TRUMP IS EUROPE`S BEST ENEMY YET / THE FINANCIAL TIMES MAGAZINE

Trump is Europe’s best enemy yet

Lack of a common foe enfeebled Europe — but not any more

Simon Kuper

© Harry Haysom

It’s an old tenet of political thought that to build a collective identity you need an enemy. 

An adversary can force your people to cohere.

Hitler played that role for Britain, and the USSR for the US. 

After the Soviet enemy collapsed, so did American unity. 

But the EU only acquired external enemies in the past decade: first the Brexiters, then Vladimir Putin, with China lurking in the background, and now, at last, the perfect enemy, Donald Trump. 

He has probably done more to unite Europe than any European ever did.

Lack of enemies long enfeebled Europe. 

There just didn’t seem much need to fight for the cause. 

When I recently researched the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, I was struck that almost nobody opposed it. 

Here was a centuries-old ideal, a united Europe, which had never previously materialised, yet when a handful of leaders whose countries had just fought each other in a terrible war agreed to it, barely consulting voters, almost everyone said: OK. 

The US backed the EEC, the UK didn’t join but barely opposed, the Soviets worried more about Nato, and large parliamentary majorities in the six founding countries ratified the EEC’s creation.

A technocratic economic union without enemies inspired little emotion. 

Nobody would die for the blue and gold flag, and only a few Ryder Cup ultras ever waved it at a sporting event. 

In TV series and films, the hero fighting geopolitical baddies was almost always an American, not a European.

Brexit became the first potential existential threat to the EU. 

Many people thought it would prompt other exits. 

In 2018, Italy’s far-right leader Matteo Salvini, just before entering government, compared the EU with “the Titanic about to sink”. 

In response to the threat, citizens’ support for the union jumped to its highest level since 1983, reported the European Commission’s Eurobarometer survey in spring 2018. 

Brexit killed off continental exit movements. 

Then Putin replaced the Brexiters as Europe’s enemy-in-chief, and helped advance European unity. 

By autumn 2024, even before Trump’s election, 74 per cent of respondents to the Eurobarometer survey said they felt they were citizens of the EU, the highest level in more than 20 years.

But Trump is the best enemy yet. 

If a television writers’ room designed the perfect villain, he would usurp the house of your trusted protector. 

He would fill the minds even of people who think about politics for five minutes a week. 

He would threaten to hurt you, as Trump did during January’s “Greenland moment”. 

And he would incarnate the opposite of your group’s stated ideals, in this case peace and democracy. 

Trump also comes with a wonderful array of sub-villains: US tech oligarchs, whose products inhabit European psyches like nothing before them.

I’ve never previously seen Europeans feel so European. 

Last week I attended an elite gathering in the fantastically Atlanticist Netherlands, where the mainstream opinion was that we had lost the US and needed to defend ourselves. 

One attendee, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Dutch secretary-general of Nato from 2004 to 2009, said that Europe couldn’t defend itself alone, and that the US still supported Nato, yet added: “I have fear of abandonment, but I am past the mourning process.”

I then saw the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland speak at the Parisian university Sciences Po, where the assembled students and even some journalists gave them a standing ovation. 

At last, Europe is tugging at heartstrings. If the continent is now decolonising itself from its American master, that’s both terrifying and exhilarating.

These aren’t just elite emotions. 

The latest Eurobazooka survey of 7,498 Europeans, conducted for French journal Le Grand Continent, is startling. 

Big majorities backed sending European troops to defend Greenland. 

Fifty-one per cent said Trump was an enemy of Europe; only 8 per cent called him a friend. 

Three per cent of German Christian Democrats, the ultimate Atlanticists, thought he was a democrat. 

And, unusually for a foreign-policy issue, awareness of the “Greenland moment” was nearly total.

The survey identified only one European political grouping divided over Trump: the far right. 

Some of its voters like him, and others don’t. 

He is splitting the far right just as migration split the European left.

I’d always doubted that Europe existed as anything more than an unfinished single market. 

That might be changing.