Research and Opinion

Dr. Danko Plevnik: The EU is sliding from an acute to a chronic crisis.    

In the 20th century, the processes of arbitrary Europeanization began, so Europe began to be defined by the visions of its unification, with which two movements are connected. The first was launched in 1922 by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi under the name Pan-European Movement for the Unification of Europe, which he saw as a condition for preventing a new war on its soil and preserving its historical role in the competition of new world powers. That movement turned into the Pan-European Union, which still strives to maintain an awareness of geographical Europe.

       The second time, in the form of the Western-centric European movement, was led by Robert Schuman in 1955. On November 1, 1993, the European movement became the European Union (EU), which imposed itself as the central paradigm of Europeanism. The founder of the Council of Europe, Winston Churchill, in his lecture at the University of Zurich on September 19, 1946, presented the idea of ​​a "United States of Europe" modeled after the USA, then the Statute was signed in Saint James's Palace in London on May 5, 1949, which the Council of Europe was founded. It was the first modern concept of a common Europe. Today, the Council of Europe has 46 members, excluding Russia and Belarus. The USA supported the unification of Western Europe with its capital after the Second World War, but to this day it has not agreed to a free trade zone with the EU!? He supported this process of unification at the beginning and because of the fear of communism in Italy, France and Greece, but he never and probably will not support competition in the form of the creation of the United States of Europe. As president, Trump supported the idea of ​​Brexit, i.e. the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020. Bulgarian political activist Ivan Krastev, in his book After Europe, already in 2017 expressed the opinion that the future of the EU is no longer a current topic and that it should rather be discussed how to organize after its collapse. A year later, the American columnist James Kirchick published the book The End of Europe, in which he portrayed Ukraine as the new West Berlin.

The decline of Europe is inversely proportional to the rise of the USA, which until the First World War was an isolationist, regional power. At the peace negotiations in Versailles, which began on January 18, 1919, English was accepted for the first time as the second official language of diplomacy, behind French (after Latin), the only official diplomatic language around the world until then. Even after the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU, the English language remained the leading communication instrument in the bodies and forums of the EU.

 Until the end of the 19th century, the Monre Doctrine, which forbade European colonization of the American continent, was considered a pillar of US foreign and international policy, and in the 20th century it was invoked by John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and other American presidents. When citing this doctrine, its second part is very often forgotten - that in return the USA will not interfere in European affairs. He stuck to that until entering the world wars that started in Europe. After the First World War, at the negotiations in Versailles, American President Woodrow Wilson wanted the decision to create the League of Nations to become an integral part of the negotiating document in order to win over the American Congress for American accession to the League, which was not accepted. After the Second World War, the USA participated in the occupation and de-Nazification of Germany, kept its forces and weapons there, and became an agent of the creation of a new world order through the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, through which it controlled the dynamics of its own and world development.

      With the help of NATO, in 1949 he began the gathering of Europe, including the recent admission of the neutral countries of Finland and Sweden. In 1994, Bill Clinton launched the Partnership for Peace (PfP) as a program of bilateral cooperation between NATO and certain partner countries, even Yeltsin's Russia, to admit to Putin that Russia would not be able to join NATO, thus saying that it would become an adversary at war, not a peacemaking partner. The European Union with Russia would be a political entity from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and this geopolitical idea could not be accepted within the American NATO. Mikhail Gorbachev's "Common European Home" strategic concept, in which there was room for both the USA and Canada, and which was against the division of the continent into military blocs and the accumulation of military arsenals in Europe and the threat of war, was not accepted in 1989, although the West then admired Gorbachev as much as he demonizes Putin today. Clinton's decision was a historic step back from the Helsinki Final Act, an agreement signed by 35 countries in 1975 that concluded the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). This agreement improved West-East relations and had a far-reaching effect on the thawing of the Cold War. In 1995, the conference settled on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which did not become operational in the style of NATO, but a necessary but often powerless debating club on the undemocratic problems of certain turbulent countries.

