Nationalism won't solve Europe's problems 

This week sees the anniversary of the formal surrender by Germany that ended World War II in Europe. Next month we go to the polls in the European elections. What thread connects these two things, and why should it matter to us?

By May 7th, 1945, Hitler was dead, the Soviet Army was in Berlin and the Americans and British were racing across Germany, so the formal surrender just confirmed the collapse of the Third Reich. After six years of war in Europe, it all came to an end in the west on May 7th, and in the east the following day, May 8th.

The damage was beyond imagining. The continent was in ruins. Millions were dead, injured, displaced, from fighting that had first begun in September 1939. After rapid victories for the Germans, from late 1942 on they began to lose. At the time, Churchill described the end of that winning streak for the Germans as ‘not the beginning of the end’, but as ‘perhaps, the end of the beginning’. As it turned out, he was wrong. It was, in fact, the beginning of the end. From the end of 1942 on, the Germans never stopped losing until their collapse in May 1945.

In that struggle, the Soviets did the heavy lifting. It was they who broke the Germans on the battlefield and paid the price with casualty rates that were terrifying.

It wasn’t just soldiers who suffered, for millions of civilians died too. The Jewish people suffered a systematic attempt to wipe every man, woman and child from the earth. Millions of them had been numbered, tagged, and then brought to designated centres to be exterminated. The children were killed, because, as the Nazis saw it, they could not let them grow up to be avengers. And the more it became clear that the Germans were losing the war, the more the effort to murder them was energised.

With the wreckage from the war near total, especially in central and eastern Europe, by 1945, whole swathes of the continent were as an ant heap. People were moving in all directions, trying to patch together the little that remained of their families and their homes. Germany had wreaked this on Europe: now Germans were forcibly expelled from parts of Europe where they had lived for centuries. And while World War II had ended, the allies who had brought it about were now about to divide, bringing about a Cold War that would last for over four decades.

The Soviet Union and the Americans were the big winners of World War II – they would both become ‘superpowers’, and their rivalry would shape the next 45 years. The settlement that came about because of the way the war ended and the rivalry between those two powers still shapes Europe today. Why so?

Because, simply put, the post-1945 settlement has meant settled boundaries in Western Europe, but did not permanently settle matters in Eastern Europe. That latter issue is an old one. We have never really had a settled system of states in central and eastern Europe. After World War I, the old empires that used to control the area collapsed. The idea then was to replace those empires with a series of what were called ‘nation-states’, providing each nationality with their own state.

That’s a great idea in theory, but the problem was that various nationalities lived alongside one another, not neatly on one side of a river or mountain range. And so each of these nation-states had ‘national minorities’, often unhappily living in a state controlled by another nation. That meant tensions, disputes, conflicts and further wars. 

That was avoided here in the Free State by partition, which spared the island of Ireland a convulsive civil war of the type that continental Europe was used to. But of course it also meant that nationalists in the North were sacrificed to live under the dominant control of British unionists – an undoubtedly unhappy and unjust experience for them. 

On the continent, post World War II, it was the Cold War between East and West that sealed in all those national tensions in Eastern Europe, under the brute dominance of the Soviet Union. In fact, in the late 1970s, the Superpowers made a deal at Helsinki which said that the post-World War II borders of European states could not be altered. It was thought that would mean the territorial ambitions of one state over another could be contained.

But since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, all those historic tensions have come bubbling up again. Since then, the post-World War II border between the two Germanies was changed, as East Germany was taken over by the West. Czechoslovakia split – peacefully – into two states. The Soviet Union collapsed, breaking into multiple states, with all the multiple issues that has produced. Yugoslavia collapsed in 1991, unleashing a near decade of war and – in large parts of the region – two subsequent decades of uneasy peace.

Alarmingly, in response to all of this instability, a lot of people are turning back to nationalism – it is happening here too – with the hope that it can provide an answer to the uncertainty and lack of security that many people across Europe feel. It can’t. It all too often creates the problem. We have a good example of that right on our own doorstep. Brexit is simply English nationalism. Our response to it has too often been – again last week – to think that we can somehow simply take over Northern Ireland and all will be well.

And here is the thread that connects the consequences of World War II to those European elections in one month’s time. When people have a different view of their nationality, and live on the same piece of ground, there is only one way to manage that peacefully. A multilateral order, where states co-operate and are bound by law across their national frontiers, is the only effective way to minimise rather than amplify tensions – and the EU is the imperfect, but only, continent-wide methodology which has ever worked. 

The Good Friday Agreement is an example of that kind of approach working in an individual territory, and where when set within the EU context it worked best. Our pre-Brexit arrangements on this island are a very good example of that in action. Pre-Brexit, the tensions over those applicants for international protection coming south from Belfast would have been handled in a much different way to what we saw last week.

So as European elections come up, this historical context should be at the forefront of our minds. Co-operation is how we reduce and manage tensions – and how we deepen that co-operation on the major matters and events that shape our world would be a suitable topic over the next month.