If almost 30 years ago, the Balkan conflict warned us that the horror of war had not disappeared from Europe, Putin’s Russia war against Ukraine it reminds us that the state of peace in which the vast majority of Europeans have lived since 1945 is an exception in the history of humanity. An exception that we have stopped caring for and appreciating, that we have even despised and that we have understood as normal, installed in our relative well-being, but immense compared to the rest of the planet. And it is that the origin of the pro-European project is none other than to put an end to the wars between Europeans that had devastated the Old Continent, uniting the markets, facilitating the movement of people and defending the common interests and values of Europeans. And this project has worked. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Europe, as a shared project of peace and prosperity, but also of democracy, rights and freedoms, extended to the East. Today in Ukraine, the war that Putin has started is about this. When in May 2014 he was part of the delegation of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, deployed in Kiev, which monitored the elections in Ukraine, after the pro-European riots of the Maidan, I verified how the young people with whom I spoke aspired to live in a country based on a ‘European way of life’ forming part of the European Union (EU), very far from the failed Soviet model of their parents or the despotic and authoritarian model that they suffer their Russian neighbors.
The EU has weaknesses, deficiencies and deficits. Many. But the European Union is the good model, by far. The model to preserve, strengthen, expand, defend, improve. The model for which Ukrainians are not fighting in vain. And for which the Russians who, with enormous courage, have filled the streets against the war in the cities of Russia also demonstrate. And a model that can also come out stronger with this crisis.
In the speech that made the state senator from Illinois famous, Barack Obama, in October 2012, against the war in Iraq, the later President proclaimed that he was not opposed to war in all circumstances, but rather to a stupid war, like the one that was about to start. These days it is worth rereading the speech of the young Obama. This war, for the Ukrainians, is not a stupid war. It is a war in defense of their independence and their freedom, their lives, definitely; and for Europeans, and not only for Europeans, this has to be a war in defense of the freedom of all, also ours. If we demonstrate against this war and against the horror of the war, it cannot be done by equating the victims with the executioners or pretending to reduce this war in a childish and puerile way to a conflict of geopolitical interests, between powers, before which we stand, equidistantly, above the lamb and evil, comfortably, without assuming any responsibility, turning our backs on the Ukrainians, and on the Russian democrats. And of course there is geopolitics in this war. We are not naive either. In any conflict of this magnitude, the geopolitical dimension is there. Those who have understood it best are the Ukrainians who want to be part of the european dream and of the alliances that unite us with Washington, Tokyo or Ottawa.
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From this point of view, it makes no sense to look for parallels between what is happening in Ukraine these days with the conflict between the Catalan institutions and the State that we have experienced during the last decade. Any reference, wherever it comes from, is obscene. And these days we have heard some.
For calm and pragmatic Catalan sovereignty, for those of us who have practiced civic and democratic nationalism for decades, this war confirms that Europe is our destination country. That Europe is the guarantee of peace and that the European model of civil and political rights and freedoms, of the social market economy and Welfare State and of unity in diversity, is our model. And neither are ambiguities or strange experiments about Europe worth paying too much attention to the sorcerer’s apprentices who speculate about other destinations and other allies. Today Europe is playing it in the streets of Kiev, Kharkov and many cities in Ukraine.