      There are 30 countries from Europe in NATO, and if they leave it collectively, only the USA and Canada will remain in it, and Europe will get an integrated defense system. This is how they will have to go to war with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia... against China when it officially becomes a war target. It cannot be said that there were no statesmen in the EU who were not able to see the consequences of such blind submission, starting from the French President de Gaulle, who withdrew France from its military structures after 15 years of being the center of NATO, to the former French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, who already in 2008 intelligently pointed out the pseudo-legitimacy of the West in leading the world, warning: "History is starting to be made without the West and perhaps one day it will be made against it." When the American President Donald Trump almost offered the Europeans dissolution of NATO, French President Emmanuel Macron sent a message in 2019 to European countries that they could no longer rely on the US to defend NATO allies: "What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO," proposing the creation of a European defense force and a break with security the dominance of the USA, but he failed in this due to the excessive power of the USA and his personal influence on EU politicians for whom sovereignty is in the rank of phantom pain. Now Trump's vice-presidential candidate JD Vance is telling the EU, and especially Germany, to provide their own defense.

     The greatest paradox of the EU - whose heritage is warfare - is that it failed to create European defense and security policies, let alone serious military forces. And there were opportunities! Before NATO, in September 1948, the Western Union (WU), a European military alliance between France, Great Britain and Benelux, also called the Brussels Treaty Organization (BTO), was founded. It was succeeded by the Western European Union (WEU), which implemented the amended Brussels Treaty. In June 2011, the WEU was abolished. Since 2007, a force of 1,500 soldiers has existed in the EU on behalf of the European Defense Union, which has never been active, so by 2025 it is planned to establish a European Rapid Deployment Capacity of 5,000 soldiers without reliance on the USA, and which would be complementary to NATO. The EU will not be able to secure its strategic independence for a long time.

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer concluded in 2010 that the EU is an institutional contradiction. The USA is developing on individualism, and Europe is collapsing with nationalisms as its constant, so even after seventy years, the emotional atmosphere of Europeanism has not been created in the way that Americanism is nurtured in the USA. Anyone who studies the EU a little longer and more deeply might notice that once the best politicians programmed its development, and now frontmen are not sent to the European Commission, as the 8th President of the European Commission Jacques Delors already noticed, but people with no vision and no organizational energy, and with such the EU will never become a global player. Delors warned that if the EU does not promote itself as a leader in world politics, it may end in collapse.

    Progress in this direction requires structural political reformation. The spiritual father of a united Europe, Jean Monnet, declared in 1943 that the prosperity of the countries of Europe would be possible only under the condition of forming a federation. Nation-states reject a federal state like the US. And this is one of the reasons why the idea of ​​the EU is spinning in a vicious circle of proclamations and resignations. The EU cannot be built without creating Europeans. It is narrow-minded to say that the establishment of a single state would minimize the role of smaller nations. After the EU expanded to include ten more European countries in 2004, there were fears and convictions in the USA that it would begin to develop in the direction of the United States of Europe, thus becoming an independent power, which would also mean the end of American supremacy in Europe. However, 20 years later, there is not even a word about it, let alone the intention to achieve such an organization of European states. Every naciocracy thinks of itself and so does the bureaucratic Eurocracy!

 According to the federative management method, the EU was unofficially first led by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, from 2019 to 2024, when she received a second mandate. Through her leadership, she minimized the European Council, founded in 1974, which is made up of the presidents of states or governments of EU member states, the president of the European Council and the president of the European Commission, which none of her predecessors succeeded in - weakening its authority obtained by the Treaty of Lisbon in defining political goals. and EU priorities. The council, which can pass legally binding acts, has been neutralized and its president, Charles Michel, has been pushed out of the game of relevant decision-making. Unlike the former presidents of the European Commission, she came to the European Parliament only when she had to, wanting to have as free a hand as possible.

    Ursula von der Leyen assisted and implemented the historic agreement between France and Germany on the formation of the Economic Recovery Fund (ERF) in 2021 to help EU countries recover from the COVID-19 pandemic in the amount of 750 billion euros and provide a seven-year budget of 1074 billion euros. It was not only about that sum, but the fact that for the first time the European Commission was able to obtain funds for Eurobonds in such a way that it started issuing economic bonds from the capital market, which was also a step towards strengthening the EU as a state entity. Until then, there were Spanish, Italian and other bonds on the European capital market, and then all the members stood behind the single Eurobond, which was a stimulus not only for economic, but also for European political unity.

