In the midst of the worst continent-wide economic slump since World War II, the European Council, which includes the leaders of all 27 EU member nations, met in Brussels June 18 and 19. Despite the fact that Europe's GDP fell by over 4 percent in the first quarter, and unemployment in the Eurozone could top 11 percent in the next year, the Council chose to focus on deficit reduction rather than jobs or social protections.
This comes as no surprise to Professor David R. Cameron, director of the Yale Program in European Union Studies, who says this "Hooverian" response is symptomatic of Europe's ineffective approach to the crisis. A few days after the European Parliament elections resulted in near universal defeats for socialist, social democrat, and labor parties across Europe, TAP Online talked to Cameron about the European left's "existential crisis," the effect of Muslim immigration on European politics, and how Europe's response to the economic crisis differs from that of the U.S.
Marie Diamond: In the recent elections for European Parliament, socialist and social democratic parties suffered significant loses in nearly all 27 member states. Do these results represent a fundamental shift toward the right in European politics?
David R. Cameron: They certainly represent a short-term switch. I don't know that it necessarily means a long-term defection from the left to the right, but certainly there were significant losses in France, Portugal, Spain, and of course the Labor Party in Britain. They lost a lot of seats and they took the biggest hit in the election by far, and the vote certainly moved to the center or the right. But keep in mind that European Parliament elections are basically second-order national elections. Even though everyone would love it to be about European issues, in fact they are run by national parties and they are about national politics.
The current economic condition -- global recession, rising unemployment --would seem to be politically beneficial for social democrats.
It is perplexing because there was reason to think the left might do well because of what's happening to the European economy. It's in a terrible state. Right now there are at least 16 countries in the EU that are in recession. Next year the most optimistic estimate is that they'll be at least a dozen countries where unemployment is over 10 percent. We've never had synchronized, continent-wide recession before of the kind we have now. You would think, all else being equal, that might help the social democratic and labor parties on the center left. But some of the parties in power have their own problems and complications -- scandal, corruption, and so forth. Still, I have to say I'm surprised by the outcome.
Is there any truth to the theory that while America tends to shift to the left during times of economic hardship, Europe moves to the right?
That's obviously what happened this time. It's hard to generalize. There have been other moments in European history when the right has done well in bad times. Thatcher came in in the wake of very tough times in the 1970s in Britain, when Labor happened to be in power. On the other hand, there were some left governments that came to power in hard times, for instance the Scandanavians in the 1930s. The other thing that makes generalization hard is that there's no sign that the center-right parties ran with a particular European program for getting out of the crisis. I don't think they have any more clue about it than the left. So both sides of the spectrum are really just sort of sitting there scratching their heads and saying, "How do we get out of this?"
Many of the right-wing parties that made gains ran on anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, and anti-Gypsy platforms. To what extent are voters reacting to internal tensions in their own countries?
Oh they do, sure. It's sort of a standard, knee-jerk reaction -- completely predictable -- when there are bad times, voters will go to the parties on the extreme right or extreme left. But clearly what we saw in this election was the extreme right doing much better than the extreme left. In fact, the extreme right picked up support from people who used to support the extreme left in some cases. A lot of it has to do with immigration. In hard times, when people are losing jobs and unemployment is getting in the double digits, the easiest thing in the world is to blame the immigrants. The thing that makes it interesting is these parties typically do better in European elections than they do in their own domestic elections.
Are social democratic voters defecting en masse to the right?
Some left voters probably have switched, but I think a lot have just dropped out. There's an enormous amount of apathy in European elections. The turnout level has dropped in every election since the first one in 1979, and this one was the lowest of all. A lot of people look at the European Parliament elections and figure this is not an important institution. The irony is it's become much more important than it used to be in the EU -- it's basically co-equal now with the Council of Ministers in legislative power, but most people don't know that. When you have very low turnout, you don't really know who the voters are. What's more important is who the voters aren't -- who's not going to the polls. You have to temper whatever kind of judgment you make about the swing in the election with the fact that most of the electorate didn't vote. It could be that there wasn't much switch from the left to the right, it's just that the left didn't vote. But there's no doubt that the left is facing a deep existential crisis about how to conduct themselves. It will either find an alternative way -- a new Third Way -- or it will be irrelevant.
Many observers say social democrats in Europe have lost their sense of purpose and direction. Are the leftist parties themselves to blame, or were they victims of circumstances beyond their control?
I think it's both. I think the leaderships of the parties are partly to blame. Part of it is that the left happened to be in government in a number of countries.In this kind of economic situation everyone is angry at the government. But I think in the countries where they were not in government -- France is a leading example -- they really failed to respond to the economic crisis and develop a program. They didn't represent their base very effectively. So some of their vote abandoned them because there were better options -- at least that's what the voters thought.
The sad thing about Europe is [that governments] didn't respond to the crisis effectively. They've been largely passé through the whole crisis, which means it will be more severe, more prolonged, and higher cost in terms of lost output and lost jobs than it would need to be. When history looks back on this they'll say that the Obama administration figured out the problem and acted the way all the countries should have, quickly and with a huge stimulus. This was a natural issue for the left; they had an opportunity in this crisis to put an argument forward about how Europe could get out of the crisis, and they failed to do it. I don't mean that they could have actually implemented the policies, because in a lot of places they're out of power, but they could have put the ideas on the table. They could have been arguing for it.
