This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past entries here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.
On March 6, 2025, in collaboration with The Dial, the NYR Online published Caitlin L. Chandler’s dispatch from an uneasy Munich Security Conference. The MSC began during the cold war as an annual summit for West German military brass and their NATO counterparts to coordinate against the Soviet threat. Since then, Chandler notes, it has become known as “Davos with guns,” a convention for CEOs, politicians, defense contractors, policy wonks, and consulting firms to celebrate the transatlantic alliance. This year’s conference, however, was distinguished by Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech castigating European officials for having cultivated a “threat from within” and unmooring the continent from the “shared values” of the West by accepting foreign migration.
“In the audience were Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, and members of the current [German] government, some of whom later made impromptu statements defending German democracy and vowed to ramp up defense so as not to rely on the US,” writes Chandler. Post-Munich, Germany and other EU member countries have raced to disentangle themselves from their American allies, including through increased military spending. As one conference delegate asked, “Can Europe get its shit together?”
Chandler has been reporting from Europe for a decade, covering subjects like the rise of the far right, developments in surveillance technology, and many of the human tragedies brought about by migration policies. In addition to the Review, her writing has appeared in, among other places, Harper’s, The Washington Post Magazine, The Baffler, and The Nation.
Last month Chandler and I corresponded about whether the utopianism of the 1990s is dead, the possible implications of the far right’s electoral successes across the continent, and where European migration policy goes from here.
Dahlia Krutkovich: Are we witnessing a transformation of the “European idea”? Do you think a more coherent European identity might emerge in response to American hostility?
Caitlin L. Chandler: There is some cohesion, at least on the surface, among elected European officials and citizens who want to maintain a functioning European Union. But if you probe more deeply, Europe feels more fractured than united on any single issue. Over the past decade, common understanding of the EU as a peace project has weakened, and its stated purpose—to allow the free movement of people and goods—is no longer the political consensus. Many people are worried about the rising cost of living, the lack of affordable housing, strained healthcare systems, climate change, and the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Palestine. There is a general sense of instability—and fear about what the future holds. Though the bloc is trying to hold strong against Trump’s provocations, it remains to be seen how effectively it navigates these other challenges.
While many young Europeans are horrified by the Trump administration’s totalitarian swagger, they saw the US as a kind of global bully even before the 2016 election. Unlike older generations, they do not have a strong belief in Atlanticism, the idea that a military and economic alliance between Europe and the United States is mutually beneficial. Exactly what kind of world they want to live in is less clear. To take an example in one country, in the recent German national election, the leftist party Die Linke did well with young women while the extremist Alternative für Deutschland made gains with young men.
It’s been three years since German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech, his response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in which he announced that Germany would begin allocating more than 2 percent of its GDP to defense spending. How much is Germany setting the agenda for Europe’s remilitarization?
Until a few years ago, Germany occupied a somewhat awkward position in discussions about European militarization because the Potsdam Agreement explicitly demilitarized the country after World War II. I think that changed in 2022, as you note, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, although over the past decade German politicians have slowly increased defense spending and floated the idea of a “European army.” The latter is widely considered implausible, because every EU country has different rules about when to deploy military force, neutrality, conscription, and so on. But other European leaders, such as France’s Emmanuel Macron, have championed the idea as well, and the EU had been ramping up defense spending prior to the second Trump administration. A study from the Transnational Institute and Statewatch found that in the 2021–2027 budget, EU security spending will increase by 123 percent, to a total of €43.9 billion. In the previous six-year period, Brussels had allocated €19.7 billion for security. (This money goes to military operations, arms companies, border control, etc.)
Germany is also the second-largest military supporter of Israel after the US and has brutally repressed antigenocide and antiwar protesters. In early March I stopped by the International Women’s Day demonstration in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood. The march united a diverse array of groups—there were sex workers, refugees, queer people, environmentalists, women’s rights supporters, and more. As I watched peaceful protesters pass by on Oranienstrasse, I noticed that the German police, heavily outfitted with guns, riot gear, and batons, were flanking—and filming—only the antiwar section, where many people were carrying Palestinian flags. It was chilling. Later, I saw a video of those same officers brutally beating the demonstrators. I’m not sure Americans are aware of the extremity of police brutality that you see here in Germany.
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It feels like a very long time ago that Angela Merkel told the German public they could handle the 2015 influx of migrants from the Middle East, in particular Syria. How do you think Europe’s migration policy will evolve in the coming years?
In most European countries today there are few political parties or politicians explicitly calling for humane border and migration policies. (One exception is Die Linke, which doubled its support from the previous election with some 8 percent.) Across the bloc, we’ve seen broad support for the militarization of external borders and attempts to trap migrants and asylees in camps along the European frontier. Just like the US and Australia, the EU is expanding the use of detention while curtailing access to asylum procedures.
“Detention” has become a buzzword of sorts in political rhetoric and media reports because it has an administrative ring to it, but I think it’s important to be clear about what exactly it means: when someone is imprisoned in an immigration detention facility, they typically exist in a state of legal limbo, forcibly confined and deprived of the ability to work or study. These facilities are essentially prisons: often overcrowded, poorly ventilated, and unable to provide proper medical care. Holding on to mental health, not to mention physical health, in such a facility is extremely difficult. And that is the point—to make conditions so terrible that people no longer try to cross an EU border without a visa. Most European countries need immigrants of course, their populations are shrinking. But governments want to pick and choose who comes, even if their policies have contributed to instability or war elsewhere. As a result, people are dying at Europe’s borders, and there will be more deaths.
A new generation of European leaders has come to the fore, and, as you say, they aren’t particularly interested in the European project as a set of ideas or principles. At the same time, someone like Jordan Bardella, an EMP from France and a rising star on the European far right, is not quite as Euro skeptic as some of his predecessors. What could an authoritarian yet still integrated Europe look like?
I do not want to imagine what a complete takeover by the far right would look like. On some level, I’m not sure it would look so different from Europe now, but I do think we would see the further erosion of civil liberties. There would likely be widespread surveillance of dissidents, activists, and journalists. There would likely be less funding for social and environmental programs, and social welfare would be gutted. We’d probably also see an explosion in public corruption, à la Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, who has been directing EU funds to his family and friends for years. Perhaps an interesting example to look to would be Italy’s far-right leader Giorgia Meloni, who was considered a Euro skeptic but has softened her stance since being elected.
Aside from my essay about the Munich Security Conference, I’ve avoided covering politicians or conventional electoral politics. There are plenty of people who do that and do it well, but I’m more interested in how politics manifest in individual lives, such as the story I did for the Review in December, about Sajjad Mohammedhasan, a young Iraqi asylum-seeker who was incarcerated for eleven months in Lithuania and went on to sue the Lithuanian government from inside prison. I think the advice I’d give to young writers is simple: write about the issues you’re drawn to, the ones that you can’t stop thinking about. I’ve learned more about how the world works from spending time with Sajjad, the Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat, or the Nigerien conflict mediator Boubacar Diallo than I have from politicians.
