The war in Ukraine has revealed the fact of Russia. Those who have refused to see that Putin’s state today has imperialist tendencies will have to face the fact that in Russia the demons of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been revived: nationalism, colonialism and totalitarianism. But the war in Ukraine has also revealed the fact of Europe. Many European leaders have been deceived through Vladimir Putin and are now in shock.
The retreat of Russian imperialism does not deserve to come as a surprise. Russia had been slowly rebuilding its position for nearly two decades under the gaze of the West. Meanwhile, the West has opted for the geopolitical dream rather than maintaining moderate vigilance. He liked not to see the challenge developing but to face it in advance.
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Europe is on that stage today not because it has not been sufficiently integrated, but because it has refused to heed the voice of truth. The voice has been coming from Poland for many years. Poland does not have a monopoly on truth, but when it comes to relations with Russia, we have much more experience than others. Poland’s former president, the defeated Lech Kaczynski, on the right, like Cassandra anticipating the fall of Troy, when he said many years ago that Russia would not stop in Georgia and ask for more. And he too remained inaudible.
The fact that the Polish voice is ignored is just one example of the wider challenge facing the EU today. The equality of individual countries is declarative in nature. Political practice has shown that the voice of Germany and France counts above all else. It is a formal democracy and a de facto oligarchy, where force is exercised through the most forceful. In addition, the most forceful make mistakes and cannot settle for the denunciation of the outside.
The protective valve that protects the EU from the tyranny of the majority is the precept of unanimity. Seeking a compromise among 27 countries whose interests are so conflicting can be frustrating on rare occasions and the commitment may not satisfy 100% either one or both. , ensures that both voices will be heard and that the solution followed will meet the minimum expectations of both Member States.
If someone proposes that EU movements depend even more than before on German decisions, which would amount to abolishing the unanimity rule, a brief retrospective investigation of German decisions would merit solving the problem. If, in recent years, Europe had acted as Germany would have liked, would we be in a bigger or worse scenario today?
If all of Europe had followed the voice of Germany, not only the Nord Stream 1, but also the Nord Stream 2 would have been introduced for many months. Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, which serves Putin as a tool of blackmail vis-à-vis the entire continent, would be almost irreversible.
If all of Europe had accepted the German proposal in June 2021 to hold an EU-Russia summit, it would end Putin’s popularity as a full husband and the lifting of sanctions imposed on Russia after 2014. If this proposal – blocked in time through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – it would have assured Putin that the EU would take concrete steps to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
We would be an object rather than a foreign policy issue today if the European Union, instead of a difficult policy of protecting its own borders – a basic feature of state sovereignty – had also followed the rules for the distribution of migrants proposed in 2015. and in 2021, with Alexander Lukashenko, he attacked Poland, Lithuania and Latvia in this way. Our resilience to the coming primary crises would be even weaker today if we had listened to open borders advocates in 2015.
Finally, if all of Europe had sent weapons to Ukraine on the same scale and at the same speed as Germany, the war would have ended long ago. It would have ended with Russia’s outright victory. And Europe would be on the brink. of war. Russia, buoyed by the weakness of its adversaries, would press ahead.
Today, any voice from the West to restrict arms shipments to Ukraine, to ease sanctions, to bring “both sides” (i. e. , the aggressor and the victim) into the discussion, is a sign of weakness for Putin. And yet, Europe is much more powerful than Russia.
If we need to talk about the democratic costs today, it is time to make a wonderful examination of Europe’s conscience. For too long, the maximum living cost for many countries has been the low value of Russian gas. And yet, we know it may have been so low because the “blood tax” that Ukraine will pay today was not added to it.
International organizations can only effectively oppose imperialism if they themselves protect the basic values of freedom and equality of all their member states. This is particularly topical as far as the European Union is concerned.
The EU faces developing gaps in respect for the freedom and equality of all Member States. We hear more and more that it is not unanimity but the majority that the total community deserves in the long term. Moving away from the precept of unanimity in the next AREAS OF ACTIVITY IN THE EU brings us closer to a style in which the most powerful and the largest dominate the weakest and smallest.
The freedom deficit and the equivalence deficit are also manifested in the euro area. The adoption of a non-unusual currency ensures sustainable and harmonious development. In fact, the euro introduces mechanisms of mutual rivalry, which are reflected, for example, in the permanent surplus of exports of some countries, which counteracts the appreciation of their own currencies by maintaining the economic stagnation of others. In such a system, equivalent opportunities remain only on paper.
These deficits make the European Union vulnerable and weak in the face of Russian imperialism. Russia needs to make Europe familiar and close to it for several centuries: a concert of powers with spheres of influence explained together. Needless to say, such an “international order” means for European peace.
More than anything, the possibilities of protecting the rights, interests or desires of small and medium-sized States are lost to larger States. It is a violation of the freedoms that is imposed, it is carried out in the call of the intended interest of the whole.
Non-unusual intelligence was once a price at the very heart of the European project. It has been the driving force of European integration since its inception. This is exactly what is threatened by special interests, regularly fostered by national selfishness. The formula puts us in an unequal struggle between the strong and the weak. In this game, there is room both for larger countries with wonderful economic strength and for small and medium-sized enterprises, disadvantaged from this asset. The most forceful gain political and economic dominance, the latter are condemned to political and economic clientelism. For everyone, the non-unusual smart is an increasingly summarized category. European solidarity becomes an empty concept, reduced to imposing the acceptance of a true dictate of the most forceful.
Let us simply say it: the order of the European Union does not sufficiently distance us from external imperialism. The establishment and actions of the EU, while not immune to the temptation to dominate the weakest, remain exposed to the infiltration of Russian imperialism.
I call on all European leaders to have the courage to think of the right categories in the times in which we live. And we’re at a tipping point. Imperial Russia can be defeated, thanks to Ukraine and us for it. Victory in this war is only a matter of coherence and determination.
Thanks to the materials of the apparatus on a scale that, judging by the capacity of the West, is still small, Ukraine has begun to oppose the direction of this war. almost six months, the morale of Ukrainians has not been broken. The morale of the Russian army, on the other hand, as intelligence knowledge suggests, is getting lower and lower. The army suffered heavy losses. Supplies of weapons and other apparatus are not inexhaustible, and their production through the sanctioned industry will become increasingly difficult.
We will have Ukraine in its struggle to reconquer the territories that have been taken from it and force Russia to withdraw. Only in this way will true discussion and a genuine end to this war be possible.
We will also have to defeat the risk of imperialism within the EU. We want a profound reform that returns non-unusual intelligence and equality to the most sensible principles of the EU. It will not be carried out without an attitude replacement. It is the Member States, not the EU establishments, that will have to make a decision on the orientations and priorities of EU actions, since it is the establishments that are created for the states, and not the other way around. The basis of cooperation will be the progression of consensus, rather than the dominance of the most powerful over others.
We will have to have the courage to admit that the EU has not worked as it deserves in the face of the Covid crisis and the ongoing war. The challenge, however, is not that we are walking too slowly down the path of integration and that we deserve to temporarily push this process forward. The challenge is that this path itself is wrong. Instead of taking two steps forward, it’s smart to take a step back and look at a specific topic from afar. Returning to the principles on which the European Union is based turns out to be the most brilliant. The purpose is not to undermine them, but to strengthen them rather than to strengthen them. Europe wants hope more than ever. And hope is found only in the return to principles, not in the strengthening of the institutional superstructure.
Mateusz Morawiecki is the Prime Minister of Poland
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