FROM FRIEND TO FOE

The need for a new European demeanour was never greater, nor may it ever be greater, than when, in the small hours of 9 November 2016, Donald J. Trump ascended from the gilded catacombs of his Manhattan tower to claim the presidency of the United States.

It was a moment that defied the odds. When, deep into the night, ashenfaced pundits of the US cable networks called the election for the construction tycoon and television star, they looked as if they had seen pigs fly. Something of tectonic significance had changed. Something that theoretically could not have happened just had. What had shifted was history itself. For if history was supposed to bend towards anything, it sure as hell was not Donald Trump.

It was the start of a new “Machiavellian moment” for Europe, a true confrontation with its temporal finitude, one which would force the continent, as the Florentine consigliere might have predicted, to reassess the metaphysical core of its politics and assert its own sovereign strength. Europe's assumption had always been that the threat to its liberal order would come from the marauding strongman Putin, from China's new economic might or from religious fanaticism in the Middle East. In fighting it off, it would stand shoulder to shoulder with its more muscular sibling across the Atlantic.

But it now appeared that the greatest danger hailed from the United States. The continent's mortal enemy resided not in the red-brick Kremlin but in the White House. And from this lair, right at the heart of the Western world, Trump could hurt Europe in ways that Putin or Xi or Erdogan could not even begin to imagine. The US had been chief guarantor of the rules-based international order and the awesome sovereign power that underwrote Europe's security after saving it from itself. If Trump wanted to obliterate that order and feed Europe to the lions, who was going to stop him?

Since completing this book, many of the dynamics discussed throughout have continued to proliferate in increasingly fraught terms. While arrivals on the central Mediterranean route were relatively low in 2019 compared to 2015–2016, arrival figures increased on the western route, as well as on the eastern route amidst threats that the Turkey–EU arrangements would no longer operate without further EU funding for Turkey.1 ‘Indeed, in early March 2020 increased numbers sought to enter Greece after Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, announced on 29 February that he was ‘opening the doors’. Many faced violent pushbacks by Greek authorities. Balkan route countries pledged to prevent new arrivals, Greece announced that it would not accept new asylum claims for a month, while the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, thanked Greece for its work as a ‘shield’ for the EU.2 This came following protests by those stuck in camps on the Greek island of Lesbos, who were teargassed by authorities.3 Meanwhile, temporary border controls remained in place in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria and France due to the ‘security situation in Europe’, the ‘serious threat to public policy and internal security’, the ‘severe threat to public order and internal security’, ‘migration and security policy’, the ‘security situation in Europe and continuous secondary movements’ and ‘terrorist threats and the situation at the external borders’, respectively.4 Relocation and the Common European Asylum Policy remained uncertain, as leaders failed to forge solidarity on asylum and relocation and as a new Commissioner in charge of migration heralded a ‘post-Dublin horizon’.5 The maltreatment of those taking flight in eastern Europe continued with allegations of Frontex involvement,6 while Frontex was also taken to court for a lack of transparency regarding Operation Triton.7 Frontex went on to win the case and charged the pro-transparency campaigners nearly 24,000 Euros in legal fees.

Not long ago, the world's strongmen were only tinpot dictators of tinpot countries. Parts of the world, we knew, remained in the doldrums of despotism. But this formed no particular threat to the West and its ideals. Liberal democracy seemed unassailable in its appeal. Strongman politics, the consensus was, thrived on social and intellectual torpor. Sooner or later the rest of the world would wake up and follow our example.

Today, history looks far less certain, less linear. Bullish confidence in the Western model, commonplace once, has become a curiosity. The strongmen are on the rise in Asia, Africa and even in the West itself. And rather than tinpot countries, they now run some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful states. The technological and military resources the strongmen command collectively, and in some cases individually, exceed those of European and other liberal states by far. The time when strongmen needed to pose as democrats to gain international acceptance is over. It suffices to win the respect of other strongmen.

For Europe, the repercussions of this new balance of power are vast. Since the Second World War, Europe has stood for an idea of global order, on which it also staked its future. According to this idea, multilateral rules can be found that serve the interests of all people, and peace and prosperity come about when those rules are upheld by global institutions of governance. It remains a powerful vision, one that has bought the continent the security and unity it needed. But as a conception of order, rules are no longer the only game in town. The strongmen have their own idea about how the world should be organized. And at the heart of this language of politics and order lie not rules but an idea of strength.

Coming to terms with the politics of strength, with the “grammar of power”, as French President Emmanuel Macron has called it, is one of Europe's biggest trials. It is also the central objective of this book. For while the politics of strength continues its rise in the world, our understanding of it lags behind. Dictators, tyrants and despots have always existed, of course.

