Does Europe often find itself grappling with the dilemma of choosing between the US and China? A quintessential example of this was an April article in the Financial Times, titled: “Europe must choose between America and China.” Apart from reflecting a typical Western dichotomizing way of thinking, this also implicitly, at least, conveys the tragic forecast that the EU, with its 450 million people, cannot choose or reinvent itself. One could also ask: Who wants to choose the EU and help it out of its crisis?
By Jan Oberg
It seems to me that the EU has always broken more bread than it can bake. While it has succeeded historically in bringing Germany and France together in continuation of the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951, it has failed to create the peace that is its Treaty’s highest goal. It has failed to create what some call a European identity and failed to be a Western alternative to the US – but it always put all its eggs in the US basket.
It has failed to speak with one voice in foreign and security matters, which it is also stipulated to do. Until today, the EU has not been able to devise new innovative concepts for welfare, security or a regional-global foreign policy. It has also made no innovation regarding democracy, and its parliament is weak.
Perhaps worst of all, the EU has no vision – nothing like China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and nothing like new thinking about global governance, human and global security, or shared prosperity for all. It does not seem to prepare itself for joining the future multipolar or multi-nodal/networking world based on a new thinking of cooperation as a road to peace.
The EU has been unable to employ any kind of diplomacy in the wake of the NATO-Russia conflict about the alliance’s provocative expansion that so tragically plays out in the war on Ukrainian territory. Instead, one element of the EU’s diminishing cohesion is cancellation and hatred of everything Russian and blaming everything on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Consequently, the EU has been completely sidelined, as a Union. It has shown no intellectual capacity to contribute to finding a solution to a conflict in its own region. Its attempts to put an end to the war, in my view, will not be successful.
Tragically, the EU has now decided to not only have but also become a Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, with gigantic investments in re-armament of €800 billion on top of an already substantial armament and depletion of its own weapons and ammunition arsenals. EU countries will continue to pour these into the deep black war hole – that is, into an already lost war.
The EU has no role in mediation – mediation is, paradoxically, conducted (amateurishly) by the US that caused the conflict in the first place – by pushing through NATO’s provocative expansion.
To express it diplomatically, the EU is now in a deep crisis. It seems that it had not come up with a viable plan B for the eventuality that the current US administration would turn out to be a law-breaking, unpredictable regime based on issuing executive orders and making statements. The US administration wants Greenland – a territory of the EU, the resources in Ukraine’s ground and a deal with Russia above the EU’s head. And it puts tariffs on the world, including on the US’ European friends and allies.
Extrapolating the US administration’s destructive and self-isolating policies throughout the next four years, it’s reasonably safe to predict that very few will want to have anything to do with its vision of the US. It will, simply put, not be possible for an economically defunct and militarized EU to choose the US.
European countries and their civil societies will have to shape new cooperative projects with the rest of the world, such as China, the BRI and BRICS+, and put much more emphasis on the UN. They will also have to learn how to cooperate and solve conflicts peacefully, including rebuilding their relations with Russia. In short, they will have to, in different ways, join the future of humankind, think globally and put their superiority complex about Europeanness – being a “paradise in a jungle” – behind them.
This will require the EU to immediately pick itself up by its civilian bootstraps. If only by the military ones, it may become an underdeveloped, over-militarized and marginalized corner of the future world.
Jan Oberg, director of the Sweden-based think tank Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research.
Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research