 The positive thing about the work of the European Commission was that decisions were made more quickly, and the negative thing was that there was selective decision-making. Funds were distributed under the psychosis of fear of the pandemic in order to stop it as quickly as possible, but this also led to insufficiently controlled spending. Von der Leyen refused to make public her electronic communication with the executive director of the American company Pfizer, the manufacturer of the Covid vaccine, so it was suspected that it was favoritism, which was reported by many media and the European Parliament sought answers. On this occasion, Dutch member of the European Parliament Sophie in 't Veld noted that the European Commission has become less transparent due to its decisions under her leadership and asked the European Parliament to hold it accountable: "This is bigger than a simple text message between Von der Leyen and Pfizer. In a democracy, transparency is the cornerstone of any executive-legislature relationship that checks the power of the executive. The European Commission has become less transparent, less accountable to the European Parliament and frankly more disconnected from European democracy."

      She came to the position of President of the Commission from the position of Minister of Defense of Germany. And there she was accused of favoritism, the accusations were later dismissed, but she still used her influence by choosing advisers and in return secured the employment of her two children in the US, as Politico magazine, which specialized in finding her ongoing omissions, reported for months. She also had problems with her CV after she wrote that she studied at Stanford, which the university representative denied and proved that she had not completed any course for which she would have received an official degree or certificate, so she could not list this university as an academic qualification in the CV.

  Russia's aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022 renewed the scourge of warfare within Europe, which brought the EU under its leadership under the direct geopolitical interests of the USA. And that costs money. The defense budgets of NATO members in Europe increased by almost 18 percent this year, which is the highest in several decades. Such dependence was not only a consequence of the fact that almost all EU countries are members of NATO, but also that a good number of their presidents and prime ministers, for whom state sovereignty seems as real as a phantom limb to disabled people, primarily from Poland, the Baltic countries and Southeast Europe, joined Germany as America's main European allied subject. But their problem, unlike Germany's, is historical revisionism and many years hatred of Russia because they were hostage to the victory of the USSR, which also became a burden for the EU and affected the direction of its foreign policy. With their belligerent political aggressiveness, they imposed decisions that deviated from the peaceful foundations of EU policy. That war forced the European Commission to abandon its constitutive principles of the rule of European law and offer Ukraine different rules for entering the EU, thereby degrading the countries of the Western Balkans. After borrowing due to the Covid pandemic, the EU borrowed even more due to the war in Ukraine.

The European Commission is incomprehensible or actually understandable because it defended American interests, ignored the blasting of the North Stream gas pipeline, and Germany bears the same irresponsibility since it was also about its project and ownership. Under normal conditions, such an impact would be a casus belli, and the EU behaved as if a power line had collapsed under a gust of wind. Now they have found the Ukrainian van der Lubbe in the form of Volodymyr Z. The EU unwittingly submitted to energy euthanasia because, due to its participation in this war and the delay in the realization of Minsk I and Minsk II, as Angela Merkel admitted, it ran out of cheap Russian energy sources and raw materials and lost competitiveness in the world. And all this happened without any condemnation from the European Commission, which dictated relations with Russia and timed the sanctions against it. Non-market decisions in favor of Ukraine, for example in the purchase of grain, caused opposition from some agrarian-oriented EU countries. Like many of today's politicians, von der Leyen acts as an "X politician", announcing her intentions on that platform before in the EU bodies. Thus, she announced that the EU will transfer 1.5 billion euros of income from frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, and that these funds will be used for the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine. He also proposes freezing the funds of the Russian Central Bank for an indefinite period and extending the sanctions against Russia from six months to an unlimited period. And this type of confiscation has long-term consequences for the EU as well because it sets a precedent that will discourage foreign investment due to such political dependence of its financial system. In 2023, the GDP of the EU grew by 0.4 percent and that of sanctioned and blocked Russia by 4 percent!? And no one in the EU that's why he doesn't call his turn!? The European economy is therefore grumbling under difficulties, and the purchasing power falls to citizens, not politicians.

       in the EU that's why he doesn't call his turn!? The European economy is therefore grumbling under difficulties, and the purchasing power falls to citizens, not politicians. wrote off the USA, which is still the undisputed world leader and decides on the world order.

