Ray Kinsella: We should play no part in an EU army
The Western narrative on Crimea was primarily an excuse to impose sanctions
“We must cast a sceptical eye on what we have learned never to question” (Edward Luce, ‘Financial Times’, May 5, 2017)
POLITICAL, including military, relations between the EU and Russia are in a dangerous state. The most recent expression of this is the Permanent Structured Co-operation agreement (Pesco).
Shorn of EU-speak and acronyms, this is the coping stone of a European army, directed explicitly at Russia. Proposals are being brought forward by the Government for Ireland to join, despite our ‘neutrality’.
We should have no part of it. A principled Oireachtas would offer a referendum to confirm our neutrality.
The EU began as a community of nations. It is metastasising into a centralised empire almost wholly detached from its Christian Democratic roots in post-war Germany. In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum , the primary initiative taken by the EU’s dominant powers, Germany and France, is an army – notwithstanding the bleak and visible consequences of the EU’s support for US military adventurism in Libya and Iraq, and the EU’s yawning democratic deficit.
Pesco has all the hallmarks of an initiative driven by the military priorities of France and Germany, reinforced by insistent US pressures. What Pesco actually does is to institutionalise the ‘incremental militarisation’ of Europe – the biggest build-up of military manpower and weaponry (including nuclear weapons) in Europe since World War II.
Considerations of security and defence, particularly in Eastern Europe, are legitimate matters for dialogue between the EU and Russia. But what is happening goes well beyond any such dialogue.
Two decades after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the US Military Industrial Complex (MIC) still contrives to equate Russia with the Soviet Union and to treat with Russia as an ‘enemy’ threatening its global military and commercial hegemony. It’s expedient for the US to do this. How so?
That wise and most insightful of American economists JK Galbraith comes closest to resolving this question. In ‘The Affluent Society’, first published in 1958, Galbraith identified the “Conventional Wisdom” as a set of stereotypical propositions underpinned by self-interest and closed, by that same self-interest, to any criticism.
The Conventional Wisdom – pushed and ‘spun’ for all its worth – is that militarisation is a response to ‘Russian aggression’, especially in Crimea. That is a serious miscalculation by the EU.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 impelled Russia to rebuild its economy and national infrastructure from ‘ground zero’. It did so in the teeth of near insurmountable difficulties– aggravated, it should be said, by the systemic damage wrought by ‘oligarchs’. At the same time, Russia also had to ‘reset’ its relationships with neighbouring countries. This included redressing centuries-old ethnic and cultural ties which had been arbitrarily displaced, on an epic scale, within the Soviet Union.
Having ‘won’ the Cold War, the US set about consolidating its global hegemony, empowered by the deeply flawed doctrine of US ‘exceptionalism’. It has done so essentially through a policy of ‘encirclement’ of Russia. ‘EU enlargement’ served as a Trojan horse for Nato pressures. Instability in Ukraine, in which the US did its fair share of ‘meddling’, provided the opportunity.
It is axiomatic that there is no justification for military intervention in another sovereign state. This applies to Russia just as it applies to the West, including the US whose propensity to intervene across the globe has had profound and tragic consequences. But Crimea’s identity is intrinsically Russian and the re-integration was overwhelmingly endorsed by a referendum – which was found by a French mission to be fair and democratic.
This reversed its arbitrary transfer to Ukraine by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 – that same Khrushchev who attempted to transfer nuclear missiles to Cuba that threatened a global nuclear war. Reintegration also mitigated the existential threat to Russia of having Nato parked directly against its land borders while also cutting it off from Sebastopol, the headquarters of its Black Sea fleet – a situation that the US would itself have found intolerable.
‘EU enlargement’ to include Ukraine made no sense – the EU was already well overstretched and, in any event, internal economic and political conditions in Ukraine precluded any meaningful progress towards accession. But it did provide the pretext for an intensification of US pressures, using the EU as proxy theatre of ‘low-level’ war.
EU and US policymakers, and academics, could not have been unaware of the ethnic and cultural linkages between Russia and Crimea, extending deep into pre-Soviet history – nor that EU ‘enlargement’, encompassing Nato’s expansion to its borders, would be interpreted as a provocation, directly threatening Russia and its vital strategic interests.
The Western narrative on Crimea, in which the EU establishment acquiesces, was primarily an excuse to impose economic sanctions to weaken Russia’s domestic economy and, by extension, its national, including military, capability – while simultaneously pursuing commercial interests at multiple levels including weaponry and energy. This is the kind of realpolitik that very clever analysts come up with to assuage the ‘establishment’.
THE EU can hardly have really believed it was feasible, much less in Russia’s self-interest, to invade Europe. In military, political and economic terms such a hypothesis is nonsense. But in contemporary Western societies, fact and truth count for little. ‘Reality’ is what the state wants to believe – and what it seeks to compel its citizens to believe.
EU militarisation on the scale now institutionalised makes no sense – except in that domain of ‘reality’ where the bigger the lie, the greater the probability of its being believed.
The transition of Europe from a community of nations, bonded by recovering together from the seismically destructive World War II, into a militarised empire reflects the EU’s identity crisis.
Secular progressive liberalism has captured and colonised the heart and bones and sinew of what it means to be European – its origins, values and legacy – as well as its laws and institutions.
‘The Paris Statement: A Europe we can believe in’ makes this important point: “Europe, in all its richness and greatness, is threatened by a false understanding of itself… [The patrons of the false Europe] ignore, even repudiate the Christian roots of Europe ... and reflexively stifles dissent. This is done, of course, in the name of freedom and tolerance.”
The political philosopher Ryszard Legutko underscores this analysis: “The term ‘European values’ means for them a mixture of leftist ideologies, the essential function of which is to change the meaning of basic concepts. Democracy as a ‘European value’ means that only the mainstream parties can win the elections; if the elections are won by a party from outside the mainstream, then ‘democracy is in danger’.”
The same process has happened across the West. Democracy has, as US presidential elections in recent decades have demonstrated, been ‘hollowed out’. The language of ‘rights’ – but not ‘responsibility’ other than to ‘self’ – has displaced an older and deeper understanding. ‘Equality’ has been transmuted into a slogan colonised by, in the words of Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla, the ‘pseudo politics of self-regard’ – of ‘identity’ and ‘gender’ operating under the flag of secular liberalism.