By Jorge Elbaum on December 31, 2024
The decline of the European Union began with the establishment of neoliberal policies. photo: AFP.
Western Europe is reluctant to admit NATO’s military defeat in Ukraine, while vacillating over its place in the new global order that has the Russian Federation as a central player alongside China and the Brics+. The changes are happening with a speed that the traditional institutionality of the colonizing countries is unable to process sensibly and sanely.The despised Slavic hordes, devalued after the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 20th century, have risen from the ashes generating a geopolitical tectonic movement that is transfiguring the West.
Brussels is currently in the process of constructing a bearable and tolerable narrative for such a failure. They tried to encircle the Russian Federation in order to weaken it, condition its economic development and infringe its sovereignty. To achieve this, they resorted to a combination of the NATO military threat -increasingly closer to Moscow-, with the soft power consisting of the manipulation of non-governmental organizations, think tanks, academic centers and social networks to promote the so-called color revolutions.
The European Union is showing the consequences of following the globalist policy of the U.S. Democrats, while debating whether to continue the new Trumpist crusade against China, return to the approach proposed by Charles De Gaulle of strategic autonomy or open up to the multipolarity promoted by the Brics+ and the Global South. These three options are being discussed discreetly and stealthily in the back rooms of Brussels while two of its most important economies, Germany and France, try to process their political crises, generated by the global mutation.
The last time a French government succumbed to a motion of censure was in 1962, more than six decades ago. The deterioration of the German tripartite government coalition, composed of the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens, collapsed as a result of the recession, inflation, the production crisis, the reception of Ukrainian refugees and the bet on a Russian defeat. Paris and Berlin supported Volodimir Zelensky and sank their respective economies by substituting the cheap energy provided by Moscow with the more expensive liquefied natural gas shipped by Washington.
The decline of the European Union began with the establishment of neoliberal policies, which from the outset were aimed at benefiting concentrated groups through the promotion of fiscal austerity – reducing the tax contributions of the wealthiest sectors – financial deregulation and labor flexibilization. These measures were accompanied by the absorption of migrant labor, which drove down wages, a situation that led to the general impoverishment of workers.
By the end of 2022, almost 10 million citizens from outside the 27 EU countries worked within their borders. That number represents 5% of their total labor force, a contribution that allows them to face the challenges of an aging population, declining birth rates and imbalances in pension contributions. These figures, however, do not make the proverbial European colonial roots invisible. The millions of white Ukrainians who fled the war are mostly considered refugees and are entitled to asylum rights. On the other hand, fugitives from hunger and environmental depredation, and from tribal disputes promoted by extractivist corporations, are considered illegal migrants.
The model promoted by the financial centers and transnational corporations suffered a severe shock with the 2008 crisis, without the European elites taking any real notice of the decline that this instability foreshadowed. To complete the debacle, the bureaucrats in Brussels embarked on a war that diverted a large part of its resources to the arms industry of the U.S. military industrial complex.
The so-called Euroscepticism (distrust of European integration) and the so-called democratic malaise (which does not offer a horizon of opportunities for the social majorities) seeks to find an alibi in xenophobic nationalism. It resists assuming the need for a new global order based on cooperation and overcoming neocolonial, interventionist and extractivist logics. The looming trade war -from which the West intends to take new advantages- appears as a new death blow to avoid horizontal negotiation with the global South. Perhaps Jürgen Habermas was right in suggesting that “The development of European consciousness is slower than the advance of concrete reality”.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English