[Interview] MCC’s Frank Furedi: Polarisation is here to stay, EU should stick clear of ‘values’

The EU’s turn to American ‘identity politics’ was the product of a legitimacy crisis facing the bloc in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, argues Frank Furedi, executive director of MCC Brussels, a conservative think-tank.

Questions about European identity are now at the heart of a culture war that has polarised politics across most of Europe.

The financial stakes of this intellectual battle are significant. In 2020, the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán transferred assets worth an estimated $1.7bn[€1.45bn] to the MCC foundation, the parent organisation which finances MCC Brussels.

This funding has turned the think-tank into a formidable counter-weight to the liberalism of the so-called Brussels bubble, providing a platform for those who believe that Europe’s future lies in its traditional past rather than a “value-free” federalist future.

Why do you think that European leaders have got themselves so tied in knots over the question of what European identity is?  

I think it goes back to the 1990s, when they basically became aware that what gave the EU legitimacy was the fact that throughout the post-war period there was a post-war boom. In terms of economic performance, the EU appears to be playing a positive role in meeting the social and economic needs of people in Europe.  

After the economic troubles began, they began to realise that they needed something else and so they basically tried to come up with a number of different arguments. First of all, they said it’s because the EU has brought peace to Europe, there’s been no wars, but they didn’t give it any moral depth and in the 1990s they began to employ a number of public relations companies to try to promote themselves, what kind of values they should be espousing.  

And it was very interesting that when you had the Lisbon conference, there was a big debate about what should be the values of Europe and already at that point you had the difference between the more traditionalist-minded members of the Parliament and the Commission and the ones that were much more involved in federalism. 

‘Value free’ values

So, if you look at some of the documents published in the last four or five years, you know, Europe of values, it’s actually value-free in the sense that there’s no moral depth, there’s no discussion about what it is. instead what you have is these throwaway remarks, particularly the embrace of what I call American manufactured values, like diversity. All of a sudden, it becomes a value in and of itself, which is an absurd proposition. One doesn’t have to be against or for diversity, it’s a fact of life. 

It’s not something that you just value in and of itself and inclusion, various other, what in America they call DEI, And I think that the EU recognises that its own legitimacy is fairly fragile. And that’s why it has embraced a number of passions that exist independent of it. 

This disagreement on what is, what is or what should be defined as European identity is at the heart of the main political divides.  

Yes, across most of Europe at the moment, right?  

Yes, there is a polarised situation that has developed between the hegemonic values that are promoted by the cultural elite, the people who have really embraced some of this new, what I call ‘administratively created’ values. 

And then some of the more traditional who are attempting to ensure that legacy of Europe’s experience and of its achievements, somehow, are at foundation of the whole process of valuing. And that’s something that has come under a lot of the political controversy, particularly the way in which there is virtually no point of contact between an emphasis on national sovereignty and a federalist moment, which regards anything that is more cosmopolitan or more globalised as trumping any of the nationally rooted values that are organic to people’s experience.  

Do you think these identities can be codified in any way? When the constitutional treaty was being drawn up, there was a row over whether to refer to Europe as Christian. 

I think that Europe should not be talking about values, period.  

But it was the commission, who wanted to find some way of legitimating itself, that began to talk about the Europe of values. And they were very selective in what values they took seriously. And they, in a sense, politicised values, which I think is entirely wrong. 

And I think that in Lisbon, when the treaty was discussed, they self-consciously distanced themselves from Christianity. And my own position is that if you’re going to talk about European values, then you’ve got to say that it is based on a Judeo-Christian tradition. That’s not the same thing as saying that we’re all Christians or Europe is Christian. 

I think there are four moments in Europe’s history: the Judeo-Christian, the Greek, and the Roman, and the Enlightenment, which are all critically important to cherish and take seriously, as the founding on which our values or morality are based. 

Now, myself, I don’t think the EU’s got any business discussing these things. It should be much more about pragmatic politics. But you have to remember that they have introduced this sort of culture war, which they always blame on the other side. 

How can such a polarised debate play out? 

It’s going to lead to more and more polarisation. 

