The first geostrategic game after the pandemic is being played in Ukraine. In general, experts understand events better than ordinary mortals. But on some occasions they suffer from what we could call a kind of intellectual Stockholm syndrome. These days it happens between experts in diplomacy and international relations and citizens who simply apply common sense. Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine would deserve a somewhat more forceful response than the one we have seen, and I am not talking about starting to drop bombs, but about a more empathetic response towards a country that the only thing it has done has been to claim its Europeanness to escape from the orbit of a regime based on terror, disinformation and the systematic violation of human rights.
The ‘reasons’ for a timid response
When someone expresses doubts that the bombing of the civilian population in Ukraine is not even worth blocking the use of the code “swift” With Russian banks, experts refer to two main reasons: Ukraine has historically been in the Russian zone of influence and, both in the Yalta agreements and in the fall of the USSR, it was accepted that this should continue to be the case. On the other hand, NATO only contemplates responding militarily to an attack against a member state and Ukraine is not. Solid arguments triply colliding with the common sense of non-experts: Does history eternally condemn States to live under totalitarian regimes? Was Bosnia a member state when Solana ordered the bombing of Serbia? Aren’t the Ukrainians being attacked for wanting to be a member state?
When do we accept Russia as a partner?
The timidity of the Western response to Putin’s aggressiveness is based on international law but cannot be explained from that point of view. The economist Joseph Stiglitz warned a couple of decades ago of the mistake that it made after the fall of the USSR, to admit Russia as a global trading partner, and very especially European, without asking about its political regime and protection of human rights.. As in the case of China, the greed to gain a large market made the West agree to do business on an equal footing with states where social and economic rights are not respected, but neither are human rights. And those states now mount a war whenever they feel like it because we can’t live without their gas or close the doors of our banks that would go bankrupt if we did. If the international community had done the same, for example, with Spain, we would still be under a dictatorship. Free trade cannot be dissociated from the democratic acquis. That is the lesson.
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The strategic weakness of the EU
The fathers of the EU (Adenauer, Schuman. De Gasperi) opted for the pragmatic path: always advance in what is easier to reach an agreement. First coal, then steel, then the internal market, the single currency only for those who want it, Schengen for those who are comfortable… Surely. it is the only possible way to convert a continent that has staged the most brutal wars in history into a federation of states. But one of the weak points of this way of making Europe is its irrelevance in international politics. For years, the EU was ridiculed in Washington by saying they didn’t know which phone to call. Now they can call Josep Borrell, but the drama is that he doesn’t know whether to answer thinking about the gas in Germany or the nuclear power plants in France. In the bipolar world after the Second World War, the EU could be a free market protected by the military and geostrategic umbrella of NATO. On the multipolar world of globalization, the EU must decide what its geostrategic option is and incorporate it into its legal acquis. In the same way that they are willing to sanction Poland for decoupling funds from human rights, they should be able to reprimand Macron for the ridicule of seven days ago meeting with Putin.