Jewish journalist: "The solution is to make the E.U.?s policy more favorable to multiculturalism and migration"

[NewsFeed]

The European Union is going through some tough times. Next month, Great Britain, which from the beginning has had one foot out of the European project by not signing on to the European currency or the Schengen Agreement (a treaty that abolished many of the E.U.’s internal borders), will vote on whether to divest from the E.U. completely.

Last month, in a move that pit Jew against Jew, Dutch voters defeated a trade agreement between Ukraine and the E.U.; according to JTA, a delegation of Jews from Ukraine lobbied hard for European integration, but Dutch Jewish leaders felt Ukraine was still too anti-Semitic to gain entry.

Dutch Jews might be right that Ukraine is still tainted by fascism, which finds homes in parties like Svoboda and Right Sector, but that’s all the more reason that Ukrainian Jews should have access to the E.U., and not be left alone to deal with that reality themselves. The fact is, if the choice is between maintaining provincial nationalism and establishing transnational governance, the latter, no matter how flawed, is always the better option.

Criticism of the pan-European project ranges from the legitimate to the petty to the dangerous impulse to return to the state of affairs that gave us two world wars and the Holocaust. For the left, the European project has wrongly put poorer nations like Greece and Spain at the mercy of northern European industrial powerhouses like Germany. “Ironic” is hardly a strong enough word for that situation.

The British impulse to step out of the E.U. stems from frustration with burdensome E.U. regulations and, more troubling, from a fear of new immigration. There’s no denying that Euro-skepticism has come a great deal from the right, especially from far-right nationalist parties that thrive on fear and hatred of non-European migrants (particularly Muslims), as France’s Front National does. To make matters worse, these groups have found an ally in Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Brussels, the seat of the European government, may have its problems. But the cold governance of Brussels would still be a far easier pill to swallow than a network of racist thugs bankrolled by the Russian oligarchs.

The best argument for this is probably Hungary, where the reign of conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the rise of the anti-Semitic far-right party Jobbik have led to attacks on minorities and on the free press , on a scale that is not fit for an enlightened democracy. This situation has forced E.U. intervention on several occasions; last year, for example, E.U. parliamentarians warned the nation after it signaled that it would bring back the death penalty.

In a 2014 paper, academic Bojan Bugarič said , “Even if the existence of the E.U. makes the danger of rising illiberalism less dramatic, there are still reasons to be worried about the authoritarian illiberal attacks on liberal democracy. As the Hungarian case shows, the E.U. has quite limited

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