The Commission is in the business of politicising values, because it has now married the sphere of values to the rule of law. So, according to that, if you don’t take seriously the Commission’s values in your day-to-day work in the national domain, then you’re violating its rule of law, and that’s got financial consequences. So, when you’re confronted with that, that’s going to provoke a counter reaction and you end up in this unhappy situation where every time the rule of law is used, it’s going to lead to backlash.  

You talked about ‘administratively created values’. What do you mean by that? 

Well, if you look at human history, what we call values emerge organically to the experience of society and the debate that holds. And even if you look at something like tolerance, or moral autonomy or freedom, they weren’t invented by a public relations company.

They weren’t just uncritically borrowed from America. 

They were the product of a genuine interaction within society itself. And they weren’t always all accepted, it took a lot of intellectual struggle. But they were values that different generations have lived by and amplified and rejected bits of it. 

Whereas this just comes out of nowhere. The people of Europe didn’t wake up one morning and say, ‘oh, diversity is wonderful. Let’s have diversity.’ 

They didn’t say, ‘oh, yeah, we need to have more inclusion.’ None of these things come from real communities, they all come from above. So they’re top-down accomplishments. 

How do you think migration policy fits into this question of European identity? 20 years ago, open borders were the accepted norm among Europe’s political elite. But we’ve had 20 years of European electorates saying, ‘actually, no, we don’t want this. We want tight border control’. And now we’ve got European leaders from the centre, the left and the right saying, ‘yes, we are in favour of tight border control.’ 

I think the way it ties in is that when there was a relatively open attitude towards migration, it wasn’t represented as a value in itself. People didn’t say that migration would make our society better than it really is. But once you had the imposition of both diversity, more importantly, of multiculturalism, then at that point, you were saying, the society of migrants is preferable to a society that was relatively homogeneous. 

The implication of that, which, the elites never understood, is if you say that a diverse society is morally superior to what existed before. What you’re doing is you’re rendering those people morally inferior. And that logic was just not understood at all. 

And that means a lot of people become resentful, they get really pissed off. And I think that year by year, this has expanded and become increasingly powerful. 

I remember the 2005 UK election, which in retrospect marked a high point of left liberalism across much of Europe. Back then it was much easier for politicians such as Tony Blair to play down fears about bogus asylum seekers as racist or xenophobic. Do you liberals have sneered at their voters? 

Well, they did. I mean, if you remember that very famous episode with Gordon Brown going around and talking to that old lady, and calling her bigoted because she was worried about it. They could get away with that, because the Tories were quite cowardly and defensive. 

The minute they were denounced as racist, they just didn’t have the bottle to carry that through. And that kind of call to self-censor, on the part of millions of people, became almost institutionalised. And it’s only latterly that this has, in a sense, unravelled. And Reform is the beneficiary of that. 

Reform didn’t have to do anything. Because there’s already a demand for a party that said what they’re thinking. And that development exists all over Europe now. If you look at the European Commission now, where they’re agreeing return agreements and readmission agreements across the piece. The UK’s Rwanda deal is now being seen as a model. 

Performative exercise

Having moved so far on migration, do you think that European leaders and the Commission will change their stances on identity politics? 

They find that very difficult, because you have to remember that, at the moment, there’s a lot of pressure from Parliament, in the way that it now exists. And also from within the Commission itself, there are people that have, in a sense, been brought up, you know, on idealisation of LGBTQ politics, the idealisation of trans ideology, the idealisation of the Green Deal, and all these things that are fundamentally underpinned by identity politics. 

This is their life. There is an element of pragmatism because they’re under pressure. They realise that unless they seem to do something, there’s going to be an even greater reaction against what’s happening in Brussels. 

But I think that it would be a mistake to see these changes, this kind of sudden conversion by the German government, other governments and the Commission, as a genuine attempt to do anything more than damage limitation.  

At the moment, unfortunately, this is just a performative exercise on their part, and I wouldn’t really read too much into it, though it does indicate that the influence of the Patriot in Parliament and the ECR, is getting more pronounced. 

Hungarian-Canadian professor Frank Furedi is executive director of the think-tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Brussels and an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. His latest book, ‘In Defence of Populism’, is due out in May.