Finally, I turn to the bad news and the things that keep me awake at night.
The European Union is facing an existential crisis for the first time since 1957, when the European Common Market was created. There is a question of whether this institution, which has done so much for so many Europeans in particular and the world in general, will be able to continue as the institution that we have come to rely upon. As previously mentioned, nothing has been more divisive in the European Union than the current migrant and refugee crisis. It is dividing countries internally. For example, in Germany the debate has not really started, yet it has still managed to divide the country. The crisis is also dividing countries between themselves, and leading to the dismantling of the very institutions that make the European Union a union: border control, the Schengen Agreement, and even serious debates in Brussels about the idea of ring-fencing an EU member. This idea is about deploying troops and police equipment on the Macedonian–Greek border to make sure that all migrants stay in Greece. However, Greece is a member of the European Union. If soli-darity for dealing with the crisis means to taking one part of the union and telling them to deal with it alone, that sends a signal about the union that is deeply divisive. It is a divisive effort when a country such as Germany takes in a million refugees, when other countries are keeping their doors closed. This leads to ugly politics, which are likely to become uglier still, and I think that is a diplomatic word.
Most importantly, there is no end in sight. This is not a problem that is possible to solve today, and it is only going to get worse. There is no strategy or idea on how to deal with it. As a result, the natural temptation is to turn inwards, claiming ‘it does not matter what happens out there as long as we are not affected’. This attitude has a huge consequence for the European Union.
Moreover, there is a second crisis that we have not solved – the European debt crisis. We have unsustainable Greek debt and a real Italian banking cri-sis being hidden, in addition to a north–south division on the fundamentals
56
NATO: Challenges and Solutions
of how to deal with the international system. Therefore, we have a real crisis that in itself was threatening the EU, even before the refugee crisis. The third crisis was the decision by the British Prime Minister to put the future of the EU in the hands of his voters. While there is nothing wrong with asking voters about certain questions, the results of the vote will have highly importance consequences. The decision to hold the vote was due internal political reasons, because Mr Cameron had to deal with euro-scepticism in his party. In the pro-cess, he put the future of the European Union in the hands of the British voters.
This has resulted in an existential crisis for the European Union, in addition to the risk to the euro and the Schengen Agreement. Britain’s decision to leave will mean that the European Union will become very different in the future.
In this respect, the transatlantic alliance is relevant. There may have been a day when some Americans thought that it would be a good idea for Europe to be divided, so that we could pick and choose, but those days are gone. We need a strong Europe to stand alongside the United States in order to deal with the challenges that we face. If Europe falters, the natural response for the United States will not be to fix it, but rather to tell Europe to fix its own problems, which it created in the first place. In other words, Europe would be on its own.
A divided and renationalized, internally focused Europe is one that is deeply deleterious for European and global security, but it is not something the United States can fix. It has been 70 years since the United States came to the rescue of this continent, and it does not have the political muscle, economic strength, the military means, and fundamentally the interest to resolve a problem that can only really be resolved internally.
Thus, this is a challenge for Europe to resolve, but in which the United States has a real interest. If Europe needs help, the United Sates will be sup-portive, but it will not solve the current problem for Europe. The United States will speak out against Brexit, it will speak out about the need to maintain inter-nal unity, and it will look for common approaches and for a strong and viable NATO. However, ultimately, the only way in which we are going to avert the kind of disaster that I think we are looking at today is for Europe to get its act together.