1) Did the founders ever asked themselves what would happen to "Europe" (virtual state!) if their "technocratic elites" were captured by a foreign hegemon that turned their EU construct into simple vassals?.
2) Did the founders ever asked themselves what would happen to "Europe" if their "technocratic elites" ever turned it into a Kakistocracy?
For an observer from the "Jungle", I can see that their construct is doomed to disappear because of the flaws of their original axioms. As it stands today, the EU is a de facto Kakistocracy and a mere US vassal entity. The dog does not even bark when their Suzerain blows up their energy infrastructure!
How can the headless chickens running the EU chicken coop free themselves from the shackles of the hegemon? Russia is not their enemy, the US is.
"One would have been to draw on the immense cultural, intellectual and linguistic heritage of Europe, its complex history and its Christian and Classical roots, to construct a collective European sensibility and mentality”.
Of all China's strengths, its cultural patrimony is probably its greatest, as Fernand Braudel suggests. "Imagine the impact on European civilization of a series of Imperial dynasties maintaining the self-same style and significance from Caesar Augustus until the First World War. Now imagine such a civilization existing on the other side of the planet unaware of Greek philosophy, the alphabet, Roman governance, Christianity, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or democracy, but with its own, unique cultural and institutional correlates that exceeded all of them in intellectual subtlety and material success”.
And being on the same cultural page pays big dividends, as Keynes observed: “Planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly orientated in their minds and hearts to the moral issue”.
I think you are making some questionable assumptions here. Just as the technological advancements made in China spread to the West (gunpowder, paper, and silk. More in the link https://china.usc.edu/sites/default/files/forums/Chinese%20Inventions.pdf ), the Western tech and culture influenced China. For example, Christianity did spread to India and China, it just couldn't compete with their religions for very long. Classic Greek and Roman culture/tech was nearly wiped out in Europe. The Arab World carefully kept those ideas safe and shared them with Europe, once they advanced from being savages and developed stable(ish) governments. European Renaissance was only possible thanks to great libraries in the Arab Middle East.
The core difference between the West and East, is that there is a tradition of narcissism/superiority complex in the West vs community/equality in the East. This allowed the West to become more powerful, because while the East tries to be fair and sticks to agreements, the West seeks to gain an advantage and dominate.
As a great example, look at the history of Christianity. Catholic/Orthodox split lead to further fragmentation in Catholicism and dictatorship/corruption culture in the church. Eastern churches didn't mind if their faith made adaptations to regional conditions, was more liberal, and maintained a unified ruling body based on equal representation of all branches. (I think it's been basically nonfunctional, because it's a minority religion in most states, and Eastern Europe was communist for a while)
Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything" looks at a number of factors involved in why European and other societies ended up as they did. Very interesting book. I'd say that what you identify as a core difference is an outcome of how those societies were organized.
Agree. The EU was a top down construct not anchored in history. Such edifices usually fail but have potential to cause great harm before they do. Burkes critique of the French Revolution’s attempt to reinvent the world is a useful reference here.
Agree too that it was based on an incorrect read that European wars were caused by ordinary people. But they typically went along while elites led. After all, the Nazis were dominated by intellectuals even though Hitler himself had no serious academic qualifications. Bismarck created universal suffrage precisely to frustrate the popular will and so forth.
The missing piece is the role of the US. It dominates both at the government to government level, by exerting power at the level of individual politicians with offers of jobs and money, as well as through corporations. In the past thirty years it has been able to use the EU as an extension of its own power in order to control Europe. Europe can only move forward if it takes control of its own destiny and kicks the US out.
I hate to say it (one of my degrees was from a U.S. school and I spent two happy years there plus have spent over two decades working for US anchored firms) but the US foreign policy establishment (not the people) is the biggest threat to the world right now
Kicking the US out it's hard. What is Europe's destiny? What are it's security interests? They don't and can't really exist. So it's easier to remain vassal states than to answer impossible questions that just point to the incoherence of the status quo.
