“The Long Bust – Point 4: Europe’s integration process grinds to a halt. Eastern and western Europe can’t finesse a reunification, and even the European Union process breaks down.”
“Meet the new Cold War, same as the old Cold War” by Solost
I don’t want to criticize the Wired article “The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 ” too much; its excessive optimism was purposeful. It stated in its opening paragraphs that it was promoting an alternate take to an older meme, dating from the early 1980s, that “America is in decline, the world is going to hell, and our children’s lives will be worse than our own”. The article described what it called ‘a new meme’ emerging at the date of the article’s publication: that new tech will lead to a long period of economic growth, peace and prosperity, that would “solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty” and “ease tensions throughout the world”. And, somehow, do all this “without blowing the lid off the environment”.
I was a young adult at the time of the article’s publication on July 1, 1997, and I remember well the roaring economy of the late 90s and the optimistic view that the good times were here to stay. The late 90s were, I believe, a watershed period for the rise of the internet and Information Technology in general, as well as a time of mistakes and excess that would lead to the bursting of the dot com bubble by 2001. I was working as a graphic artist back then, and in the late 90s I was witnessing the graphic design field be utterly transformed by the rise of ubiquitous personal computers and newfangled ‘desktop publishing’ software; from drawing with ink on vellum, using straightedges and circle templates, applying Linotype lettering, to doing the work entirely on computer.Few professions transformed so radically and so quickly, from being a wholly physical process to entirely digital, as did graphic design. The retail industry was another that was on its way to being radically transformed. By the late 90s the still-young World Wide Web was just getting started migrating the way we consumed much of our news and information away from the printed page, also utterly transforming (and some would say permanently damaging) the institution of journalism.
The pollyannaish predictions of the Long Boom article ignored a fact of any technological advance since the dawn of humanity: Fire. Electricity. The printed word. Every advance in technology, every invention and innovation, also carries with it a negative or dangerous side. The invention of the automobile revolutionized transportation, but now, according to the CDC, crash injuries are estimated to be the eighth leading cause of death globally for all age groups and the leading cause of death for those between 5–29 years of age. That’s a grim statistic we just accept as the price of technological and cultural progress. The rise of the internet allowed for the dissemination of information more quickly and efficiently than any technology since the Gutenberg press. But it also created an environment that enabled cyber hacking and allowed for disinformation to be spread with a speed and on a scale never seen before.
The ways in which the technology of the early 21st century affected the unification of Europe for better and worse differed from the rosy predictions of the Long Boom article. The reality of the European Union process falls somewhere in between the optimistic scenario of the Wired Long Boom article and the ‘spoiler scenario’ in the sidebar quoted above.
The article got the year of adoption of the Euro, in 1999, more or less correct: it was introduced virtually to world financial markets on January 1, 1999, and entered into physical circulation on January 1, 2002. But its prediction that Britain would hold out for just a few years longer, eventually coming around to adopting the Euro, was completely wrong, as Britain never adopted the Euro, and of course was not long for the European Union altogether. Perhaps the Long Boom article can be forgiven for not predicting ‘Brexit’, an event, after all, almost 20 years away at the time of the article’s publication, but it entirely missed how the spread of disinformation and the weaponization of the internet from Putin’s Russia would seek to destabilize and damage the progress made in unifying eastern and western Europe throughout the early 21st century.
The EU did have a robust expansion into central and eastern Europe in the very early part of the 21st century. After the Cold War ended many former communist countries of eastern and central Europe had applied for EU membership, but their lack of economic development was an issue in fully integrating them into the EU. A system was proposed in which these countries could participate in some aspects of integration, such as free trade, but not others, such as the use of the Euro as currency. in 2004, the EU admitted 10 countries, 8 of which were formerly communist states: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia; along with Cyprus and Malta. In 2007, Bulgaria and Romania also joined the EU. This despite opposition from some who felt that expanding the EU would slow the development of European foreign and security policies.
But problems were forming on the horizon. The euro-zone debt crisis, beginning in 2009, began as an economic downturn in Greece and soon spread to several other EU countries, threatening the survival of a single currency and possibly the EU itself. The measures taken to stabilize the euro and maintain solvency-- bailout packages and austerity measures, did a lot of political damage to the ruling parties of EU governments; by May 2012 more than half of the EU’s 17 member nations had their governments collapse or change leadership.
