Like a bunch of cheerleaders, the EU shouts ‘Slava Ukraini’

I went looking for peace doves this week. De-escalating language and actions. Leaders who took responsibility and came up with realistic proposals for a ceasefire. Who offered a way out of this conflict without razing Ukraine or before an even more serious, supposedly unthinkable, escalation. Since corona I take unthinkable scenarios pretty seriously.

I searched and found very little. Really only saw leaders adding fuel to the fire. In the video he recorded for the Ukrainian population, Rutte just wore the blue-yellow flag of that country. “We are family in Europe,” he said. It sounded like incitement. It is the same family rhetoric with which Putin justifies the invasion of Ukraine. After all, Belarus and Ukraine are brothers of Russia, didn’t you know?

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, went a step further. She threw not a little oil but a full barrel of gasoline on the conflict by immediately and accelerated membership in the face of Ukraine. We welcome you with open arms! And then watch as such a country is plunged into complete destruction as it rushes towards you. It is the same provocation that we know from Greater Europe thinkers like the former Belgian Prime Minister Verhofstadt and the late MEP Van Baalen.

Georgia and Moldova also promptly apply for EU membership. I fully understand that these peoples are eager to join the EU. When you have to choose between Putin’s corrupt criminal kleptocracy or the liberal democracies of the European Union, the choice is easy. Moreover, such an EU membership always offers all kinds of possibilities for one’s own cultural conceptions of ‘democracy’. Now we applaud Poland for taking in hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, a few weeks ago the EU was still struggling with the fact that Poland had introduced gay-free zones, fired disobedient judges and tried to contain the media for not merely bringing of good news.

The EU has found at the time of Brexit that there is one moment when you can unite all 27 member states and that is when there is a common opponent. The weight and strength of a united, self-confident Union is awe-inspiring, and when so many Member States send weapons individually, it’s not such a loss that there is no European army. But it seems that at such a moment European leaders lack self-awareness and responsibility, as if they do not know how to deal with their sudden position as a world power. They stand like a bunch of amateur cheerleaders’Slava Ukraine‘ to call. Only French President Macron, NATO leader Stoltenberg and US President Biden had the presence of mind to emphasize that they were not at war with Russia.

The quick membership application turns out to be a disappointment. Because in the end it is nothing more than that: war language.

I went looking and there was no one more pacifist at all. Once, half a million Dutch people demonstrated against the placement of cruise missiles in this country. They were against Soviet violence and against American weaponry. Now even GroenLinks is in favor of sending a bunch of anti-tank missiles to the East. With a childish blue-yellow flag display, Dutch organizations are getting rid of everything that smells Russian, including a festival weekend around the composers Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky and Russian participants in the Nijmegen Four Days Marches. Germany announces that it will place another 100 billion and a total of 250 billion in orders with the arms industry this year. In the midst of this climate crisis and with the acute energy problem, I had known some other urgent destinations for that money.

Where was that peace then? That foundation of the European project? Suddenly I missed Merkel. The embodiment of reason and restraint. He knows what it is like to be a global player and behaves accordingly. Who at the same time could have punished Putin with sanctions and boycotts, but had known the consequences of beating the war drum too hard and flinging weapons too flashy.

Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.