Since 2008, the EU has suffered from austerity policies, the division of Europe into South and North (left-wing populism in the South, right-wing populism in the North), a refugee crisis, followed by Brexit, along with rising regionalism in Scotland and Catalonia, unprecedented social inequality throughout Europe, then a semi-authoritarian EU COVID-19 policy, and now the return of hot war. A politically disunited and institutionally fragile EU got caught up in the maelstrom of the 2008 banking crisis, forming the catalyst for a decade of European crises from which the Union has yet to recover. Today, some thirty years later, the Ever Closer Union has yet to materialise, which is becoming ever less likely. Europe was to become a political union there was even talk of a European federal state. The first grand European project was launched during the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989: the Ever Closer (European) Union, sealed by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. The real issue is that the two grand European projects that were launched in 1989 at the end of the Cold War – part of the supposed ‘end of history’, as Francis Fukuyama put it the two great hopes for the reshaping of the European continent – have both failed. © NATOīlaming ‘Putin’ alone is a distraction from the real issue. An armored German Leopard 2 tank fires flare at exercise Iron Wolf in Lithuania in October 2022. Once the war got started, Brussels should have called for a peace conference, engaged the UN or OSCE and set up a mediation process 2, rather than immediately siding with Ukraine. The EU can’t deny a certain co-responsibility for the failure of Minsk I & II agreements. It conveniently overlooks the long and complex history of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and the chances the EU has missed to facilitate a solution. Once the war got started, Brussels should have called for a peace conferenceīlaming Vladimir Putin as the catalyst, or indeed as the direct cause for the current apparent madness afflicting European politics, is a gross oversimplification. Instead, we see people daring to raise the idea of peace or calls for negotiations being vilified as apologists for Russia. The EU ought to be convening a European peace conference, doing its utmost to find a solution to the current war using the tried-and-tested designs of cooperative security and peace including the whole European continent. After all, for seventy years, ‘Europe’ meant no more war. What a betrayal of the essence of Europe. European states are even discussing an intervention in the war within the framework of NATO. In this opinion piece, based on their new book Endspiel Europa 1, Guérot and Ritz warn that the EU should not disconnect from Russia and China, nor increase its dependence on the United States.Įurope is at war! Who could have imagined that just a short while ago? Even if no EU Member State is formally a warring party, the Russian-Ukrainian war dominates the news, political scene and social developments throughout Europe. According to both German political thinkers the EU seems to embrace warlike policies, apparently oblivious of its own history and mission. The European Union has shed its anti-war mindset, much to the concern of Ulrike Guérot and Hauke Ritz.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |