Europe’s hope for unity fading as it confronts rising discontent | McClatchy Washington Bureau

German wags and social media commentators, looking at the current cocktail of woes facing the European Union, have come up with a notion of a single fix: the “Saxit,” or the forced exit of the deeply angry German state of Saxony from Germany and the EU.

It’s a jest perhaps only a German would understand.

Saxony’s capital is Dresden, the birthplace and continued heart of anti-refugee populism and violence in a nation that in the past year has taken in a million refugees. Dresden, and small towns near it, regularly make national newscasts for anti-refugee actions. In Berlin, and Munich and other urban areas where refugees have found greater acceptance, the news from Saxony these days is often described as an embarrassment to all Germans. Better they just exit.

But it’s also a reference to “Brexit,” the contemplated exit of Britain from the EU, a proposition the British electorate will vote on in June. Or “Grexit,” the possible departure of Greece from the EU that’s been discussed for years as the Greek financial crisis unfolded.

And “Saxit” reflects more than a German attitude these days. Dissatisfaction is rife in France and Holland and Belgium and Spain and Italy and the Scandinavian countries. Some even suggest that the rise of Donald Trump in the United States is part of the phenomenon.

“In Germany, in France, in the United Kingdom and even the United States, we’re seeing a common reaction to what looks to be the same root: a disenchantment with the existing political elite,” said Joerg Wolf, the editor in chief at the Atlantic Initiative think tank in Berlin. “These movements don’t come from the results of policy. Saxony doesn’t have many foreigners. The United Kingdom doesn’t actually put that much money in the European Union. But people are fed up, in general, with the directions of their lives, and want to send a message.”

“Brexit” has become the latest flashpoint of dissatisfaction with European policies regarding the continent’s fears of terrorism, refugees, youth unemployment and a Greek financial crisis that isn’t going away. The notion behind it is that the crises of the European Union are both unwanted and predictable results of the union, and that the only way to avoid them is to escape them.

In a talk at the British think tank Chatham House recently, Nigel Lawson, a former British chancellor for the exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, outlined reasons for British citizens to back a Brexit. He said the EU is a political union based on a “dysfunctional” single-currency economic union of which the United Kingdom happily is not a part.

He said that the euro, a currency used by 19 individual nations with individual economic policies and issues, was “designed to fail.”

“It was designed to be a stepping stone to a central political union that never happened,” he said. Instead, the euro and the EU represent “One of the greatest economic and political failures of our time.”

The notion of the mythical “Saxit” plays on the idea that the solution to Europe’s problems is to simply jettison those who insist on doubting.

Die Zeit, the German weekly intellectual newspaper, started the talk with a column.

“For months now Saxony has been the most unsympathetic German state,” columnist Stefan Schirmer wrote. “It’s in headlines with ... right-wing extremism and attacks on refugees. Isn’t it time for a Saxit, the exit of Saxony from the federal republic?”

Schirmer added that the move would hardly be in the best interests of Saxony, but would serve the rest of the nation.

“If they left, the rest of Germany wouldn’t have to feel ashamed that the Saxons are showing so little sympathy,” he wrote. That lack of sympathy includes recent polls that show the right-wing Alternative for Germany political party, whose main issues are anti-immigrant and anti-EU, running ahead of the Social Democrats in state elections in neighboring Saxony-Anhalt.

In Britain, a government report has estimated that it would take the nation 10 years to disentangle from the European Union, and that the process and result would bring heavy costs. Still, six of 22 cabinet members and the influential mayor of London, Boris Johnson, have labeled the stay effort as “Project Fear” and are insisting that leaving the EU is the safe option.

Richard Whitman, a European politics expert at the University of Kent, said that even if British voters decide to stay, the Brexit campaign has done its damage.

For one, to avoid a British exit, the EU agreed to let the United Kingdom avoid what had been union-wide obligations, most notably the longstanding EU goal of forming “an ever closer union” among the people of Europe. It also won the right to pay reduced child benefits to immigrants from other EU nations. That undercuts the very idea of the European Union.

“In the past, the effort has been to get everybody into the same space,” Whitman said. “This puts Britain in the slow lane, with no obligation to ever catch up.”

Now “leaving the EU is an option,” he said. “It’s no longer an exclusive club in which membership lasts for life. Right now, I think even nations like the Netherlands might vote for an exit.”

Whitman said the notion that Europeans share values and goals has suffered. “We’re back to the idea of promoting our individual national superiorities,” he said.

Some say the fracturing of the dream of a united Europe was inevitable. “The European project was always bound to fail,” Stratfor, the Texas-based international risk analysis consultancy, wrote on its website Tuesday.

Stratfor said the “project” of European unity “would inevitably encounter insurmountable levels of nationalist resistance” built up over centuries of war among “distinct groups of people with different histories, languages and cultures.”

“That is the point at which we now find ourselves,” the Stratfor analysis said.

Iain Begg, an EU expert at the London School of Economics, said the future of the EU is at best complicated. While he doubted that the EU would allow other nations to renegotiate their deal with the union, “the U.K. deal has the potential to weaken the commitment of the EU as a whole to maintaining, let alone deepening, integration.”

And the EU might not be the end of it.

In a paper published Wednesday, Paul J.J. Welfens, president of the European Institute for International Economic Relations in Germany, blamed Germany’s open-door refugee policy for hastening European disintegration and giving a boost to the British campaign to desert the union.

“If the EU continues to be destabilized, the next field of instability will be NATO,” he wrote, referring to the military alliance that also includes Canada and the United States. “That would be highly dangerous.”