In early 2014 former Soviet states Georgia and Moldova signed an agreement with the EU to promote closer political and economic ties. Ukraine was supposed to have signed the agreement as well, but backed out due to extreme pressure from Russia. This resulted in violent protests and a bloody government crackdown that led to dozens of deaths and hundreds wounded. Threatened by EU expansion, Russian President Vladimir Putin took control of Crimea, a former Ukrainian autonomous republic, and formally annexed it on March 21, 2014.
By the middle of 2014 Euroskepticism was on the rise throughout many EU nations, a populist movement that advocated disengaging from the EU and supporting tighter immigration controls. Rising Euroskeptic sentiment in Britain led to Prime Minister David Cameron scheduling a referendum for June 2016 to determine if the United Kingdom would continue to be an EU member. On June 23, 2016, 52 percent of Britons voted to leave the EU, a result that emboldened Euroskeptic parties across Europe to attempt a referendum on continued EU membership in their countries as well.
Were Russian cyber war activities partly to blame for Brexit? The “Russia Report”, an assessment of Russia’s tampering in UK politics put together by an independent committee of 9 members of parliament from different political parties, sought to address this. According to the report, the government, including British intelligence, “underestimated the response required to the Russian threat and are still playing catch up.” It states that “Russian influence in the UK is the new normal […] the UK is clearly a target for Russian disinformation.” The report suggests that that Russian information operations, through social media and influential voices within UK politics—may have been a significant factor, just as Russian cyber operations were a significant factor in the 2016 US election.
Russia’s interference in the Brexit referendum included promoting misinformation through fake social media accounts and state-sponsored media outlets. Russian trolls had been documented promoting fake claims of election fraud after the 2014 Scottish independence referendum as well. Prime Minister Theresa May accused the Russian government of “deploying its state-run media organizations to plant fake stories and photo-shopped images in an attempt to sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions”
According to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer in an interview with NPR, “it seems there was actually a lot of Russian money offered to Arron Banks, who was one of the major political figures leading the Brexit campaign. The Russian money was offered to him in the form of business opportunities and gold mines and diamond mines by the Russian ambassador to England. So there seems to be financial incentives that were dangled. There are bots and trolls and posts that are coming from the same Russian Internet agency in St. Petersburg. So in both countries, we see pushing Brexit and pushing Trump at the same time by the same trolls and bots.”
Nigel Farange, the former leader of the UK Independent Party, a ‘hard’ Euroskeptic party, and also the former leader of the Brexit Party, was named a ‘person of interest’ in Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.
The rest of the EU has also been vulnerable to Russian disinformation and cyber operations. From the report “Hacks, Leaks and Disruption: Russian Cyber Strategies”, published in 2018 by the European Institute for Security Studies (EUISS):
“The extensive scope of Russia’s cyber operations is generally recognised by EU policymakers. The European Parliament in November 2016 adopted a resolution stating that Russia’s goal is to distort truths, provoke doubt, divide member states, engineer a strategic split between the European Union and its North American partners, discredit the EU institutions and transatlantic partnerships as well as to undermine and erode ‘the European narrative based on democratic values, human rights and the rule of law’. Sir Julian King, European Commissioner for the Security Union, stated openly that ‘there is little doubt’ that the EU is subject to a sophisticated, carefully orchestrated pro-Russian government-led disinformation campaign in Europe.’”
Several EU member states have openly attributed WannaCry and NotPetya malware attacks to Russia.
Clearly Putin-led Russian cyber operations are now, and will be for the foreseeable future, a threat to the continued prosperity and even the existence of the EU as well as a clear threat to the rest of the western world. While Russia may not have been successful in causing the complete breakdown of the unification of eastern and western Europe, there is much evidence that Russian cyber activities caused damage to the unification process. And the cyber threat against the EU and the west in general is only growing. The weaponization of the internet is a real threat that the Wired Long Boom article failed to foresee.
Some discussion threads here on the Straight Dope include What will the UK do wrt Brexit? and https://boards.straightdope.com/t/support-for-unification-has-increased-dramatically-in-northern-ireland-over-the-past-8-years-morphed-to-brexit-revisited