There will be popular revolts and nationalism will as usual play a part. We see that already but I'm not sure how effective nationalist demagoguery will be given how irrelevant it is to the piratical problems. But since "Europe" is supra-national and anti-democratic, people will have to petition their national governments against it and in this way even a labor movement can appear nationalist. How this turns out is very hard to predict but as I pointed out in another comment, the failing liberal center is turning authoritarian and that's even more scary than anything happening in popular politics.
The revolution is going to come from the bottom, not from the top.
The headless chickens in Brussels will NEVER cut ties with their Suzerain willingly.
The problem is very simple, the elites have been bought for decades and their master has so many dirty tricks about them that they cannot rebel. Merkel, Macron, Johnson, etc.... were caught and trained by Clown Schwab in order to sell their countries and it took decades of infiltration, brainwashing and bribing to enslave those "elites".
Europe can only survive if there is a popular revolution - don't bank on policy changes because that will happen only when pigs start flying.
Nazis had marginal support among intellectuals. Their support was based more on business owners and the middle class. Foreign help was also nice.
Bismark curtailed political freedom and expanded state social programs to compensate.
USA started taking control of European economy with Marshal Plan, actually even WW1 loads already gave it some leverage. Once you control the economy—you control the government in a democratic state. With some help of intelligence shenanigans. Then you make those democracies join EU/NATO, so you don't have to micromanage each state, only the umbrella organizations.
....so you don't have to micromanage each state, only the umbrella organizations....
And Madeleine Albright celebrated when the EU was formed saying that it was less painful to go through what Kissinger had to do in the 70s - i.e calling too many European countries.
Today, they can just call Ursula and ask her to buy 4.5 billion doses of bio-weapons for the entire population of Europe. Mission accomplished!
I agree fully that a majority of intellectuals probably did not support the Nazis. At least not early on. Later on, people kind of had to in order to make their carriers. But many of the committed Nazis did happen to be intellectuals, in the sense of having higher degrees and qualifications in an era when that was rarer than today. For example, seven of the fifteen Wannasee attendees had Dr in their title.
The basic point is that the received view is that the Nazis were a rabble of the “lower orders”. Yes, they had a rent a mob in the movement but most of the leaders were not that. But it is a read of history that is used today by some of the heirs of those people (both metaphorical and genetic in some cases) to justify top down, authoritarian, non democratic government.
Racial Hate papered over, is like the Chinese Proverb, holding fire in a paper bag. Europe made itself rich by diverting the hate of others practiced and refined on its seas and plains, which gave it a technological edge in the business of slaughter of other Europeans into the business of pillaging others further away, richer and more alien than the war worn and be-beggared of Europe. However old habits die hard, and now it will be a hard dying by Europe as it let the hate burn through the bag and directed it at a Slavic nation that has centuries of experience in stomping out such fires. It no longer holds the technological advantage in industrial murder, and all it's other assets, education, and skills are even easier to overtake today now that it can no longer use force to suppress others even in the global south. The colonial French Franc is dead, and the USD is debauched.
I am actually very surprised how blind the collective NATO is.
When people hear about hypersonic missiles, they just think that we're just talking about another weapon. Which is WRONG. We're talking about new laws of physics currently mastered by Russia, China and Iran (Iran announced it only recently but I knew when they tested it silently). If Europe was still a rational society, they would be scrambling to try to understand what happened with this quantum leap only mastered by "Untermensch" in the Borrell "Jungle". They don't even know what they don't know these days and that's why Europe is on its way out of existence.
NATO isn't blind, it's just controlled by USA. Americans don't care about increasing likelihood of war, because Russia only cares about security in Europe/Asia/Middle East, so any potential destruction is not going to be done in Americas. What's the point of compromise with China/Russia for USA, if the worst case scenario doesn't really threaten USA itself, just the proxies.
I'd read commentary from the early days of the European union movement (early 2950s, I think) that described Schuman, Adenauer, and Gaspari all as "Catholic Germans," so your analogy to the Catholic Christendom (and Charlemagne symbology) has been around for a long time. I don't think those three men would even deny it too strenuously.