Call it a prism or a language, an ethos or a narrative, or simply a game, but the strongman believes the world is organized around sovereign power, structured not by rules but by his freedom and ability to act without those rules. He sees order emerge out of dynamism and action, the nurturing of ties of homage and fealty, the projection of strength, and the ethos of the duel. His language of power is based on a loosely cohering set of analytical and normative judgements that highlight the importance of states, borders, spheres of influence, personal diplomacy and rivalry, as well as informal but universal codes of respect and equality that enable deal making with political rivals.

It is a prism that contrasts sharply with how most Europeans regard political and global order, which for them fundamentally is, or should be, organized not around strength but around the power of institutions that apply the same rules to all, the strong and the weak alike. Europe's language of rules renders the separateness of states far less absolute and less political. It maintains that beyond the strongman's code of respect there are more comprehensive values and standards that determine how states are to behave, including towards their own citizens. International conflict, on this view, is structured less around the spatial distinction between states and more around the distinction between those who abide by the rules and those who don’t.

The difference between these two prisms – the language of power and the language of rules – explains the incompatibility of temperament that exists between Europe and the strongman, and why the encounter between them tends to be grating and fruitless. It is those languages themselves that clash in the encounter. For Europe's leaders the confrontation with the strongman is a confrontation with the immoral and the unsavoury. To negotiate and shake hands with a strongman is a soiling business.

AUDIENCE WITH THE SULTAN

On 5 October 2015, European Council President Donald Tusk hosted Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan for a special dinner in Brussels. It was no occasion for pleasantries, even less for lectures about the rule of law in Turkey. Brussels was in full crisis mode. And to conquer the crisis it needed help, the strongman's help.

A torrent of refugees had been making its way to Europe since the start of the year. On the run from poverty and war in Syria and the Middle East, the human convoy passed through Erdogan's Turkey before embarking on packed dinghies and small boats to Greece and the European Union. It was a perilous journey. Thousands perished at sea. Their bodies washed ashore on some of Europe's most idyllic coastlines.

But the many hundreds of thousands who made it to Europe's shores found nothing to stop them. No walls or fences, no border guards, booths or gates, no police asking for papers. The Union possessed no system for guarding its external borders. And so the caravan just trudged onwards, via Serbia, Hungary and Austria to Germany, where most migrants planned to stay. If the Greeks could not guard the Union's external borders, the only practical solution seemed to resuscitate the continent's internal borders. But this, too, was an unappealing scenario.

By the time Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker broached their plan to their Turkish guest, Europe's options had dramatically shrunk. The pressure cooker needed to vent steam or it would blow. Europe needed Erdogan's support in keeping the refugee stream at bay. Might Turkey provide them with shelter, buy the EU some time at least? Turkey would of course be fairly compensated.

That evening it must have been hard for Erdogan, an intensely proud Turk, to fight back a smile of satisfaction. Was this Europe begging for help, his help? As long as he could remember, Turkish leaders had begged for Europe's recognition and acceptance, and the Europeans, infuriatingly, had always withheld it.

A CLUB OF RIVALS

In the end, it took only five seconds to decide he liked him. After decades of deal making in the real estate business it was not difficult. “It's my touch, my feel, that's what I do”, Trump said. “I think very quickly I know whether or not something good is going to happen. And if I think it won't happen, I’m not going to waste my time.”

It had not looked quite so easy one year earlier, when Kim Jong-un was busy testing his long-range missile capability over the Pacific Ocean, a projection of his strength and power. In August 2017, Trump still tweeted that North Korea's nuclear threat “will be met with fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen”. And Kim, who Trump liked to refer to as “Little Rocket Man”, responded by calling the president a “mentally deranged dotard”.

War had seemed unavoidable. But when both leaders met in June 2018, on the island of Sentosa off the coast of Singapore, the turnaround was dramatic. When Kim had first floated the idea of a summit, foreign policy experts in Washington quickly agreed it would be a disastrous move. Trump's secretary of state Rex Tillerson, part of the “axis of adults” in the White House, advised against it. Any deal would need to be minutely prepared by professional negotiators. How else had Obama been able to get the Iran nuclear deal agreed?

But Trump rated himself as the world's number one dealmaker. The Iran deal he considered “the worst deal ever”. Tillerson, previously the CEO at ExxonMobil, was summarily sacked, by tweet. The president had decided to stonewall his foreign policy mandarins. For Trump, what mattered more than professional advice was his personal relationship with Kim. “This is all about leader vs leader”, he explained his motives to White House aides. “Man versus man. Me versus Kim.”