 In the vortex of its (re)visions, the EU lives as a prisoner of its own fickle history. As an American small ship, it fails to complete neither its strategic identity nor its financial identity, because some countries are still outside the Eurozone, nor its spatial identity, because it ignores the countries of the Western Balkans that are within its borders, and plans to expand to countries outside those borders: Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova...although they do not meet the Copenhagen criteria. Due to the irrational blockade of first Greece and then Bulgaria, the EU endlessly delays the admission of North Macedonia, which in 2004 was the first from the Western Balkans to sign the Stabilization and Association Agreement. Unlike Ukraine, the EU immediately put Croatia on ice because of the Storm or Croatia's liberation from Serbia's wartime aggression. Stoltenberg then invited Yasushi Akashi to request NATO strikes on the HV, and now NATO is defending Ukraine against Russian aggression. Where did the fear of Russia and the outbreak of the Third World War disappear, which justified the passivity of the EU and NATO in relation to Croatia?

    The EU is sliding from an acute to a chronic crisis. It has never happened that, during her election as president of the European Commission, in the European Parliament, representatives of Poland, Romania and others heard insults and calls for her to be put in prison, and not the head of the European Commission. On the other hand, it is not even remembered that a member who started the presidency of the Council of the EU is being challenged so much from Brussels, and doubts are being launched from some members about the necessity of Hungary's membership in the EU and NATO. After numerous Brussels sanctions against Hungary, Orbán reacted against such Brussels-centricity by calling for the creation of a Europe of nation states. Under his leadership, a new extreme right-wing, Eurosceptic group with the paradoxical name Patriots for Europe was formed, the third largest bloc in the European Parliament.

The European Commission did not like the fact that Orbán voted against von der Leyen and went to Putin in his initial visits. Most of the ministers of the EU countries are boycotting the meetings in Budapest. Since the EU still functions on the principle of consensus and veto, it is surprising that there is so much bile towards Hungary and Slovakia, which are trying to maintain their views on the war in Ukraine and energy dependence on Russia. Orbán therefore compared the EU to the USSR, expecting a similar disintegration and concluded that the EU is not aware of what is happening in the world, warning of the coming new, this time Asian, world order. According to him, a change is coming that has not been seen for 500 years as China, India, Pakistan and Indonesia will become the dominant center of the world. I think it's too earlywrote off the USA, which is still the undisputed world leader and decides on the world order.

In the vortex of its (re)visions, the EU lives as a prisoner of its own fickle history. As an American small potato, it fails to complete neither its strategic identity nor its financial identity, because some countries are still outside the Eurozone, nor its spatial identity, because it ignores the countries of the Western Balkans that are within its borders, and plans to expand to countries outside those borders: Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova...although they do not meet the Copenhagen criteria. Due to the irrational blockade of first Greece and then Bulgaria, the EU endlessly delays the admission of North Macedonia, which in 2004 was the first from the Western Balkans to sign the Stabilization and Association Agreement. Unlike Ukraine, the EU immediately put Croatia on ice because of the Storm or Croatia's liberation from Serbia's wartime aggression. Stoltenberg then invited Yasushi Akashi to request NATO strikes on the HV, and now NATO is defending Ukraine against Russian aggression. Where did the fear of Russia and the outbreak of the Third World War disappear, which justified the passivity of the EU and NATO in relation to Croatia?

 What is left of such an inconsistent Europe? Only prepotency! Just as Croatia believes, such is the traditional self-deceiving mentality, that it is better than its neighbors, so Europe thinks it is better than the rest of the world. Europe is overrun by suspicion, slowness and old age.