PS. Of course, all three were (sort of) from the old Holy Roman Empire: Schuman was a Lorrainer born in Luxembourg, Adenauer was a Rhinelander from Cologne, and Gaspari was a Tyroler from South Tyrol, all of whom were trained as lawyers in Germany/Austria-Hungary...
Aurelien says: "After the end of the Ukrainian crisis, when the debris has stopped bouncing, European states will have to learn to live with Russia, individually and collectively."
I'm reluctant to disagree with our August host, but here I must. I believe the current insanely intense anti-Russian propaganda campaign will result in an EU that is, ultimately, going to become the new sacrificial lamb for Cold War II/ World War III.
We are already seeing things like the decision to ignore Hungary's veto on funding Ukraine, the determination by EU member states to make their nations into clubs like Ukraine - la Baerbock's "We're backing Ukraine, to hell with the voters" to the various Eastern European nations forcong support for Ukraine down a disinterested population's throats. The states of the EU are already enthusiastically turning their police on protestors, with, I expect more and worse to come.
Collapse of the EU (and its' component states) is a best case scenario. I think a neo-fascist kleptocratic dystopia WAY more likely. How long can that last? I dunno, but I'm not counting on a rapid triumph of popular opposition.
Europe can 'support' The Ukraine as much as it likes through rhetoric, but in concrete physical terms, Europe (and the US) is rabidly running out of munitions of all sorts, and Europe is also losing much of the excess economic means to buy very expensive and technically inferior US replacement products. Without such products, any threats to anyone else are meaningless.
.....very expensive and technically inferior US replacement products.....
100% agree. I've followed closely the Saudi debacle in Yemen since 2015.
Can you imagine that the US THAAD and Patriot ABM PAC-2 and PAC-3 have been unable to protect their infrastructure from cheap Yemeni drones ($5,000-$10,000)? For each incoming cheap ballistic missile worth peanuts, the Saudis fire 2-3 ABM missile costing $1-$3 million each. This is crazy to say the least and they don't even reach some of their targets.
That's what is happening in Ukraine now. When they say that they're going to send the same Patriot ABM to Ukraine, I say great! Russia will use a single hypersonic missile to destroy a $5 billion Patriot ABM complex and Germany, France or the US will have to send another one for the same results....
This proxy war is funny because Russia is demilitarizing NATO, Ukraine was already demilitarized before June. Soviet Weapons now being used in Ukraine are shipped from former communist republics (Slovakia, Poland, etc...).
The liberal center is indeed turning authoritarian. They will try to hold on to power this way but it really exposes how weak their position is. If they could defeat RF they would go ahead and do that. They can't so they try to fight with more PR. And cracking down on dissent is just the far end of PR.
I am also certain that there are POWs transactions behind the scenes between Russia and NATO. You'll notice that neither Russia nor NATO has said anything since March 2022 about hundreds of NATO officers that were trapped in the bunkers of Azovstal in Mariupol.
At the time I knew from other sources that Lt. Gen. Cadieu (Canadian) who was in charge of bio-weapons development was caught. Lt Gen. Cloutier (US) who was in charge of satellite communications (Starlink) was caught. Did they just vaporize? I haven't heard anything since.
What I know for sure is that there were at least 50 French NATO officers in that bunker and there has never been an official statement about their whereabouts. Did they vaporize?
What about all the Brits and Polish NATO officers who where also caught in Mariupol?
I agree with you that EU-Russia relations will not be reset.
It takes decades to build supply chains between countries, diplomatic relathionships, etc..
1. The EU has proved that signing treaties with them is meaningless: Minsk 1 and Minsk 2
2. The EU has proved that international laws no longer exist: steal Russian assets
3. Russia is investing to divert its energy export to Asia - $billion in new infrastructure being built between Russia and China, Russia and Iran
4. Russia expects to supply China with 60% more gas than it was supplying to EU by 2028.
5. As for India - Russia has become their top energy partner..
6. Dedolarization and De-EUROzation. Russia is dropping the Euro and Dollars from their reserves. Export of energy is settled in Ruble. This is not a reversible process!
Even if the Ukraine proxy war stops today, I don't see how the EU will convince Russia to pump energy to Europe instead of China, India, South Korea...
As it stands today, Europe cannot be part of any other treaty to stop the war in Europe. Merkel and Porochenko have admitted publicly that Minsk I and II were designed to prepare for the war with Russia instead of being implemented. I don't see how the EU can be involved in a peace treaty in Ukraine. It's over for Europe!
That's very likely, but that will still give Turkey and Russia (the biggest neighbours and likely targets outside Europe) plenty of advanced warning, because 1st all the immigrants would have to be dealt with. Not to mention interstate wars inside Europe itself. Russia can just nuke Poland and create a radioactive wasteland to cut off it's link to Europe.
I think that many continental leaders and policymakers have limited, but still much better understanding of Russia than the USA. They just don't have much influence on foreign policy of their countries.
Freedom of movement will not collapse because of a surge of Ukrainian refugees whatever the economic strains. For Europeans especially the young - this aspect of the EU is the one that makes the most impact on one's day to day life. Can't find a job in Athens - head to Berlin or Stockholm etc. Need a vacation home to spend some time in the sun - you can buy in the Algarve or the Costa del Sol. EU citizens won't give this right up and given declining birthrates the Ukrainian influx may be a boon if Europe can stem the deindustrialization stemming from high energy prices.
Once individual countries are forced to increase social support coverage, they will have to limit the beneficiaries, or the entire low income population of Europe will flood into their borders.
1) Did the founders ever asked themselves what would happen to "Europe" (virtual state!) if their "technocratic elites" were captured by a foreign hegemon that turned their EU construct into simple vassals?.
2) Did the founders ever asked themselves what would happen to "Europe" if their "technocratic elites" ever turned it into a Kakistocracy?
For an observer from the "Jungle", I can see that their construct is doomed to disappear because of the flaws of their original axioms. As it stands today, the EU is a de facto Kakistocracy and a mere US vassal entity. The dog does not even bark when their Suzerain blows up their energy infrastructure!
How can the headless chickens running the EU chicken coop free themselves from the shackles of the hegemon? Russia is not their enemy, the US is.
EU/NATO was designed as a system to manage USA subject states from the very start.
"One would have been to draw on the immense cultural, intellectual and linguistic heritage of Europe, its complex history and its Christian and Classical roots, to construct a collective European sensibility and mentality”.
Of all China's strengths, its cultural patrimony is probably its greatest, as Fernand Braudel suggests. "Imagine the impact on European civilization of a series of Imperial dynasties maintaining the self-same style and significance from Caesar Augustus until the First World War. Now imagine such a civilization existing on the other side of the planet unaware of Greek philosophy, the alphabet, Roman governance, Christianity, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or democracy, but with its own, unique cultural and institutional correlates that exceeded all of them in intellectual subtlety and material success”.
And being on the same cultural page pays big dividends, as Keynes observed: “Planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly orientated in their minds and hearts to the moral issue”.
I think you are making some questionable assumptions here. Just as the technological advancements made in China spread to the West (gunpowder, paper, and silk. More in the link https://china.usc.edu/sites/default/files/forums/Chinese%20Inventions.pdf ), the Western tech and culture influenced China. For example, Christianity did spread to India and China, it just couldn't compete with their religions for very long. Classic Greek and Roman culture/tech was nearly wiped out in Europe. The Arab World carefully kept those ideas safe and shared them with Europe, once they advanced from being savages and developed stable(ish) governments. European Renaissance was only possible thanks to great libraries in the Arab Middle East.
The core difference between the West and East, is that there is a tradition of narcissism/superiority complex in the West vs community/equality in the East. This allowed the West to become more powerful, because while the East tries to be fair and sticks to agreements, the West seeks to gain an advantage and dominate.
