Three decades later U2’s warning to Europe is more relevant than ever

On November 1st, the European Union will celebrate 30 years since its founding. On the same day, U2 will play another date of their glitzy residency in Paradise, Nevada. The timing of this concert, if not its Las Vegas location, could not be more fitting. Three decades ago, the band toured Europe with a warning about the dangers of violent nationalism and right-wing populism. Zoo TV’s stark message remains more relevant than ever as the EU faces a protracted war in Ukraine and a new generation of political extremists at home.

U2 had originally looked to the United States for inspiration. But, having mined this seam until it was spent, the band relocated in 1990 to Berlin, where they channelled Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard and David Bowie. When ZooTV reached Europe in the summer of 1993, its political focus changed. Bono had opened earlier shows in North America by jerkily dancing before a snow pattern of static on a giant video wall. Now he appeared to the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the European anthem, flashing a Strangelove-inspired salute before an animated European flag which lost one star after another. Rather than phoning the White House, the singer prank-called right-wing populists such as French MEP Jean-Marie Le Pen and spoke nightly to journalists in Sarajevo, a city under siege.

Europe was in the cultural ether that summer. The recently completed single market project had created a seemingly borderless space between the 12 member states of the European Community, promising new economic opportunities for their 370 million citizens. The Maastricht Treaty sought to build a new European Union on the edifice of this Community, complete with a single currency, a common foreign and security policy and co-operation in the fields of justice and home affairs. However, these plans were thrown into disarray when Danish voters rejected Maastricht by the narrowest of margins.

The stakes couldn’t have been higher when Danes went to the polls for a second time in May 1993. Although the other members of the European Community promised to launch the European Union regardless, Conservative rebels in the British House of Commons would have been emboldened in their efforts to defeat the Maastricht Treaty. Had the EU failed, Central and eastern Europe’s new democracies, which saw closer ties with western Europe as crucial for their prosperity and stability, would have been left in limbo. Danish voters ultimately backed Maastricht, but the second referendum was marred by violence in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district during which the police shot and wounded 11 protesters. Meanwhile, British prime minister John Major faced down the Maastricht rebels, while bemoaning the ‘bastards’ in his own party who continued to sow divisions over Europe.

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Jacques Delors was dismayed by this turn of events. “The euphoria of 1990, in the wake of the liberation of Central and eastern Europe, has given way to a period of depression, with the Yugoslavian tragedy looming in the background”, the then president of the European Commission said in a speech in February 1993: “To be frank, routine co-operation between our 12 member states has weakened in the face of these developments”. U2 were too busy having fun to follow the fine details of such events, they told journalists, but they were struck by the rise of right-wing populists as they criss-crossed Europe and troubled by the disconnect between politicians “pontificating about the single market and single currency” while responding to the Yugoslav Wars with “uncertainty and prevarication”.

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When U2 opened ZooTV in Rotterdam’s Feyenoord stadium in May 1993, they encountered a new and febrile sort of European politics. The liberal consensus underpinning Dutch society was visibly crumbling. Hans Janmaat, a far-right member of parliament, played a part in this seismic change by promising to abolish multiculturalism if he won power. Mainstream parties condemned such statements while putting forward plans of their own to crackdown on illegal immigration. Later that summer, Bono’s Faustian alter ego Mr MacPhisto called his “very good friend” Janmaat from the stage and sang I just called to say I love you.

It was not only in the Netherlands that politics had taken an ugly turn. Le Pen’s depiction of France as a country under siege from Eurocrats and immigrants helped his party to secure three million votes in the first round of parliamentary elections in March 1993. Two months later, German chancellor Helmut Kohl was criticised for his taciturn response to a house fire in the city of Solingen in which skinheads killed five members of a Turkish family. In Italy, Andrea Mussolini was greeted by cries of “Duce, Duce, Duce” as she campaigned to become mayor of Naples. “I wanted to thank him for letting me back in the country” was MacPhisto’s message to both Le Pen and Kohl. “I just want to tell her that she’s doing a wonderful job filling the old man’s shoes,” he told the Italian dictator’s granddaughter.

Thirty years later, as U2 take to the stage in Las Vegas, the EU has shown far greater resilience than many expected at the time of its creation. While Delors was right to see the EU as crisis prone, he misjudged how politically invested member states would remain in the European project in times of turmoil. Faced with the euro crisis, the global refugee crisis and Covid-19, national leaders’ instinct to work together to advance their collective interests grew steadily stronger. That 16 countries have joined the EU since 1993 – the majority from Central and eastern Europe – underlines the Union’s power of attraction. Brexit was undoubtedly a blow for European integration, yet the remaining member states closed ranks while the UK Conservative Party tore itself apart over how to take back control.

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Despite the EU’s resilience, U2′s warning to Europe still resonates in 2023. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s recent call to “stop the invasion” owes a debt to Janmaat, whose anti-immigration policies have left an indelible mark on Dutch politics. Alternative für Deutschland, some factions of which are classified as ‘verified right-wing extremists’ are polling at 22 per cent, amid talk of an electoral pact with the centre-right party that Kohl once led. Marine Le Pen may have distanced herself from her father’s Holocaust denials, but she has honed his arguments against a European superstate to powerful effect. Twice beaten by Emmanuel Macron in a runoff for the French presidency, Le Pen is, according to polls, in a strong position to succeed him in 2027. In Italy, prime minister Giorgia Meloni has spoken openly of her admiration for Benito Mussolini and warned against the “ethnic substitution” of Italian citizens.

This political ideology is not confined to these countries. In Hungary and Poland, right-wing populist governments are openly defying the EU’s commitment to the rule of law. In Ireland, the burning of asylum seekers’ makeshift accommodation on Dublin’s Mount Street and the recent construction of a mock gallows outside Government Buildings have sparked fears of a far-right backlash against the country’s progressive consensus.

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The message of U2′s ZooTV tour was not only that violent nationalism and right-wing populism were on the rise in Europe but that the EU was too passive in the face of such threats. The €76 billion in financial, humanitarian and military support provided by the EU to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022 shows that lessons have been learned since the Yugoslav Wars. So too does the temporary protection given by EU member states to more than four million Ukrainians. And yet, the EU has been too slow to hold right-wing populists such as Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban to account for undermining the rule of law and too quick to make common cause with leaders such as Italy’s Meloni on immigration.

U2 have been uncharacteristically quiet about politics in Las Vegas. In contrast to their last tour, which saw Bono heckle Donald Trump nightly, the singer has declared the “T-word” off-limits. The only flag flown at concerts has been John Gerrard’s Surrender, an arresting environmental artwork made of white water droplets evaporating in the Mojave Desert. Mr MacPhisto has yet to appear in Paradise, but Brussels should be at the top of his call sheet if he does.

Dermot Hodson is Professor of Political Economy and Digital Technologies at Loughborough University London. His book Circle of Stars: A History of the EU and the People Who Made It will be published by Yale University Press on October 10th.