European current affairs // I S S U E 1 // P A T T E R N S
The year 2021 started with thousands of trucks from Folkestone, Great Britain, driving into Calais, France, as they have been doing for the past 26 years — carrying beef, milk, cereals and shoes. This time, however, they were met with flashes of dozens of cameras. On New Year's Day journalists hurried to see for themselves if anything changed on the day the United Kingdom officially left the European Single Market.
It turns out not much did.
As the UK and the EU managed to agree on a new trade deal on Christmas Eve, after years of negotiations, trade went on as it always had: free, and without significant interruptions at the British-French border.
The biggest changes aren't always fully visible though, if you look at them with the naked eye of camera flashes or through the lens of daily news reports. European society, identity and politics have been profoundly changing for the past ten years, and they will for years to come.
Just look at what’s happening.
The EU is trying to find a way out of economic crises and a pandemic. In the meantime, the people of Belarus have been protesting to unseat the last dictator of Europe.
The EU is trying to find a way out of the economic crises that occurred after the pandemic hit the continent. Some hope that the European Green Deal — a plan to attract one trillion euros worth of public and private investments in the coming ten years, to boost a climate neutral economy — will be a way out of economic decline. This Green Deal gives the institutions of the European Union more power, making the call for democratization of the EU even bigger.
In the meantime, the people of Belarus have been protesting to unseat the last dictator of Europe; Alexander Lukashenko, who has been ruling his country for the past twenty-six years, echoing Soviet Times. Some would say this could be the last stop on the way towards a more democratic continent. But this is not a done deal.
National-populists have been gaining ground in European countries for years.
National-populists have been gaining ground in European countries for years, challenging the foundations of liberal democracy. Just recently, the governments of Poland and Hungary vetoed the budget of the European Union. In their countries these governments restrained the independence of judges and attacked free press and universities. Now Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Polish Law and Justice party leader Jarosław Kaczyński think their fellow European leaders were too rigid in their plans to make EU cash conditional on respecting the rule of law.
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Protests in Minsk, Belarus, 2020. Photo by Andrew Keymaster on Unsplash