Europe

All the news not fit to print
Email | Back to History | Back to the world news | Home | Support this website

TM, ®, Copyright © 2021 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.

TM, ®, Copyright © 2024 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.

The European Elections
Should Europe kick the USA out of NATO?
European Spleen
Articles on Europe before 2024

  • (june 2024) The European Elections.
    Much has been made of the shift to the right in the European elections of 2024, but it's really only France that suffered a seismic shock.
    In reality, not much changed in the European parliament: the EPP (center right, Christian Democrats - Ursula von der Leyen) gained 13 seats and remains the largest bloc; and the S&D (center left) lost only 9 seats, so together they gained seats. Most media neglected the fact that Tusk won in Poland, which offset losses of the center elsewhere, and that right-wing autocrat Orban lost votes in Hungary (which in fact should get as much attention as Macron's humiliation in France). The hard right won but let's not exaggerate: Meloni's ECR gained 14 seats; Le Pen's ID actually lost 6 seats; and the rest is so fragmented that it's hard to tell how relevant they will be. The greens and Renew Europe (liberals - Macron) are certainly the big losers, especially in Germany (where they lost 9 seats, virtually being annihilated, while the right-wing AfD gained 4 seats). The Left (communists) have the same seats, but it's a tiny group.
    It takes 360 votes to pass legislation. EPP+S&D+Renew has way more, just like before. And we'll see if Meloni decides to ally with LePen to the right or with Leyen to the center (in which case the Leyen majority would be even bigger than it was before: instead of "the right takes over the EU parliament" it will be "half of the right moves to the center").
    One also has to "read" the reasons for the shift to the right: consistently, polls show that Europeans are hostile to the migrants arriving by the thousands from Africa and the Middle East, and that Europeans are annoyed that mainstream politicians can't find a way to stop the "invasion". The polls don't show any fascination for neofascist or neonazist ideologies. They simply show frustration that the European politicians can't stop the flood, and in fact seem to make things worse by treating the illegal immigrants like guests.
    Ursula von der Leyen is likely to remain as the president of the European Commission, as she has been since 2019, Christine Lagarde's eight-year term as president of the European Central Bank won't end until 2027. Mark Rutte (who was Holland's prime minister for 14 years) will be replacing Jens Stoltenberg as NATO Secretary General. Regardless of what happens in France, this trio actually guarantees quite a bit of stability in the European Union at a time when the USA and Britain are in political turmoil.

    See also: The New Byzantium: The European Union

    See also: Europe's Many Crises

    TM, ®, Copyright © 2024 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
    Back to the world news | Top of this page