As a great example, look at the history of Christianity. Catholic/Orthodox split lead to further fragmentation in Catholicism and dictatorship/corruption culture in the church. Eastern churches didn't mind if their faith made adaptations to regional conditions, was more liberal, and maintained a unified ruling body based on equal representation of all branches. (I think it's been basically nonfunctional, because it's a minority religion in most states, and Eastern Europe was communist for a while)
Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything" looks at a number of factors involved in why European and other societies ended up as they did. Very interesting book. I'd say that what you identify as a core difference is an outcome of how those societies were organized.
Thanks, I'll check it out.
Interesting piece.
Agree. The EU was a top down construct not anchored in history. Such edifices usually fail but have potential to cause great harm before they do. Burkes critique of the French Revolution’s attempt to reinvent the world is a useful reference here.
Agree too that it was based on an incorrect read that European wars were caused by ordinary people. But they typically went along while elites led. After all, the Nazis were dominated by intellectuals even though Hitler himself had no serious academic qualifications. Bismarck created universal suffrage precisely to frustrate the popular will and so forth.
The missing piece is the role of the US. It dominates both at the government to government level, by exerting power at the level of individual politicians with offers of jobs and money, as well as through corporations. In the past thirty years it has been able to use the EU as an extension of its own power in order to control Europe. Europe can only move forward if it takes control of its own destiny and kicks the US out.
I hate to say it (one of my degrees was from a U.S. school and I spent two happy years there plus have spent over two decades working for US anchored firms) but the US foreign policy establishment (not the people) is the biggest threat to the world right now
Kicking the US out it's hard. What is Europe's destiny? What are it's security interests? They don't and can't really exist. So it's easier to remain vassal states than to answer impossible questions that just point to the incoherence of the status quo.
There will be nationalist revolts in Europe very shortly, to regain sovereignty and implement economic policies not destructive to it's citizens.
There will be popular revolts and nationalism will as usual play a part. We see that already but I'm not sure how effective nationalist demagoguery will be given how irrelevant it is to the piratical problems. But since "Europe" is supra-national and anti-democratic, people will have to petition their national governments against it and in this way even a labor movement can appear nationalist. How this turns out is very hard to predict but as I pointed out in another comment, the failing liberal center is turning authoritarian and that's even more scary than anything happening in popular politics.
The revolution is going to come from the bottom, not from the top.
The headless chickens in Brussels will NEVER cut ties with their Suzerain willingly.
The problem is very simple, the elites have been bought for decades and their master has so many dirty tricks about them that they cannot rebel. Merkel, Macron, Johnson, etc.... were caught and trained by Clown Schwab in order to sell their countries and it took decades of infiltration, brainwashing and bribing to enslave those "elites".
Europe can only survive if there is a popular revolution - don't bank on policy changes because that will happen only when pigs start flying.
Nazis had marginal support among intellectuals. Their support was based more on business owners and the middle class. Foreign help was also nice.
Bismark curtailed political freedom and expanded state social programs to compensate.
USA started taking control of European economy with Marshal Plan, actually even WW1 loads already gave it some leverage. Once you control the economy—you control the government in a democratic state. With some help of intelligence shenanigans. Then you make those democracies join EU/NATO, so you don't have to micromanage each state, only the umbrella organizations.
....so you don't have to micromanage each state, only the umbrella organizations....
And Madeleine Albright celebrated when the EU was formed saying that it was less painful to go through what Kissinger had to do in the 70s - i.e calling too many European countries.
Today, they can just call Ursula and ask her to buy 4.5 billion doses of bio-weapons for the entire population of Europe. Mission accomplished!
I agree fully that a majority of intellectuals probably did not support the Nazis. At least not early on. Later on, people kind of had to in order to make their carriers. But many of the committed Nazis did happen to be intellectuals, in the sense of having higher degrees and qualifications in an era when that was rarer than today. For example, seven of the fifteen Wannasee attendees had Dr in their title.
