No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
It was for those of us sharing the continent of Europe the year of the outsider. Both literally in the almost Biblical exodus from the Middle East, and in the insurgencies of our internal ethnic and political outsiders. And there was a parallelism in both the movements of those alienated from politics, expressed in varieties of anti-politics on the right and left, and in the disaffected young Muslims who had never felt at home here and for whom jihadism became a home.
Mainstream, democratic politics seemed to be withering on the vine as the crises of 2015 threatened to tear the Union apart leaving it battered, bruised, uncertain and littered with new barriers.
In the Greek crisis we saw the emergence and, for now, the overcoming of the EU’s first existential threat, while the second, migration, remains in the balance. Both required above all a renewed commitment to the core value on which the union was ostensibly founded, solidarity – a moral imperative, but also a practical one arising from globalisation and our inevitable growing interdependence.
It was never better exemplified than in the global agreement in Paris at year's end on new legally enforceable common targets for greenhouse gas emissions. And was also manifest in September in Chancellor Merkel's brave articulation of an open door policy for Syria's and Iraq's fleeing millions. But how far Europe's nations remain from embodying that essential value, of which John Donne wrote, was sadly exemplified in Germany's neighbours, Hungary and Poland, among others. They articulated a narrow-minded nationalism and an Islamophobia that sadly appeared to draw new political borders between old and new Europe, with frontier posts and barbed wire fences re-emerging across the "borderless union".
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
And while the events of the year showed European politics increasingly marching in step to a common calendar and with an increasingly shared political culture, it was also clear that each was also marching to their own drum with uniquely national characteristics. Whether it was the political successes in France or the UK of the Front National and Ukip, in Greece and Spain of Syriza and Podemos, or in the Nordic countries of their own distinctive right-wing parties – or indeed in the success of Donald Trump in the US – each bore the hallmark of their own political cultures.
The nation state, its politics and culture, is robust and certainly not withering away either in the face of globalisation or of what many see as the malign impact of "ever closer union". That imperative, however, was largely on hold this year, not least because it was a casus belli that one of the year's most successful politicians, the re-elected David Cameron, would cite in his attempts to renegotiate UK EU membership.
The year was ushered in in Paris by the massacre claiming the lives of 17 people at Charlie Hebdo, the first real taste of the backwash in Europe from Syria's bloody war, and a harbinger of things to come. Hundreds more would perish in jihadist attacks in countries as far-flung as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Tunisia, Mali, Russia and the US while the same war's backwash would also drive the mass migration.
More than a million people reached Europe through irregular means in 2015, a four-fold increase on 2014, the vast majority arriving by sea in Greece. People smuggling operations probably earned at least $1 billion. And at least five million people globally were forcibly displaced from their homes in the first half of the year, adding to the 59.5 million displaced people the UN refugee agency recorded at the end of 2014.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
The early months would be dominated by the Greek voters' election in January of a radical left government under Alexis Tsipras and a confrontation with fellow member states that appeared to threaten the euro itself. After months of acrimonious confrontation, Greece agreed in July to even harsher terms for a new bailout. Tsipras used a new election to give himself a new mandate and purge his party. The country is far from being out of danger – there are more precarious votes to come, and more pain for the Greek people, but Tsipras appears secure. Meanwhile his party's success has had a ripple effect throughout the union from Spain and Portugal to Germany, and even in the surprise election of Jeremy Corbyn to lead the British Labour Party.
A turbulent bruising year that the continent will be glad to see out. “Europe is the less”.
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. (John Donne)