  • (may 2024) Should Europe kick the USA out of NATO?
    After Trump (Putin's lackey) started demonizing NATO, many US citizens view NATO as redundant, as a cost that doesn't serve any useful purpose. Generation X, in particular, has forgotten why NATO was invented and, generally speaking, doesn't seem to be interested in the foreign world. The younger generations may be even more skeptic: why should the USA commit to defending Europe, especially now that the USA may be forced to cut back spending? Most US citizens probably don't even realize that so far NATO's treaty of mutual defense has been invoked only once. The only time that NATO got into action to defend a member country was 2001 when the USA was "attacked" by Al Qaeda terrorists (19 kids armed with paper cutters) and the whole of NATO had to mobilize to attack Afghanistan, at best a dubious interpretation of Article 5 (no country was bombing the USA or trying to invade the USA or threatening its territorial integrity in any way).
    Europeans have always viewed NATO differently. NATO is the military wing of the US empire. NATO was from the beginning a form of US occupation of Europe, as every long-term historian probably agrees. Viewed from Europe, NATO has always been a scam: the Europeans fund the US military industry to make weapons in return for the vague promise that the USA will use those weapons to defend Europe, when in fact so far the USA has used those weapons mostly in Asia to create and maintain a Pacific empire (very successfully, i'd say, but what does Europe get out of it?). Poland bought heavy tanks from the USA despite the fact that most Polish bridges cannot support their weight. Romania bought fighter jets from the USA that it cannot afford to operate and maintain. Trump complained that Germany was not paying enough for the defense that NATO provides but another way to view it is that Germany never asked for NATO to defend it: the USA occupied Germany after Germany lost World War II and now the USA forces Germany to be part of NATO and to pay for that US occupation disguised as "defense". Almost two thirds of the military equipment that European countries purchased in 2022-23 came from US companies. The powerful lobby of the military-industrial complex is a major factor in convincing US politicians of the need for NATO: NATO is a major source of revenues for the USA and supports millions of US jobs.
    One can even argue that NATO has been a way to divide and fragment Europe: without NATO, EU integration would have happened faster, simply because of survival needs. European countries would have been forced to come up with a common defense strategy which coupled with the existing economic union (and even a monetary union) would have effectively turned the EU into a nation. Today the EU would be a real federation, with a GDP comparable to China's and not much lower than the USA's (and ten times bigger than Russia's). But this also means that the USA would have two strategic rivals in the world: China and the EU. Without NATO, the EU could have become its own superpower, perhaps even absorbed Russia. NATO, therefore, can be viewed as an expedient to keep Europe from becoming a threat to US world dominance. Thanks to NATO, the USA has only China to worry about and the EU is even an added value in the strategic competition with China.
    I grew up with discussions on this topic, with anti-NATO marches and riots in the streets. The old anti-NATO sentiment of the European leftists now resonates even with many of the US right-wing. In terms of defending Europe the whole story of NATO is fictitious: the nuclear weapons paid with European money are mostly stored deeply into the USA and it's hard to imagine that the USA would launch them from the USA into Russia to defend Italy or Germany, no matter who is president, given the likely retaliation of Russia on US cities.
    Furthermore, much of the European public opinion views NATO as evil, especially after the end of the Cold War. NATO bombed Serbia and Libya, both times with no popular mandate. The bombing of Serbia, in particular, sent shock waves through eastern Europe. Those bombing campaigns caused more marches for months against NATO. The polls show about 50-50 support for NATO. It went up recently thanks to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but it's hard to find any European country where support for NATO is consistently above 50%. If people were free to vote on NATO, I suspect that NATO would shrink down to 5-6 countries, and ultimately NATO would mostly remain an Anglosaxon alliance, which is what it really was at the beginning (France was not a member for 40 year, Spain was not a member for the first 30+ years, Italy and West Germany were forced to join as losers of WWII when they were still under US administration).
    Bottom line: many Europeans view NATO a simply an extension of the US military, the armed branch of the US empire, and not a force for good. And so one can see a debate starting in Europe whether it makes sense to spend money into NATO armament instead of spending money in EU armament (like French nukes and planes and German tanks). Macron has been arguing for an independent European defense for many years (his "NATO's brain death" speech is from 2019).
    The right-wing demagogues of the USA, probably sponsored by Putin, also distort simple facts about the war in Ukraine. They claim that the USA has done "too much" for Ukraine. The Europeans view it differently: EU response has been bigger than US response, from the beginning. Europe started arming Ukraine immediately (Poland, Estonia, Britain, Czech, even Germany via the Ringtausch program right after Olaf Scholz's Zeitenwende speech) whereas the USA has been dragging its feet all along. The court that declared Putin a criminal is a European court whereas no US court has accused Putin of any crime. In fact, Putin is perfectly safe to travel to the USA as a tourist and even become a citizen without any fear of being arrested: the USA does not recognize that European court. Macron doesn't rule out sending French troops to Ukraine while Biden said from the beginning that under no circumstances US troops would be deployed in Ukraine. Whose response has been weak? The sanctions that Europe imposed on Russia are orders of magnitude bigger than the ones imposed by the USA, and Europe pays a much bigger price for the sanctions against Russia than the USA does (in fact the USA pays no price for its sanctions, and it even steals properties of rich Russians). Europe is home to 6 million Ukrainian refugees while the USA only took 178,000. Last but not least: the USA provides military aid with fake money, money that is actually spent in the USA to make weapons, while Europe provides a lot of aid that is real money and some of it even ends up in the USA to buy US weapons.
    Keep or dismantle NATO? It depends on what the goals are. If we want Europe to "grow up", then maybe it's good to get rid of NATO: Europe needs that kind of motivations. Take energy. For decades Europe has been dependent on the Middle East and on Russia. Europeans always managed to find an easy solution to the problem. Putin's war in Ukraine finally convinced them to invest massively in becoming self-reliant. Without the war, the motivation was not there. So it might be good for Europe to kick the USA out of NATO and get serious about their own defense. As the leftists always said, what's in it for Europe for defending Israel? what's in it for ostracizing Iran? why not accept closer Chinese ties if the Chinese are willing to pay for it? why not tell Russia "if you let Ukraine go, we'll severe ties with the USA"? After all, the issue for Russia is not really "NATO enlargement" but "USA enlargement". Remove the USA from the equation and Russia would not be so afraid of NATO. Why Europe doesn't have its own operating system, why Europe doesn't have its own search engine and social media? Ultimately, it's because it's part of the US Empire, just like India didn't have a textile industry under the British. Being members of NATO encouraged Europeans to think small instead of thinking big. After centuries of colonialism and world wars, Europeans generally agreed that it was better for Europe to think small. But this allowed the USA to think big also on behalf of Europe, and it's not clear anymore that this benefits Europe.
    Keep or dismantle NATO? If you care for peace in the world, i am convinced that NATO has been crucial for avoiding big wars. We complain about wars in Yugoslavia and Ukraine but we forget what was the norm before. China, Russia and so on are not afraid of the USA, they are afraid of USA+ EU + Japan+ Australia+... If this big alliance breaks, it's not clear what comes next: Pax Romana, Pax Arabica, Pax Mongolica, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana and then...? I believe NATO (Pax Americana) has saved many millions of lives. Keep or dismantle NATO? If you ask Xi and Putin, the answer is obvious. So it depends on what the goal is.
    The USA has never won a war since 1898 that it fought without the help of Europe. It's hard to tell if Europe would lose wars without the USA, but certainly so far the USA lost the war whenever Europe didn't help (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq...). The USA is a paper tiger without NATO. Keep or dismantle NATO? If the USA doesn't care about imperial power, then they don't need NATO, just like Britain at one point let all colonies become independent. Of course that means that the USA will become a much less relevant country. It will be a shock just like the 1970s were a shock to the British who suddenly realized they were only a tiny country after having been the most powerful country for two centuries. It also triggered the independence movement in Scotland (after all, isn't Scotland also an English colony?) and it might trigger an independence movement in states like California. Once you start dismantling, it's hard to stop the dismantling.
    The Trumpists who advocate a withdrawal from NATO may get what they want, and sooner than they think. This reminds me of Brexit, when so many continental Europeans were fed up with Britain, and then Britain decided to leave: rather than panicking, millions of Europeans breathed a sigh of relief ("good riddance").
    TM, ®, Copyright © 2024 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
    Back to the world news | Top of this page

  • (april 2024) European Spleen
    Europe has been falling behind the USA and China in just about everything except culture. Enrico Letta, a former Italian prime minister has prepared a report suggesting that the single European market, which is based on the free movement of goods, services, people, and capital, needs to be improved with a fifth "freedom": the free movement of research, innovation, knowledge and education. Mario Draghi, another former Italian prime minister, is preparing a report on EU competitiveness that will suggest massive increases in joint scientific research and a bureaucratic revolution to foster an ecosystem of startups devoted to disruptive innovation. The fundamental problem of these ideas is that the European public doesn't want "disruptive innovation". Europeans want stability, not innovation. Ultimately, they don't want Silicon Valley, and certainly don't want China. They decry the economic stagnation but in reality they want to retain precisely the elements that cause the economic stagnation. Last but not least, Letta's and Draghi's plans require that the European Union be more united and have more power. The right-wing party that are becoming more powerful in pretty much every European country oppose giving the EU more power and are generally nationalistic, which means that the EU will remain a fragmented union, a fragmented union trying to compete with the very united 1.4 billion-people China and with the $25-trillion economic juggernaut of the USA. It is easy to predict that Letta's and Draghi's reports will be read only by the political and economic elite, and will change absolutely nothing in the patterns of voting around Europe. This will cause the EU to fall further behind USA and China, which will cause even more economic stagnation, which will cause people to blame the political elite, which will benefit the right-wing nationalist parties, which will cause even more damage to the competitiveness of the European countries, and so on. Young people in particular don't seem excited about the future of their continent. Without a vision of the future, it's hard to see why they should be.