The basic point is that the received view is that the Nazis were a rabble of the “lower orders”. Yes, they had a rent a mob in the movement but most of the leaders were not that. But it is a read of history that is used today by some of the heirs of those people (both metaphorical and genetic in some cases) to justify top down, authoritarian, non democratic government.
Racial Hate papered over, is like the Chinese Proverb, holding fire in a paper bag. Europe made itself rich by diverting the hate of others practiced and refined on its seas and plains, which gave it a technological edge in the business of slaughter of other Europeans into the business of pillaging others further away, richer and more alien than the war worn and be-beggared of Europe. However old habits die hard, and now it will be a hard dying by Europe as it let the hate burn through the bag and directed it at a Slavic nation that has centuries of experience in stomping out such fires. It no longer holds the technological advantage in industrial murder, and all it's other assets, education, and skills are even easier to overtake today now that it can no longer use force to suppress others even in the global south. The colonial French Franc is dead, and the USD is debauched.
I am actually very surprised how blind the collective NATO is.
When people hear about hypersonic missiles, they just think that we're just talking about another weapon. Which is WRONG. We're talking about new laws of physics currently mastered by Russia, China and Iran (Iran announced it only recently but I knew when they tested it silently). If Europe was still a rational society, they would be scrambling to try to understand what happened with this quantum leap only mastered by "Untermensch" in the Borrell "Jungle". They don't even know what they don't know these days and that's why Europe is on its way out of existence.
NATO isn't blind, it's just controlled by USA. Americans don't care about increasing likelihood of war, because Russia only cares about security in Europe/Asia/Middle East, so any potential destruction is not going to be done in Americas. What's the point of compromise with China/Russia for USA, if the worst case scenario doesn't really threaten USA itself, just the proxies.
I'd read commentary from the early days of the European union movement (early 2950s, I think) that described Schuman, Adenauer, and Gaspari all as "Catholic Germans," so your analogy to the Catholic Christendom (and Charlemagne symbology) has been around for a long time. I don't think those three men would even deny it too strenuously.
PS. Of course, all three were (sort of) from the old Holy Roman Empire: Schuman was a Lorrainer born in Luxembourg, Adenauer was a Rhinelander from Cologne, and Gaspari was a Tyroler from South Tyrol, all of whom were trained as lawyers in Germany/Austria-Hungary...
Aurelien says: "After the end of the Ukrainian crisis, when the debris has stopped bouncing, European states will have to learn to live with Russia, individually and collectively."
I'm reluctant to disagree with our August host, but here I must. I believe the current insanely intense anti-Russian propaganda campaign will result in an EU that is, ultimately, going to become the new sacrificial lamb for Cold War II/ World War III.
We are already seeing things like the decision to ignore Hungary's veto on funding Ukraine, the determination by EU member states to make their nations into clubs like Ukraine - la Baerbock's "We're backing Ukraine, to hell with the voters" to the various Eastern European nations forcong support for Ukraine down a disinterested population's throats. The states of the EU are already enthusiastically turning their police on protestors, with, I expect more and worse to come.
Collapse of the EU (and its' component states) is a best case scenario. I think a neo-fascist kleptocratic dystopia WAY more likely. How long can that last? I dunno, but I'm not counting on a rapid triumph of popular opposition.
Europe can 'support' The Ukraine as much as it likes through rhetoric, but in concrete physical terms, Europe (and the US) is rabidly running out of munitions of all sorts, and Europe is also losing much of the excess economic means to buy very expensive and technically inferior US replacement products. Without such products, any threats to anyone else are meaningless.
As for a popular revolt - it's well overdue.
.....very expensive and technically inferior US replacement products.....
100% agree. I've followed closely the Saudi debacle in Yemen since 2015.
Can you imagine that the US THAAD and Patriot ABM PAC-2 and PAC-3 have been unable to protect their infrastructure from cheap Yemeni drones ($5,000-$10,000)? For each incoming cheap ballistic missile worth peanuts, the Saudis fire 2-3 ABM missile costing $1-$3 million each. This is crazy to say the least and they don't even reach some of their targets.
