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TRUMP, BREXIT AND THE RISE OF EUROPE'S FAR-RIGHT STOKE FEAR IN BRUSSELS
12/3/16 AT 12:13 PM
When I first met Katrine Steinfeld over dinner in Brussels a few weeks ago, she seemed to epitomize the thousands of bright young people drawn to Europe’s capital. For more than 70 years, such people, backed by American support and dollars, have been dedicated to the idea that Europe’s success could only be achieved if its nations shed their ages-old hatreds and grievances and work together.
Steinfeld, 29, specializes in gender equality issues for a Brussels-based international organization. Her friends at the table that night included social policy experts at the European Commission and a professor at the Center for Ethnic and Migration Studies at the University of Liège. Typical for Bruxellois, all are fluent in several languages.
At first, everybody winced and joked about Donald Trump’s victory the week before. The future leader of the free world had famously disparaged NATO, which is more than a military acronym to Europeans anxious over Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and continuing provocations in the Baltics and Scandinavia. But the laughter grew thinner when the discussion turned to Trump’s ascendance in concert with the rise of authoritarian and racist parties across the continent, all cheered on by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The foundation of the European Union, nations bound by shared values of liberal democracy, seemed to be falling apart.
<<snip>>
The week before I met Steinfeld and her friends for dinner, 75,000 torch-bearing, far-right nationalists marched through the streets of Warsaw, already under the reactionary rule of the Law and Justice Party, carrying banners that read, “God, Honor, Fatherland,” and, “To be a Pole, to be a Catholic is a privilege and honor.”
To Steinfeld, such developments were a visceral threat. She told me how her Jewish great-grandparents escaped the pogroms in Russian-occupied Latvia at the end of the 19th century. They fled to Norway, where, 40-years-later, the Nazis landed and began rounding up Jews. “My great grandmother and her children were taken by the collaborating police, and ultimately saved by a neighbor who was a policeman and ushered them quietly out through a back door while the crowd was moving into the station, ” she recounted. Their son, who was 17, “was himself arrested and tortured, hung outside in a cage in winter.”
...
Steinfeld, 29, specializes in gender equality issues for a Brussels-based international organization. Her friends at the table that night included social policy experts at the European Commission and a professor at the Center for Ethnic and Migration Studies at the University of Liège. Typical for Bruxellois, all are fluent in several languages.
At first, everybody winced and joked about Donald Trump’s victory the week before. The future leader of the free world had famously disparaged NATO, which is more than a military acronym to Europeans anxious over Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and continuing provocations in the Baltics and Scandinavia. But the laughter grew thinner when the discussion turned to Trump’s ascendance in concert with the rise of authoritarian and racist parties across the continent, all cheered on by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The foundation of the European Union, nations bound by shared values of liberal democracy, seemed to be falling apart.
<<snip>>
The week before I met Steinfeld and her friends for dinner, 75,000 torch-bearing, far-right nationalists marched through the streets of Warsaw, already under the reactionary rule of the Law and Justice Party, carrying banners that read, “God, Honor, Fatherland,” and, “To be a Pole, to be a Catholic is a privilege and honor.”
To Steinfeld, such developments were a visceral threat. She told me how her Jewish great-grandparents escaped the pogroms in Russian-occupied Latvia at the end of the 19th century. They fled to Norway, where, 40-years-later, the Nazis landed and began rounding up Jews. “My great grandmother and her children were taken by the collaborating police, and ultimately saved by a neighbor who was a policeman and ushered them quietly out through a back door while the crowd was moving into the station, ” she recounted. Their son, who was 17, “was himself arrested and tortured, hung outside in a cage in winter.”
...
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-brexit-europe-far-right-fear-brussels-527980