    Europe still hasn't acquired a post-Soviet identity. Europe in the post-communist era has an identity crisis: it is a federation of more or less democratic states that basically believes in protecting the borders of its states. It seems to me that the ultimate purpose of the European Union is to avoid conflicts about borders, the kind of conflicts that have devastated the continent for thousands of years. A secondary achievements has been to foster democratic and business institutions in countries that had no such traditions, like the former Soviet satellites in eastern Europe.
    The EU doesn't have an army and doesn't have a real executive, so it doesn't do much more than discuss small matters and issue rules about, say, genetically-modified food and toxic paint. It is marginalized on the world stage.
    The EU's military is de facto NATO, the alliance with the USA and Canada. The "A" in NATO stands for "Atlantic" but now NATO includes countries like Estonia that are pretty far from the Atlantic Ocean. Avoiding wars over borders is also the main achievement of NATO: no wars between the Western European powers since the establishment of NATO. But NATO, as it is, makes little sense in a post-Soviet world since it was originally designed to protect Western Europe from a Soviet invasion. Now it looks like the purpose of NATO is for Western Europe to defend Eastern Europe from the aggressive posture of post-Soviet Russia. Nobody is threatening to invade or topple the governments of West Germany and Italy anymore. NATO is now really about defending the likes of Poland and Estonia, and even non-member Ukraine.
    The EU and the USA failed to invent a post-Soviet post-communist paradigm for world order. They simply applied a logic of enlargement to the existing world order. Hence the enlargement of the EU and the enlargement of NATO, which have virtually no limit.
    NATO should have died with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in March 1991 (the defense treaty among communist countries). In fact, Russia repeatedly proposed to let the OCSE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) take over the role of NATO (with the big advantage that Russia would be part of it). Instead NATO is on the way to become something comparable to the Catholic Church in previous centuries: a supranational entity that imposes political order on a chaotic Europe. NATO's success story is not a military one, since its military engagements have been limited to fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and bombing Serbia and Libya (neither of which were threats to a member of the alliance). NATO's real accomplishments (albeit indirect ones) have been political and economic. The London Declaration of July 1990 and the New Strategic Concept of November 1991 recognized this fact by redefining NATO as an institution for economic, social and political stability.
    NATO has not adapted yet to a new economic, social and political threat: China, which is much stronger than Russia. The result is that the USA has a military treaty with Japan, keeps troops in South Korea, implicitly protects Taiwan, and has just signed a treaty with Australia and India while theoretically none of these countries is an ally of Germany or Italy or Poland or any other member of the EU. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia are not "Atlantic" (the "A" in NATO) but they are as "Western" as any European country, and possibly even more than some NATO members (Turkey and Hungary, for example). And yet they are not members of the Western military alliance, NATO.
    Strobe Talbott's essay "Why NATO should grow" (1995) argued long ago that NATO should keep enlarging, and his is still the best argument. Samuel Huntington's essay "Conventional Deterrence and Conventional Retaliation in Europe" (1983) argued that NATO should become an offensive alliance, not just a defensive one (he's the one who later became famous with "The Clash of Civilizations"). But an enlargement to Asia should come with a different name and a different mission: defend all democracies anywhere (some kind of "bill of rights).
    Incidentally, the United Nations itself should be reformed. It was created when India was still a colony of Britain, hence India is not a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council with veto power while tiny Britain and France are. In 1971 mainland (communist) China inherited the seat originally held by the old regime of China (which since 1949 has been confined in Taiwan after losing the civil war) and in 1991 Russia inherited the seat originally held by the Soviet Union, but nobody ever bothered to fix the aberration that the world's third and fourth economies (Japan and Germany) as well as some of the world's most populous nations (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, etc) have lower rights at the United Nations than those two small European countries (France and Britain). Kudos to US president Joe Biden for the pledge he gave to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2022 to support increasing the number of both permanent and non-permanent representatives of the UN Council.
    It is not only the Cold War that ended: it is also the colonial world that largely vanished.
    These multiple identity crises combine to define a transitional age in which Europe still has to find its place.

    TM, ®, Copyright © 2024 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
    Back to the world news | Top of this page

  • Articles on Europe before 2024
Editorial correspondence | Back to the top | Back to History | Back to the world news