Europe is riding two currents that could collide. One is deeper security cooperation, driven by a prolonged war in Ukraine, a persistent Russian threat and a United States that has grown reluctant to shoulder European security. The other is the rise of the radical right and sovereigntist forces. Once prominent mainly in Hungary and Poland, that trend is now spreading to core Western European countries such as Germany, France and Britain. How these two currents — stronger security cohesion at the European level and nationalism in domestic politics — collide is drawing close attention.
Since early this year, officials have floated a new EU-level mechanism, modeled loosely on the security consultations of Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) treaty, under which all 27 EU member states would convene to discuss a joint response when a member faces hybrid threats such as drone incursions or cyberattacks. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed an emergency security protocol and the creation of a European Security Council along those lines last month. The council is envisioned as a leader-level security consultative body that would include not only major EU states but also non-EU partners such as Britain, Norway, Ukraine and Canada. Separately, von der Leyen also proposed granting Canada the EU's first associate membership. There is no shortage of problems to resolve, including overlapping functions with NATO, which 23 of the EU's 27 member states have already joined, and questions over legal authority. Even so, the push for a separate European security framework appears to be an effort to build the institutional capacity for Europe to consult and respond on its own, rather than relying entirely on the United States.
In the European Parliament, meanwhile, the radical right and sovereigntist forces have already secured considerable influence. They have not merged into a single bloc, but they share a view that national sovereignty should come first and that the EU's powers and interventions should be scaled back. Last month, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 43.8% of the vote in the Saxony-Anhalt state assembly election, falling just three seats short of a majority. In the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin state assembly elections, the party took 38.2% and 16.8%, finishing first and third, respectively. Germany's Basic Law contains a "defensive democracy" mechanism that defines parties threatening the free democratic basic order as unconstitutional and allows the Federal Constitutional Court to order their dissolution. But because extreme measures such as banning a party can run counter to democracy itself, the established parties have instead adopted a strategy of refusing to bring the AfD into coalition governments.
In Britain, Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, who spearheaded Brexit, has established itself as a major political force threatening both Labour and the Conservatives. In France, Marine Le Pen, a key leader of the National Rally, is seen by some as having a chance of winning next year's presidential election. Britain, France and Germany are the core states underpinning European security and the liberal international order. Changes in their domestic politics are bound to send correspondingly large ripples through policy across Europe.
So how will the EU's drive for deeper integration, built on solidarity, meet the nationalist right-wing politics spreading through major European countries? First, conflict over support for Ukraine is likely to intensify. Radical right parties oppose aid to Ukraine, viewing the war less as a common European task than as an external conflict that imposes a heavy fiscal burden on their own citizens. Climate action could also be slowed. The radical right has criticized the EU's stringent environmental rules as a policy by which technocrats in Brussels push excessive costs onto businesses and farmers. The biggest change is likely to come in immigration policy. With voters frustrated by economic stagnation and inequality increasingly seeing immigration as a threat not only to jobs but also to national identity, anti-immigration policies will harden.
For now, radical right parties are more likely to expand their influence by joining coalition governments than by governing alone. That could produce political bargains in which established parties accept some of the right's demands on immigration while the radical right compromises with existing policy on European security cooperation. In the end, Europe's direction depends on where external pressure for a "stronger Europe" and the domestic politics of member states demanding a "stronger nation-state" find common ground.