In what ways do different pro-migration activist interventions contribute to the formation of alternative horizons of solidarity and hope in the midst of a deadly ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’? And how effective is an appeal to human dignity in challenging the dynamics of power through which death and vulnerability have become regular and accepted? This book has set out to address these questions by undertaking a sustained analysis of the relationship between practices of governing migration (Part I) and activist interventions that seek to contest them (Part II). It has explored diverse narratives and framings of the so-called crisis of 2015–2016 (Chapter 1), various EU policy mechanisms and dynamics of power and violence that constitute contemporary practices of governing migration (Chapter 2), as well as different materialdiscursive processes of dehumanisation that create the conditions for the pervasive deaths and vulnerabilities of people on the move (Chapter 3). Moreover, by considering how the normalisation of death and vulnerability has been contested through diverse activist interventions, the book has examined attempts to facilitate safe passage and a welcoming arrival (Chapter 4), to enact effective rescues and document rights abuses at sea (Chapter 5) and to mark the graves of the dead in terms that account for the lives of those lost (Chapter 6). As well as exploring the ambiguities of different responses to unruly forms of migration that are unauthorised by states, I have also advanced an analysis of the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ as reflective of a more fundamental breakdown of a modern European form of humanism. In so doing, I have presented a series of reflections on crisis, humanism and dignity, with a view to exposing alternative horizons of solidarity and hope that go beyond a divisive politics that is embedded in a postcolonial present and orientated towards the security of home.

This theoretical chapter introduces in greater detail the conceptual framework of the book. In the first part of this chapter, we revisit and review existing scholarship on public attitudes and preferences. The second half focuses on how public preferences are transferred into policy-making. We argue that the influence of public opinion on policy-making is strongest in the world of “loud politics,” when the salience of an issue is high and attitudes are coherent. In contrast, interest groups have a strong influence on policy-making in the realm of “quiet politics,” when salience is low. Third, when salience is high, but popular attitudes are conflicting, the dynamics of policy-making are likely to follow a pattern of partisan politics (“loud but noisy politics”). We posit that education is a particularly well-suited policy area to demonstrate the usefulness of our framework as salience and coherence of attitudes vary across different educational sectors and policy issues. However, the framework is also applicable to other policy areas.

This chapter analyzes the role of public opinion in the politics of education reform in Germany. Being a federalist country, policy-making happens both at the federal level and the subnational (Land) level. We focus on Baden-Wurttemberg in the south and North Rhine-Westphalia in the west of Germany. We identify salient issues with coherent popular attitudes (such as the reform of upper secondary academic education), where we find a strong influence of public opinion on policy-making (“loud politics”). In the case of vocational education and training, in contrast, interest groups and “quiet politics” rule. Lastly, the domain of school reform politics, in particular the institutional setup of the secondary school system, is an area of “loud but noisy politics” with a high degree of partisan contestation. Thus, the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 2 is broadly confirmed.

Many reforms of education governance throughout the postwar decades have been heavily contested politically. Since around the 1980s, governments in several advanced Western countries have reformed their education systems by increasing private provision, school choice, decentralization, and competition; by lowering or increasing the number of educational tracks available in secondary education; and by reorienting the role of vocational education and training in the education system. Yet, to date we possess insufficient knowledge of the extent to which such reforms are actually in line with individual preferences. This chapter studies individual preferences toward education governance for four educational sectors (early childhood education and care, schools, vocational education and training, and higher education) along three dimensions of education governance. On average, our findings reveal a strong support of public opinion for a publicly dominated, comprehensive model of education provision, coupled with a high degree of choice for students and parents. Yet, for most issues, preferences toward education governance are highly contested between individuals of different ideological orientations and partisan constituencies. Conflicting preferences at the individual level reflect the oftentimes high degree of partisan conflict on many reform issues in the governance of education.

The introductory chapter provides a short overview of the main arguments of the book. In particular, we define the salience of an issue and the coherence of popular attitudes on that issue as conditioning factors that influence the role of public opinion in the politics of education reform. The introduction clarifies how our argument connects to the literature in comparative public policy work on education as well as scholarship on the influence of public opinion on policy-making. It closes with a short overview of the various chapters.

This chapter analyzes attitudes and preferences toward education spending. Relying on representative survey data for eight European countries, it (1) studies what citizens want when it comes to education spending and (2) explores explanations for these preferences, i.e. the main latent political cleavages over education reform. The first part of the chapter sheds theoretical and empirical light on the question how salient is education expenditure compared to other (social) policy areas. Moreover, it explores how attitudes toward education spending relate to attitudes toward means to finance this spending (via taxation, debt, or retrenchment in other areas). The second part of the chapter studies preferences toward the distribution of spending on different sectors of the education system. The results show, among other things, that compared to other issues education is highly salient, particularly schools and vocational education and training. While public support drops considerably once increases in expenditure come at a price, there is an astonishingly high support for education-related taxes. The chapter reports evidence for several potential cleavages over education spending (e.g. along respondents’ income and educational backgrounds), the most consistent one being a partisan divide.