That's what is happening in Ukraine now. When they say that they're going to send the same Patriot ABM to Ukraine, I say great! Russia will use a single hypersonic missile to destroy a $5 billion Patriot ABM complex and Germany, France or the US will have to send another one for the same results....
This proxy war is funny because Russia is demilitarizing NATO, Ukraine was already demilitarized before June. Soviet Weapons now being used in Ukraine are shipped from former communist republics (Slovakia, Poland, etc...).
The liberal center is indeed turning authoritarian. They will try to hold on to power this way but it really exposes how weak their position is. If they could defeat RF they would go ahead and do that. They can't so they try to fight with more PR. And cracking down on dissent is just the far end of PR.
I am also certain that there are POWs transactions behind the scenes between Russia and NATO. You'll notice that neither Russia nor NATO has said anything since March 2022 about hundreds of NATO officers that were trapped in the bunkers of Azovstal in Mariupol.
At the time I knew from other sources that Lt. Gen. Cadieu (Canadian) who was in charge of bio-weapons development was caught. Lt Gen. Cloutier (US) who was in charge of satellite communications (Starlink) was caught. Did they just vaporize? I haven't heard anything since.
What I know for sure is that there were at least 50 French NATO officers in that bunker and there has never been an official statement about their whereabouts. Did they vaporize?
What about all the Brits and Polish NATO officers who where also caught in Mariupol?
I agree with you that EU-Russia relations will not be reset.
It takes decades to build supply chains between countries, diplomatic relathionships, etc..
1. The EU has proved that signing treaties with them is meaningless: Minsk 1 and Minsk 2
2. The EU has proved that international laws no longer exist: steal Russian assets
3. Russia is investing to divert its energy export to Asia - $billion in new infrastructure being built between Russia and China, Russia and Iran
4. Russia expects to supply China with 60% more gas than it was supplying to EU by 2028.
5. As for India - Russia has become their top energy partner..
6. Dedolarization and De-EUROzation. Russia is dropping the Euro and Dollars from their reserves. Export of energy is settled in Ruble. This is not a reversible process!
Even if the Ukraine proxy war stops today, I don't see how the EU will convince Russia to pump energy to Europe instead of China, India, South Korea...
As it stands today, Europe cannot be part of any other treaty to stop the war in Europe. Merkel and Porochenko have admitted publicly that Minsk I and II were designed to prepare for the war with Russia instead of being implemented. I don't see how the EU can be involved in a peace treaty in Ukraine. It's over for Europe!
That's very likely, but that will still give Turkey and Russia (the biggest neighbours and likely targets outside Europe) plenty of advanced warning, because 1st all the immigrants would have to be dealt with. Not to mention interstate wars inside Europe itself. Russia can just nuke Poland and create a radioactive wasteland to cut off it's link to Europe.
The correct phrase in paragraph 21 is ‘it surpasses belief..”, not “it passes belief..”
The hipocrisy of this "Europe" is one of the reasons.
They are the most totalitarian hypocrites.
And most of them totally misunderstand all things about Russia.
I think that many continental leaders and policymakers have limited, but still much better understanding of Russia than the USA. They just don't have much influence on foreign policy of their countries.
Freedom of movement will not collapse because of a surge of Ukrainian refugees whatever the economic strains. For Europeans especially the young - this aspect of the EU is the one that makes the most impact on one's day to day life. Can't find a job in Athens - head to Berlin or Stockholm etc. Need a vacation home to spend some time in the sun - you can buy in the Algarve or the Costa del Sol. EU citizens won't give this right up and given declining birthrates the Ukrainian influx may be a boon if Europe can stem the deindustrialization stemming from high energy prices.
Once individual countries are forced to increase social support coverage, they will have to limit the beneficiaries, or the entire low income population of Europe will flood into their borders.