail governments because they don’t solve problems. But as soon as they get into government themselves and are responsible, they also fail. Meloni, Morawiecki and Orbán themselves need diversions and poke conflicts with ‘woke’, migrants, independent institutions or Brussels.
Also read this interview with Christopher Clark, from 2014: ‘Every country has a smoking gun in hand’
In addition, and this is a big difference with 1848-1849: this is not a new story. National leaders who want a ‘Europe of nations’ know they already have it. They are the ones who take all the important decisions in Brussels and veto everything they don’t like. That is why they do not want to leave the EU, especially now that America, China and Russia, each in a different way, are pounding the continent. Thanks to the EU, European countries have more power than they would have without the EU – a point that Alan Milward made in 1992 in his formidable book The European Rescue of the Nation-State.
So the real new story had better be about what Europe and the Member States really need: strong European defence, a cleaner continent, social equality and economic prosperity.
A version of this article also appeared in the August 19, 2023 newspaper.