Wide

The broken dream and Europe's dilemma

26 February 2023

Curated by Moreno Bernasconi

The long season of liberalization of world economic exchanges has deluded Europe into believing that the economic strength of its markets was enough to make it the third pole on a world scale. A dream shattered by the return to reality: that of old and new geopolitical, national and neo-imperial interests.

Who defined the new European and global balances after the Second World War? The victorious powers. In February 1945, in Yalta in the Crimea (sic), next to the President of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin, sat the President of the United States of America Roosevelt and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Churchill. Both Anglo-Saxon, both Atlantic. Representatives from defeated continental Europe were absent (much to De Gaulle's annoyance). The division of continental Europe with Stalin was done by the Atlantic powers: first by granting him Eastern Europe and then – only four years later, in 1949, frightened by the expansionism of the Soviet Empire – by establishing the Atlantic Military Alliance of NATO deployed on the borders with the USSR and its vassals. From a geopolitical point of view, things are clear in Europe and have not substantially changed for 70 years.

The Atlantic Alliance dominated by the USA has progressively expanded in Europe – and is still expanding in these months of war, also integrating historically neutral EU member countries such as Sweden and Finland -. In short, it is evident that the United States (to which we are indebted for the liberation from Nazi-fascism as much as we are indebted to Russia) came to Europe to stay. The European chancelleries and in particular the Italian ones who have succeeded one another for the past 70 years are well aware of this. There has not been and there is no Italian government that can be established and can last without declaring loyalty to the United States, guaranteeing the NATO and US military bases on the territory (and guaranteeing US economic interests, as the Mattei case teaches). Craxi dared to interfere on the Sigonella bases and paid the price. Premier Massimo d'Alema himself (a former Communist trained in Moscow) in 1999 could only give his endorsement of the bombing of Serbia (not authorized by the UN) by NATO planes that took off from the US military bases in Aviano, in Friuli. A military operation more timely than ever, given that the conflict in Ukraine is dangerously reopening the wounds of the XNUMXs in the ex-communist Balkans.

From a geopolitical and military point of view, but not only that, Europe has remained until today – throughout the process that saw it transform itself into a European Community, into a monetary union and into a European Union (institutionally still incomplete) – in a relationship of more or less strong vassalage towards the United States of America. For a few decades it was able to attract the recalcitrant United Kingdom - which had not signed the Treaty of Rome and would have instead wanted to incorporate the EEC into the European Free Trade Association - but Brexit sanctioned the return of the "perfidious Albion" in the traditional Anglo-Saxon Atlantic area.

The EU has indeed managed to broaden its area of influence by recovering the countries of Eastern Europe from the former USSR, but as the current war in Ukraine demonstrates, unfortunately it does not have the means to be an independent protagonist in its own geopolitical area. Neither from a military point of view, where it is totally driven by the United States, nor sensationally from that of energy resources and raw materials. Clamoringly, since the first nucleus of the European union process was the ECSC, the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951, established to guarantee the sources of energy and the raw materials necessary for the construction of the common European market.

The harsh truth is that – while a very dangerous armed conflict is raging on the continent's borders caused by the world's largest nuclear power – the European Union does not have a common "force de frappe", an autonomy of energy sources and raw materials capable of withstanding the perverse effects of economic sanctions against the Russian threat and a solid unit capable of exercising a foreign policy and diplomacy that is not national but common and not subordinate to that of the United States. How is it possible, given the aforementioned geopolitical context, that Europe dreamed at a certain moment of its development, of becoming the third pole on a global scale, between the United States and China?

Its extraordinary economic development certainly contributed to fueling that dream. The EU is the second largest exporter and importer of goods in the world and the first in trade in services. To make it an economic giant has contributed to the fact that its process of unification and enlargement of the single market went hand in hand with that of the liberalization of trade, from the Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1947 (GATT), to the World Trade Organization (WTO) established in 1995. The euphoric season of globalization and liberalization has given wings to the leading countries of the EU. But the season of happy globalization has passed.

The sum of the resistances of countries and social classes victims of the perverse effects of market liberalization have relaunched protectionism and nationalism. It is no coincidence that it was once the unions and the left that demonstrated against globalization and today it is (also) the popular classes who vote for the sovereigns. And if one carefully considers the strategies and slogans of the two powers competing for supremacy on a world scale, the United States and China, one notices - although they need each other economically - a common protectionist tendency and the affirmation of a very similar imperial will. While three years ago, at the Davos Forum, the autocrat Xi Jinping wore the mask of the champion of world trade liberalization, in reality the policy he implemented was as protectionist and perhaps more than the one Donald Trump claimed with his "Make America great again”.

Strengthened by a centralization of political and military power that no Chinese leader has ever had since Mao Zedong and by unprecedented technological instruments of social, political and economic control, Xi Jinping's clear objective is "Make China great again" (starting with bend Hong Kong and the irreducible independence activists of Taiwan). A goal that comes from afar because – as can be seen from his speeches – he wants to wash away the shame of colonization, of the secular invasion of the Celestial Empire by the West, reversing the direction of the Silk Road. Implementing a Chinese economic imperialism aimed primarily at the Far East, but also at the Pacific, Africa and Europe. And creating a new economic-financial order opposed to that of the dollar.

In this new neo-imperial geopolitical context where China and the United States vie for world supremacy, what is a continental Europe capable of doing, caught in the grip of a dangerous conflict on its eastern borders, of growing migratory flows from the Mediterranean and of an acute energy and raw materials crisis pushing it into recession? Of course, it is understandable that precisely in this situation of extreme need, Europe has no interest in considering Beijing as an enemy but rather as an essential partner and an enormous, vital market. Someone claims that it is necessary to go further: that it is necessary to distance oneself from the policy of confrontation implemented by Washington and to deal on an equal footing with China.

The fact is that the majority of European chancelleries (even if Berlin seems to want to continue undeterred in its pro-Chinese policy) seem to have understood that the New Silk Road offered by Beijing could turn into a poisoned gift from an economic, technological, political giant and military in the hands of a single party that controls and directs everything in a capillary way (as demonstrated by the Zero Covid policy): every movement of its citizens, science and research and even the economy.

The state led by the leading party, in turn led by Xi Jinping, also promotes and controls the technologies and economic activities of companies and companies that have trade with the whole world. The dilemma of European countries (more than of the EU, given that the President of the European Parliament and the President of the European Commission compete to exclude each other when they meet the Chinese President) is therefore the following: in relations with Beijing it is possible to maintain an attitude of equidistance compared to those with Washington, of which Europe is a not indifferent vassal? Is it possible to even continue to dream of being a third pole in the current balance and in the new economic-financial order on a global scale, alongside the USA and China? When put to the test, the dilemma now appears rhetorical. Like it or not, this Europe has already made or suffered the choice. And I fear that it will also be very difficult for her to play the role of referee.